Unwrapping

Unwrapping#

The UV Flow add-on enhances the standard unwrapping process in Blender with several useful features.

You can unwrap any object or set of objects in Object Mode by navigating to the Object menu and selecting UV Flow > Unwrap UVs. In Edit Mode, UV Flow Unwrap can be found in the UV menu.

The hotkey Shift Alt U can be used to unwrap the selection in both Object Mode and Edit Mode.

When using the Cut UV tool in Edit Mode, enabling the dot “record” toggle to the left of the Unwrap menu will automatically unwrap your mesh after any action you perform with the tool. Unlike Blender’s Live Unwrap, UV Flow’s Auto Unwrap only affects the islands impacted by the tool. This prevents the other islands from being reset, i.e. prevents you from losing work.

If you choose to work with Auto Unwrap off, you can use the “play” button to the right of the Unwrap menu to unwrap all of your selected faces at once.

In addition to the usual options like Method, Fill Holes, Correct Aspect, and Use Subdivision Surface, you can enable the following enhancements:

Transform#

Enabling Auto Align automatically runs the UV Editor’s Align Rotation (Auto) on each island after unwrapping, which helps to straighten out basic shapes. Note that this may increase computation time.

The Scale property determines how large the resulting UV islands will be in the UV space.

  • Fit scales the islands so that they take up as much of the UV space as possible.

  • Physical Units allows you to input how large the image texture you are unwrapping to is, and the islands will be scaled so that the texture matches that size in 3D space.

  • Texel Density allows you to specify how many pixels of the texture you want per unit in 3D space.

Splitting#

With splitting, you can tell UV Flow to treat various edge attributes as if they were seams, without actually needing to mark them as seams.

  • Split Angle: Treats any edge with an angle greater than the specified threshold as a seam during unwrapping.

  • Split Bevel: Treats any edge with a bevel weight greater than the specified threshold as a seam.

  • Split Crease: Treats any edge with a crease weight greater than the specified threshold as a seam.

  • Split Sharp: Treats any edge marked as sharp as a seam.

  • Split Freestyle Mark: Treats any edge with a Freestyle mark as a seam.

If you choose Mark Seams, any edge split by UV Flow will be marked as an actual seam while unwrapping.

Apply Scale#

  • Apply Scale: Stretches the unwrapped UVs to compensate for non-uniform object scale.

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