I have been spending a lot of time tweaking the UVW of the world geometry in de_sacrilege and started to grumble a little bit about some of the limitations of the UVW tools inside 3ds Max. Generally, Max's UVW tools are very good, especially for complex things. But it is overly complicated for some simple tasks like planar mapping. The Unwrap UVW tools are really good but simply clunky for some mapping projects.
For about a year I have toyed with tackling some of these issues... but honestly UVW space and matrices make my stomach churn.
Thank the Almighty Max Gods that I ran across this plugin: PolygonMap by Vladislav Gavrilov (http://www.vg2max.spb.ru/PolygonMap.htm). I have found this thing to be an indespensible asset. It makes planar mapping a breeze. I love this plugin... and I wish I had discovered it long ago!
Here are a few quirks, problems I've run across:
Observations-
I have had a few freezes when using PolygonMap that crashed Max to CER. It seems to have happened when I've used the Select UVW Transform from Face and/or the Delete Link functions. When this happens I can still move the cursor, but it stops responding and Max will crash. I would say it's happened two or three times this week. I am using 3ds Max 2013 64 bit with PU6 and Nitrous. Vladislav has made an update to fix this.
- Sometimes the Show Links stops working randomly. I don't have a really good idea of what causes this, but I think it is related to clicking Show UVW Space and/or Show Map. It doesn't always hide the links... and if I toggle the Show Links off then on, they come back. This is a minor quirk.
- Applying the Polygon Map as an instanced modifier to multiple objects does not seem to work correctly. First, it causes a huge slowdown in performance; secondly the face linking doesn't work.
- UVW Window is garbled if an object has a multimaterial.
- The UVW window shows some odd labels at the top (perhaps Asian characters)... not sure if this is intended but is confusing. My guess is it has something to do with UTF characters?
Feature Requests
- More tooltips. Right now, some of the buttons have tooltips, but others do not.
- Add support for multiple objects in an instanced PolygonMap modifier.
- Extend the Use Old Mapping functions. For example, if I have an object that has most of the mapping correct and add some new pieces that need to be mapped, if I apply PolygonMap all the existing mapping is lost unless I press Use Old Mapping -- but if I do that then I cannot apply any links from previously mapped faces to the new faces that need mapped. So I would like a button that sets the PolygonMap base mapping to the mapping coming to the polygon map up the modifier stack... then allowing the user to adjust from there.
- Add a material function. I would like an eyedropper for materials inside polygon map so that the user can lift materials from arbitrary scene object faces and apply them to the currently selected faces in Polygon map. This would duplicate a function in Hammer (the native level editor for the Source Game Engine and one I duplicated into Wall Worm). It would be very convenient if this functionality was present inside PolygonMap. I would find it way more useful inside PolygonMap than the functionality I scripted in Wall Worm.
- The UVW window should allow the user to choose which map to display in the case of multimaterial.
If you've used this plugin I'd like to hear your input on it as well as any advice or ideas. I'm hoping to get others interested in this modifier so that Vlad will be encouraged to add some of the feature requests I've listed above.
Until today Wall Worm did not support flipped UVs on brushes and displacements, which limited the capabilities of using some UV mapping strategies.
As of today, WW now properly supports flipped UVs on brushes and displacements. As such, PolygonMap becomes even more viable as a powerful tool for Source Level Design inside 3ds Max. I strongly endorse this plugin and hope some WW users start supporting Vlad for making this really cool tool.