RFE: New render mode: UV Layout

Could you please consider adding a UV layout mode render mode (to render and render pass top).

The idea is to output the gl position as the UV map (maybe optional layer parameter?), but leave all the other parameters as the world position for accurate lighting and other calculations (shadows gets messed up easily when you mess with position in vertex shader, I noticed).

The idea is that you then have a flat raster made from a render pass with accurate lighting from a given viewpoint. You can then remap that onto an object - probably the same object - to retarget it with cameras that represent projectors.

The other benefit is that you can mix between viewpoint rendered baked exports from TD or other apps and your renders in a TOP pipeline. This is common in a big projection mapping system.

There are currently two workarounds - a custom script SOP to stash UV coords and custom vertex shader to tweak GL positions, or doing a flat render and using a ‘render from camera viewpoint’ in the final render. This approach is severely flawed in that surfaces tilted away from the camera or far from the camera have terrible resolution (pixel smearing). Using UV layout can give you a decent resolution throughout the model (depending on how well the map was made).

Bruce

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Are you suggesting having something like this but not as an editor–just as a previewer?

I’m suggesting a render mode that outputs like that but still uses the camera position and settings for culling and geometry and lighting etc.

In some cases (mapped LED screens) you can render that, or else you can export it or use to flat texture a model to view with camera/projectors.

It would be also great to have UV mode in Geometry viewer

+1 for the UV Editor in TD. In the Geometry viewer yes.

That culling feature would be next level.

A crude way to do UV editing easily is to use the point SOP to rearrange your UVs to point positions, modify those point positions and then use the point SOP to merge back your changes.

Thanks Richard, but I’m looking for an unwrapped render, similar to baked texture from 3D apps or d3’s output for LED.

In GLSL you can unwrapped a geometry and this return a flat uv of your model in render TOP.

Yes, see first post.

I’d like to see if there’s support for making that official. Doing it by hand can be tricky because of the built-ins. So far, that’s an asset - all the lighting and shadows etc work even though it’s unwrapped, but there’s no incentive for derivative to not accidentally break that in future versions, or at least to change it enough that there’s a lot of debugging required or you could
miss out on new shading trying to preserve hacky unwrapping.

+1, would love this feature!

+1

I work with abstract LED displays and it would be great to be able to shine lights, project images and otherwise mess with the 3d model, unwrap the UV, and then pixel map it back on to the LED sculpture.

+1

Spent a few days trying to figure out how to do this for the same reason as the last post. I was surprised to learn it wasn’t already a feature. Like the OP mentioned, it’s a common feature in most 3D software to be able to bake textures.

+1 again as it has come up again :slight_smile:

Lucas Morgan was kind enough to put this together for me.

Thanks Lucas!!!
renderUnwrapped with lighting.tox (16.6 KB)

Thanks for your feedback. This feature will be available in the 2018.40000 series of builds.

One quesiton, right now I’m adding it to the Render TOP as a new render mode. Does it also make sense to have this controllable per-camera? Is there situations where you’d want to render the same scene with the same lighting from two cameras, one UV unwrapped and one with a regular camera?

Thank you!

And yes - you need two views to work effectively - sometimes you only see the unwrapped view after it being piped through various other stages. (On second thoughts, I guess you can make that view yourself, but having multiple views seems good to have if possible.)

Bruce

This is amazing! Thanks for adding this feature.

I’m having trouble getting things to work in my workflow. I’m using a Light COMP with projection map onto some geometry. I’m then using a render TOP in UV mode into a moviefileout to save out a tiff of the UVs with the Light’s projection map applied.

I’d assume that if all things were working, I could use a moviefilein attached it to that same geometry’s MAT, and it would look the exact same. Mine is not!

Can anyone shed some light?

thx for the new features!

Hey, can you share your sample .toe?