Maya – Basic UV unwrapping

Software:
Maya 2018

Steps for basic UV unwrapping:

  1. Select all polygons.
  2. Apply planar UV projection just to get rid of all the current UV seams.
  3. Select the edges that that are intended to be UV seams.
  4. In the UV Editor menu choose Cut/Sew > Cut.
  5. Select all polygons.
  6. In the UV Editor menu choose Modify > Unfold.
  7. In the UV Editor menu choose Modify > Layout.
  8. Scale and rotate the UV layout to fit the UV space.

Related:
Multiple UV layouts

3ds max – Unwrap UVW snapping to a defined grid

Software:
3ds max 2018

There are cases where we need to have the UV borders and edges placed precisely on a certain grid. an example of this is when preparing a UV layout intended for baked lightmaps in a game engine, that should preferably be aligned to a 64 by 64 or 128 by 128 grid.

To set the Unwrap UVW editor window grid to 64 by 64:

  1. In the Unwrap Options window:
    Set the Checker display to 64/20 which is 3.2.
    Set the Grid Size to 1/64 which is 0.015625 (the numeric field displays the value rounded to 0.016)
  2. Turn on the grid display in View > Show Grid.
  3. In the Unwrap Snap Settings, make sure Grid Snap is checked.
    * Hold and drag the snap button to open the Snap Settings.
  4. Activate Snap.

Note:
It works only in Vertex selection mode.

UV_Snap.jpg