I have a quick question about blender UV’s. So I’m trying to make my modular architecture meshes and I’ve run into a small roadblock. So I made my first wall that’s 250x100x20. I want to set it up so that every 50x50 is a full tile of a 2048x2048. The problem I’m having is the snap to grid in the UV viewer. It snaps but it is always off the main lines of the grid. It snaps to a subdivide of that grid. Is there any way to get it to snap to the grid directly or is that one of the things you cant do in blender? Also can you make the grid continue out of the 0,1 UV space?
Any help would be appreciated. I have only been using Blender and UE4 for about a month now so I’m sorry if i didn’t use the correct terminology.
There is, unfortunately, no way to change the snapping grid in the UV editor in Blender. There are workarounds, but none that are ideal. Possible options:
Create a plane in the 3D view and subdivide it into a grid of the size you want, then UV unwrap it. Then in the UV editor, lock those UVs. Now, you can snap to vertices, but it requires you to have this plane as part of your object while you do your UV mapping.
Use the numerical entry in the ‘N’ tool palette on the right side. Select one or more vertices, then you can precisely position them by entering the u and v location.
Scaling on one axis. You can select multiple vertices and then if hit S then X or Y and then 0, it will align all those pixels to the same X or Y position
Create a grid in photoshop. Import this into the UV editor while working and use “snap to pixels”.
As for your question, you can extend UV points outside of the 0,1 range, but how those are dealt with will be shader dependent. I believe the default treatment on most hardware/shader libraries is to tile, but you shouldn’t assume it. There are other options available to shader developers, including clamping and repeating edge pixels. If you’re not in control of the entire pipeline, your best bet is to keep them in the 0…1 range.
Another question then. Can I unwrap in the 3ds trial version? If not are there any good free or cheap programs to do this? I just find it hard to justify paying the 180 a month for 3ds as I’m new and cant even use blender to its full potential. Any suggestions would be a great help.
