Tool Wishlist

Linear UVs In Turbosmooth and Meshsmooth:

Currently when you apply a meshsmooth or a turbosmooth to a mesh, as well as smoothing the mesh itself, it also smoothes the interior uvs of the object.

Unfortunately, Autodesk's mudbox only works properly with Linear UVs, which is no smoothing in any of the uvs.

Mudbox has a mode to turn on smooth uvs, however, the way it smooths its uvs is radically different from the way max smoothes its uvs.

This can cause nasty artifacts if you try and export a color map or displacement map out of mudbox to use inside max, since you can't sync up the way max or mudbox deals with it's uvs.

Could we please have options in both max's meshsmooth and turbosmooth modifiers to turn on and off the different elements that make up Smooth or Linear UVs?

Note, the "use old mapping" checkbox in max's meshsmooth does something that is similar to linear uvs, but not really, and so also won't match what mudbox does.

Update: There is a workaround to get Linear UVs in max that Eric Craft has suggested. Apply a Unwrap UVW Modifier, select all of the uvs, and then choose "Break". Then if you apply a turbosmooth on top, the uvs do remain linear. However, this workaround does have a few drawbacks...

1) Every time you want to edit your uvs, you will probably have to reselect the uvs and weld them together. And then once you're done editing them, you have to break them again. This adds a bunch of extra mouse clicks to your workflow, and the user has to remember to do this everytime they edit the uvs or else artifacts will show up later in the pipeline.

2) It does not allow you to choose subsets of uv smoothing like for example linear exterior edges, but smoothed interior edges, which means it may still be incompatible with how some other 3d packages smooth their uvs. And that limits the ability to move assets between multiple packages. Having the 4 checkboxes gives the user far more control to try and match whatever they need.