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Tweak UV Brush:

The tweak UV Brush is a powerful brush that simulates the feeling of painting UV's. It has multiple functionality built into a single context to give the ultimate control for editing UVs. Lets go over its standard usage.

Once you click on the Tweak UV Brush Context, you will immediatly see the cursor change to a crosshair. If you move your mouse over a UV polygon object, you will see a green sphere drawn which illustrating the soft selection zone. If you do not see the green sphere or it is too small, holding down the middle mouse button and dragging left or right will increase or decrease the brush size.

MIDDLE CLICK AND DRAG

Since all the custon brush contexts that show a radius have the same Middle Click and Drag functionality, the gif above shows this on an object in the viewport as apposed to a uv polygon object.

LEFT CLICK and Drag:

As shown above, if you now left click and drag over a UV polygon object, you will see the uvs move with a soft selection. One additional thing to note, if you drag the radius of the brush all the way down to 0, (all the way to the left) instead of using a soft selection, you will be editing a single closest component level. This means if you hit a face, all "x" amount of vertices of the face will move with the brush. If you hit an edge, the two edge vertices will move, and if you hit a vertex, the single vertex will move. This gives you the flexibility to tweak at a much more precise level quickly.

NOTE: Notice that the UV polygon object is not in component mode. It is in Object mode. The Tweak UV Brush was made to work on the object level, not component level. If you highlite the object first, it should exit you back into object mode.

SHIFT:

Holding down SHIFT and draging back and forth will "smooth" the uv's. This does not just do an average, it will smooth the uvs relative to the object in world space.

One thing to note, the UV Smooth Intensity value will allow you to have much finer control of how the uv's get smoothed. By default it is set to a low value to allow more precision. Sometimes setting it even lower can give you exact control.

As you can see from the gif above, holding down shift and dragging will use the soft selection to smooth the uvs out. One thing to notice as well is the UV Shell borders. By default, the UV Shell borders remain pinned. So smoothing the borders will leave them intact.

In the options menu there is an option called Pin Border Edges. If you uncheck this, when holding down shift and dragging, you will affect the border edges. This could be useful at times for even finer control.

CTRL AND SHIFT AND DRAG:

Holding down Ctrl + Shift and dragging over a polygon UV Shell will unwrap and refine the entire UV Shell. This is similar to doing an unfold in Maya's uv editor. However, there are a few things done to maintain the shape of the shell even further than what you would achieve with Maya's version.

As you can see above, I first tweaked the shell to get a different fit. I then held down Ctrl and Shift and dragged on the UV Shell and the tool automatically started to refine the shape. The longer you hold down before releasing the more it will try to refine the shell. This is a very common usage for this tool. Even if the initial Unwrap does not get what you want, tweaking the UV's quickly to the desired shape and then using Ctrl and Shift to re-unwrap will give you the ultimate control to get the exact shape you desire quickly!

CTRL:

Holding down Ctrl and dragging will allow you to quickly move the shell.

As shown in the gif above, this is a very quick way to organize while working.

PINNING AND UNPINNING:

Another extremely powerful feature that is built in to the Tweak UV Brush is the ability to take pinned UV's into account while editing.

Since technically we are not dealing with UV's, but with a traditional polygon object, pinning UV's happens on a "Vertex" level. As shown above, you can use any of Maya's selection tools to do this. For this example I am using the standard selection tool context. By right clicking and going to "Vertex" mode, I select the vertices that I want to pin, and then click "Pin" on the icon tool bar. This will turn the vertices green indicating that they are pinned. One thing to mention, pinning only works with the Tweak UV Brush context. This means that if you use any of Maya's tools to move Vertices, the pinned dots will stay with the vertices, but Maya will not respect the pinning.

After the Vertices are pinned, I switch back to the Tweak UV Brush. You can see that by doing any of the hotkeys, the pinned vertices stay in place. This can be helpful in a ton of situations where you want to smooth uvs without messing up specific ones. Once you are done and you want to unpin the vertices, switch back to any of Maya's selection tools, select the vertices you want to unpin, and click the "Unpin" button on the icon tool bar.

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