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RD UV Editor:

RD UV Editor is a feature rich UV Editor that works hand in hand with Maya's built in UV Editor. RD UV Editor compliments Maya's UV Editor in many ways to provide the fastest and most efficient workflow possible within Maya. Because RD UV Editor is built into Maya, you have the ability to use most if not all of Maya's tools inside of the editor. RD UV Editor shows a color representation of the distortion of the uv's in relation to the object. Red and Blue colors are used to represent distortion. RD UV Editor uses a compression based algorithm. White represents zero distortion.

HOW RD UV EDITOR WORKS:

UV's essentially are points in space which correspond to an objects texture placement on a per polygon basis. For this reason, uv's can be represented by a polygon object since they have the same basic structure as the UV data of an object. This is exactly what is happening with RD UV Editor. An objects UV data is being represented by an arbitrary object that is created that corresponds to the objects UV data. This arbitrary object is "linked" to the objects uv data so whenever the points are modified, the objects uvs will automatically modify to match.

This methodology is different from other programs which require you to transfer the UV data to the object after you have modified it within their tool. With RD UV Editor, any changes that you make will automatically change on the object.

Because a separate object is created which represents the objects uv's, you do not have to have the object selected in order to modify the uv's. This can actually become very handy as you do not have to see the wireframe on top of the object while modifying the uv's of the object. In addition, when you unselect the object, the uv's do not disappear from the editor like they would in Maya's editor.

WHY HAVE A SEPARATE UV EDITOR WHEN YOU CAN JUST USE MAYA'S?

The simple answer to that question is functionality. Maya does not give access to a lot of the features within their UV Editor. You cannot represent polygon colors, you cannot modify or create custom contexts that work within the editor, and you cannot tailor the editor to work any other way then the way Maya intended it to. Because of these limitations, a separate editor had to be created to make editing uv's much easier and faster.

Some Limitations:

Because technically the uv's shown in RD UV Editor are not the actual uv's of the object, there are some limitations as to what can be done within the editor. For one, you cannot split, delete or merge anything in either RD UV Editor or Maya's editor and have the changes seen in the other. If you'd like to merge, sew, etc, please close RD UV Editor, do the merging and sewing within Maya's UV Editor, and then re-open RD UV Editor to see the changes. Although this is a limitation, it was done by design. RD UV Editor is meant to work hand in hand with Maya's UV Editor. For this reason, and for the most compatibility and features, some limitations had to occur.

The uv's seen in RD UV Editor are actually a polygon object created inside of Maya. That means the object now exists in the scene along with the grid. This causes some limitations and or oddness while working. For example, hitting "F" to frame everything in the perspective window will cause the camera to zoom so far out that you will not be able to see anything. Since the newly created uv's are created in the scene, they have been moved far down in the scene to avoid being shown while working. Hitting "F" will try to focus all geometry in the scene. If you accidentally do this, just close down RD UV Editor and click "F" again in the perspective window to frame your objects back, then reopen RD UV Editor again.

NOTE: all polygon objects created will be in the scene if RD UV Editor is left open when saved. Once you close RD UV EDitor, all objects get deleted from the scene.

the above is a screen shot of the outliner when the RD UV Editor is open. You will see a group that is created that holds all the geometry, camera, and additional information needed to run the editor. Closing the editor should clean this group up.

HOW TO USE RD UV EDITOR:

Now that you have an understanding of how RD UV Editor functions, I will now explain how to use RD UV Editor to quickly modify and edit uv's.

To edit uvs in RD UV Editor, first open the editor. Next, select an object in the perspective view, then click the Add Selected Objects button shown below.

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Once you click Add Selected Objects a new object will be built based off of the uvs of the selected object.

As you can see, a new polygon object has been built in the editor. Polygons are colored to show the uv compression on a per shell basis. There is an option in the Options menu called Full Shell Compression Colors. If this is checked you will get compression colors based off of all of the shells of the object. This means if a shell is extremely small, the whole shell could turn blue since it is compressed relative to the other shells.

Above is a hypergraph view of what gets connected when you click Add Selected Object and a uv object is built. The selected node above is the new uv object which gets piped into a uvEditNode. This uvEditNode is connected to the object in the scene. If you delete history on the object in the scene you will kill the connection and the uv object will not effect the objects uvs anymore.

If you want to get rid of the uvs in the window, select the uv object and hit the "DELETE" key on the keyboard. This will delete the node that is selected above while leaving the uvEditNode. Your uvs will be preserved. If you want to edit uvs again on the object, click Add Selected Objects again and a new polygon object and a new uvEditNode will be connected to the node chain.

The UV Editor supports multiple objects. Select as many objects as you want and add them to the window. Again, if you want to get rid of any of them from the window, you can just select the uvs as an object with any of Maya's selection tools and hit the "DELETE" key on the keyboard. Closing RD UV Editor will delete the objects automatically.

Because the "UVS" are technically a polygon object, you can do anything to it that you can do with a polygon object. That means if you want to edit the "UVS" you need to edit the polygon object like you normally would in any viewport. In the above image, I selected vertices with Maya's "Move" tool and moved them. This will update the uvs on the mesh. If you have a checkerboard on the object you will see the uvs update in realtime.

NOTE: Because the uvs are a polygon object, you CANNOT delete polygons, cut polygon, merge polygons, etc.. if you do, it will break the uv update and an error will be displayed. Please keep this in mind. If you need to move and sew uvs, close down RD UV Editor and do the operation in Maya's uv editor. then reopen RD UV Editor.

RD UV Editor was created to be as full featured as possible eliminating the need to go into Maya's uv editor all together. This currently is not 100% finished or all there which requires the use of Maya's uv editor for certain functionality. However, what is there is pretty powerful. Below I will go over the current feature set within the tool.

NOTE: Most uv edit tools work on the polygon "VERTEX" level.

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