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Hi guys,

I want to share a very basic UV generation compound for the Power Extrude plugin ( a huge THANK YOU! to Fabricio Chamon for that tool and in general for the amazing plugins he gave us). I could not find anything for that, so if you are aware of more advanced stuff please let me know.
The UV generator is very basic and works best with the "evenly spaced" algorithms. In order to use it with the "per span" (on path) algorithm use the "compensation factor" slider- it's a very quick and dirty workaround, but I don't have the time right now for a better implementation. It does the (at least primary) job.
You can use it to generate a planar projection for open meshes, like ribbons, low poly hair and such. You can also use a cylindrical projection for closed meshes ( that corrects the UVs on seams), but for open meshes I would use the other one, as it is mush quicker. As for some basic UV manipulation of the UVs, translation, scaling and spiraling (skewing) are implemented.



I developed the compound explicitly for Power Extrude, so I used the nomenclature of this specific plugin. I guess it could easily be extended for any parametric mesh.

Credits: The plugin is an adaptation of the factory shipped "generate 3d grid" ( for the planar projection) as well as on the example from the scene Modeling Cylinder (for the cylindrical one).


I hope it will be of use for somebody. I didn't implement any UVs for the caps, as those are really easy to do in a click manually.


P.S. Don't forget to choose the right projection in the render tree.

Thx for that, have to try it!

Wait, here is a new version, I just realized I had a mistake in the old one.

hey radoo, looks awesome!
big thanks for sharing this.. I never got the proper time to look into UVs, and now it's done! the power of softimage community. =)

(website revamp looks so cool, congrats admin )

Hey Fabricio,

Cool, I hope somebody can find it useful. I'm using it on an almost daily basis (your plugin), as I'm doing alot of cars and such with plenty of cables, isolation stuff and so on. I'm sure it can be greatly improved- I mean the UV stuff-, but I'm not a coder at all and for my needs is enough. I would have a question though, about that compensation factor I put there like the stupid man's solution, because I didn't have any clue how to calculate the right array size, what the heck is the proper value there? I tried a couple of ideas, no luck whatsoever.
And yeah, the community is great since those a$$hats killed SI, it's good to know I'm not the only die hard user .