Boundary First Flattening, a novel new open source UV mapping application
Jan 02, 2018 by CGPress Staff
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The Geometry Collective at Carnegie Melon University has released a free open source application called Boundary First Flattening (BFF) that allows for UV mapping with free-form editing of the flattened mesh. Based on a paper by Rohan Sawhney and Keenan Crane, BFF gives users “direct control over the shape of the flattened domain—rather than being stuck with whatever the software provides. The initial flattening is fully automatic, with distortion mathematically guaranteed to be as low or lower than any other conformal mapping tool”. BFF also employs cone singularities for flattening which the authors claim can dramatically reduce area distortion, and facilitate the creation of seamless maps. Learn more about Boundary First Flattening on the Geometry Collective website and download or fork the project on GitHub.
Help me out guys I’m slightly confused… if the algorithm can produce really low dostortion unwraps that’s cool. But am I the only one who never cared what the boundary of my unwrap looks like as long as the unwrap was decent?
It’s a quite useful tool. Latest when you’re forced to create assets with limited texture size, the borders start to matter. On low resolution textures the seams become more visible if your UV-borders are “freestyle”. With straigt UV-boders, which are all of equal length and meet in 90° angles the seam visibility can be greatly reduced…and creating such UV-borders by hand can be painful 🙂
i see, that makes sense. Thanks, obviuosly I’m not a realtime guy XD
Wool: Yes, it also helps a lot of displacement maps AFAIK and remember… there might be great problems with the borders(seams) even much greater than on diffuse etc. maps. This helps also withthis issue, correct?