UVs LAST HOPE / Houdini Indie HDA
Product Files include HDA-LC (Houdini Indie) + Original Subnetwork .hiplc before turning into HDA.
When you need to unwrap UVs, maybe for baking or painting textures, on the most messy geometry and you got no time to clean and you have no last resort... AL-UVs LAST HOPE is your weapon of choice.
How different is it from the awesome "Labs Auto UV" ?
SideFX Labs AutoUV is a great free node part of the sidefx labs toolset that let you unfold and pack UVs on multiple UDIMs. Which works perfectly fine if your geometry got a reasonable polycount and is mostly composed of quadrilateral topology. Would advise to try this out first ! If this fails or is getting insanely slow your geometry is probably too messed up for it and using this tool/workflow may get you out of trouble... That's why I call it "UVs Last Hope !" Haha
This Houdini Indie tool is based on the workflow I am showing here into my tutorial entitled "UVing millions of polygons in 5 min".
Basically making a more complete setup based on this principle.
I am offering here more controls and an organized HDA that you can use not only in Houdini but also 3dsmax or Maya using Houdini Engine. (Free plugin with Houdini Indie !)
Visualize UVs / Tiles:
Allows to check out the UV and tile distribution.
TILE SPLIT / BOX BASED :
Control tile distribution based on object's bounding box divisions. Using this feature to slice the tiles by height in this example :
TILE SPLIT / VORONOI BASED :
Control tile distribution based on voronoi pattern. Useful to get a more uniform distribution on intricate objects.
UV MAPPING / Fast And Messy :
This mode is a good way to test real quick the different distributions but generate a lot of small islands. Just have a simple control to limit the amount of UDIM columns
UV MAPPING / Slow and Clean :
This mode is a cleaner way to unfold UVs but takes longer to cook. (1min30 in this case) Based on UV flatten node, offers Spectral or Angle Based uv flattening. Most often get better results using Angle Based flattening. To give an example tried unfolding with Labs AutoUVs and was still cooking after 10 minutes.
CACHE GEO :
Final TAB to export or cache the geometry with UVs. A custom menu for extension (bgeo.sc, abc, obj... can add more if requested)
Once the geometry is Saved, use load geometry to load it.