Tutorial: Super/UV Pro Plug-in

In this tutorial, we will create a clean UV map for a simple box. We won't go into the intricacies of dealing with beveled edges or organic shapes, but rest assured with a little thought and practice, ResPower Super/UV can help you create superb UV maps in very quick order.

1. Create a Box. In this example, we've created a simple 1x1x1 box centered at the origin.
2. Create an empty UV map.
3. Select all of the polygons in the model and prepare to run the "Poly Norm UVs" tool that comes with Lightwave. Note: Unlike almost every other Lightwave tool, having no polygons selected is not the same as having all polygons selected as far as Lightwave is concerned, so you actually do need to select all. You can do this by selecting nothing and then using the Invert Selection tool (default keystroke is the quote key, ").
4. Run the "Poly Norm UVs" tool. Be sure to turn "off" the Automatic Size option.
5. What you have at this point is 6 polygons projected by their individual surface normals into UV space. Because we're dealing with a box, their projections are identical and they are all stacked up on each other. Obviously this isn't what we want, since we're probably going to want each polygon to be independent of every other polygon. That's where Super/UV is going to come in.
6. Let's get to work on re-arranging the UV Map. Deselect everything and then select two polygons in the perspective view.
7. Run SUVPolySnap. Notice how the second polygon is moved in UV-space so that it lines up with the first.
8. Select all the polygons, and run SUVPolySnap. Notice how all of the polygons are now aligned to the first. Also notice how the one polygon that shares no edges is aligned as well.
9. Suppose you'd like the polygon at the top of our UV cross to align to the bottom instead. To do this, deselect all of the polygons, select the bottom polygon, and then add the top polygon to the selection.
10. Run SUVPolySnap. Notice how the polygon at the bottom remains still while the top polygon snaps to it.
11. Obviously, our UV map still has two problems. First, it's too big to fit in UV space, which must contain everything in the rectangle from (0,0) to (1,1). Second, the polygons are below and to the left of the valid UV area. We can fix these problems by using SUVPolyMove and SUVPolyScale. To do this, simply select the tools and move your polygons around until they fit on the UV grid provided by Lightwave.
12. And of course, if you like the way the edges are tied together, but want the map rotated on an angle, it's easy to rotate the whole map using SUVPolyRotate.

As you can see, rearranging polygons in UV space using SuperUV is incredibly simple and works just as you would intuitively expect it to. The ResPower Super/UV team hopes that you enjoy using it as much as we do.