Today I recommend 10 of the best 3DMax UV unwrapping plugins and scripts. We introduce to you from back to front:
10- Text tools (TexTools)
It is a set of tools to help any texture artist with UV and texturing related tasks. The main idea is to shorten typical steps to simple context-sensitive clicks.
You can download Textools for free. To get started, you simply drag the Textools installation file into the viewport and let it install itself into your 3dsMax user folder.
Textools comes with dimension tools, UV layout tools, selection tools, Texel density tools, and it can also bake textures. This tool is great for UV unwrapping work if you need something that allows quick or fast UVs.
9- Roadkill UV Tool
Roadkill is also a good UV unwrapping standalone app that works with 3ds max and you can use it for free. If you don't have any UV unwrapping tools, you should probably install Roadkill.
The latest version is a standalone application that can be called from 3DS Max.
Roadkill is an excellent free application that makes unfolding models quick and easy. There is a script called Roadkill Link that improves the workflow between 3Ds Max and Roadkill.
§ It allows easy selection of roadkill cutting edges.
§ It automatically exports and imports roadkill.
8- Polygon Unwrapper (PolyUnwrapper)
PolyUnwrapper is a complete set of UV unwrapping tools available in 3Ds max to help you complete the UV unwrapping process faster, especially for architectural work and game development. It contains a large number of features to help you improve your UV unwrapping workflow.
You can sew multiple shells at once, it has custom packing algorithms and packing tools. Additionally, it has tools for matching shell width and height, easy grid spacing, and the ability to render UV tiles. A nice feature they added recently is: the PolyUnwrapper toolbar which is now always on top of the 3Ds max Unwrap Editor.
7- Advanced UV Normalizer
Advanced UV Normalizer is a tool for normalizing the texel density of different objects.
It has a comprehensive set of functions to calculate, set and modify the texel density of a model according to different parameters such as geometry area, texture area, UV area and geometry or pixel, and geometry or UV ratio.
Texel density can be set using a fixed texture size, or you can assign different Advanced UV Normalizer textures and normalize them all at once using their texture size.
6- Iron (Flatiron)
Flatiron is a unique render-to-texture plugin for 3ds Max. It enables to bake a complete scene or object selection into a single UV map with just a few clicks. Flatiron is a fast, simple, and configurable automatic unwrapping and baking solution that accelerates the baking of complex scenes in 3ds max.
With Flatiron, you can unwrap and bake multiple objects into a single texture map without manually arranging UV charts or compositing render maps in image editing software.
Flatiron is suitable for flattening all objects in a scene, baking them in a single render pass, and obtaining high-quality texture maps. Among other things, you can minimize the size of texture maps by automatically and perfectly arranging the UVs of one or more objects.
Superior UV compression using a unique organic, hard surface or projection unwrapping method. Flatiron is different from other UVunwrapping tools here because of its additional features.
With Flatiron, you can quickly unwrap and bake multiple objects into a single texture map, compressing texture sizes and optimizing visualization for real-time 3D machines.
One of its great features is the ability to bake shadow maps or ambient occlusion for an entire room or even an entire level at once, and combine multiple objects onto a single uv map.
Flatiron is ideal for game developers who need to add maximum visual quality to their games while keeping hardware requirements to a minimum, as dealing with large scenes in some scenes in the game engine may not be possible.
5- UV Packing Machine (UV Packer)
UV-Packer is a plugin for 3ds Max UV unwrapping. This is a simple solution for packing UV maps by calculating their size and scale and distributing them optimally on the UV plane.
UV Packer calculates the perfect orthogonality of UV maps, scales them, and puts the pieces together in a mathematically precise way that is almost impossible to do manually.
UV-Packer, not only moves and rotates UV parts, but also takes mesh surface area into account and scales parts independently to provide an even distribution of pixels.
The models will not have different texture sizes, so the texture quality of the legs, arms and body textures will vary as UV-Packer keeps them uniform.
UV-Packer 2 provides instant and optimal UV packing and self-customizable UV tile sets for 3D artists. Artists can easily control the number of UV tiles, automatically generate material IDs for each UV tile or unwrap UV tiles based on material ID settings. This is especially useful for Mari, Mudbox or ZBrush workflows.
A new update to UV-Packer introduces high UV packing speed improvements. For heavy polygonal scenes with more than 100.000 faces and 100 UV islands, the default 3ds Max UVW packer does not work at all, according to its developers, UV-Packer calculates UVs in less than half a minute on average -Map.
4- Unfold 3D (Unfold3D)
Unfold3D is an intuitive, fast, and extensible tool that makes it easy to generate beautiful UVs. Many studios and freelancers are currently using Unfold3D from Polygon Design, a 3D tool development studio based in France.
UNFOLD3D Generation 8 has the following new features:
§New 64-bit unwrapping core, which can unwrap very large meshes (up to one million triangles).
Significant improvements to "dirty meshes" when importing OBJs.
§ Multi-UV mesh pack. This means that the island is squeezed into the square below.
§ Multi-UV mesh selection. This means that in island selection mode, clicking on a square label will select all islands within the square.
§ Additionally, you can also select each edge of the border of the selected island and other islands with the same topology.
§Unfold 3D comes with a set of alignment tools for vertical and horizontal edge alignment on selected edges.
§ They improved the speed of edge selection (20 times faster...)
§ They fixed many bugs that were causing problems before.
3- Goodness UVLayout
UVLayout is a stand-alone application for creating and editing UV texture coordinates for 3D polygonal meshes and subdivision surfaces. Used by professionals in the games and visual effects industry, hobbyists of all kinds, and students. UVLayout's unique approach gives texture artists the tools they need to produce high-quality, low-distortion UVs in far less time than traditional methods.
Headus is the name of the company that developed this UV unwrapping tool, based in Perth, Western Australia. Some of the main features of UVLayout are:
Edge loop detection for faster UV seam selection and symmetry editing for faster flattening of symmetric meshes. Additionally, this tool has color feedback for instant assessment of distortion errors. They also added edge correction to the shell borders and inside.
Headus UVlayout has the ability of Flattening Brushes, which can make local adjustments to automatically generated UVs. For faster work, there is automatic packing of UV shells to minimize wasted texture space and automatic stacking of similar shells to share texture space usage.
Additionally, subdivision surface calculation based on extreme surface shapes Headus UVLayout has additional features such as:
§ Unlimited Undo function for all edits.
§ Plug-in interface for integration into other applications.
§OBJ import and export.
2- Enhanced Unwrap UV (Unwrap Pro)
Unwrap Pro is a 3ds Max UV Unwrapping plugin that unwraps meshes while generating low distortion, no overlap, weighted density UVs. Unlike the 3ds Max Peel command, it produces overlapping UVs with high area distortion.
It's easy to use and very fast (according to the developer, a mesh of 1 million triangles unfolds in 23 seconds).
When you want to use Unwrap Pro:
§ When you want textures to have the same pixel density.
If you don't want to edit UVs manually.
§ When you want to have more or less pixel density in certain areas.
§When you don't want to unwrap UVs manually.
Although Unwrap Pro won't add seams or pack UVs for you, it has some nice features:
These are some of the benefits you get:
§ Don't have to worry about distorted or overlapping UVs, saving time and effort when unwrapping meshes.
§ Use vertex color or soft selection to increase the pixel density of important features.
§ You don't need to manually edit or fix UVs to produce great results.
§ Fast high quality UV light.
1- Unwrella
Unwrella is a 3Ds Max UV unfolding plug-in. It allows you to automatically unwrap 3D models with precise pixel-to-model surface aspect ratios, significantly speeding up texture baked UV map generation.
Some of its features are:
§ Preserve user created UV Seams0
§ Almost completely reduce texture mapping seams and minimize surface stretching
§ Blocks are kept large and lined up on the UV surface, maximizing the available space
§ It is user-friendly, it has user-defined pixel-based padding between UV blocks
§ It is suitable for various models (organic, human and industrial)
§You can download a demo version of 3ds Max or buy a commercial license.
Almost all of these tools do the same thing, but of course, they differ in many different ways, some of which allow you to get your job done faster and with less effort.
Some of them are free, others are paid and expensive. Sometimes even as high as $300. A tool like Textools is a free and amazing tool that many artists rely on if you need a free tool.
Some of these UV unwrapping tools are better suited for things like architecture or video game development.
Also, I've noticed that a lot of the old tools are still there, and as far as I know there aren't very many new 3DMax UV unwrapping tools for 3DMax, but the list I've given here is good enough.