MALLET: Uv Aligner

Enhancing your workflow with precise UV adjustments is essential for both hard and soft surface models. The ability to align UV maps with precision, whether using options like Top, Bottom, Left, Right, or Center, streamlines your process and saves valuable time.

For comprehensive UV adjustments, consider integrating UV Aligner with Material Mode, an addon designed to facilitate texture application directly in the viewport - https://inlet.gumroad.com/l/mallet-material-mode

Organize your materials with filters that replace the default Blender bloat - https://inlet.gumroad.com/l/material-tags

World Align provides seamless texture adjustment based on world coordinates, eliminating the need for manual tweaks and adjustments often required when UVs break due to rotations and positional variations. With World Align, simply select the object or specific faces, and with a single click, achieve precise adjustments in an instant.

While Cube Project is typically considered the default solution, it struggles with consistency and fails to handle angles effectively. When applied to individual faces, it often leads to disastrous results. In contrast, World Align effortlessly handles such challenges and actively prevents issues, ensuring smooth texture alignment every time.

UV Aligner

With Justify, you can precisely position UV maps using various alignment options, ensuring optimal coverage and alignment. Fill functionality neatly covers the entire image within the UV map, with X and Y values indicating coverage or looping.

Transform tools enable basic UV movements, scaling, and rotations, supporting customization in both Imperial and Metric systems. Flipping and Scaling features offer direction reversal and resizing options, with Center and Edge modes for flexibility.

While these tasks can be performed manually, the absence of convenient buttons often results in time-consuming processes. Aligning UVs perfectly or scaling a face’s UV from its bottom edge can be tedious without dedicated tools.

Moreover, achieving proper UV filling or aligning faces with different world coordinates can be challenging and time-consuming. Manual adjustments on each face can consume countless hours and lead to frustration.

However, even with streamlined UV workflows, applying textures to numerous faces remains a significant task. Material Mode simplifies this process by allowing you to select materials and apply them directly to faces in the viewport. This eliminates the laborious manual process, enhancing efficiency and productivity - https://inlet.gumroad.com/l/mallet-material-mode

FAQ

The .zip doesn’t install in Blender

• Please un-zip the archive and install the .py script. Please enable file extensions if you can’t see it.

How do I activate an addon?

• Use this 20 sec guide – https://youtu.be/wOv4oHO5Kqg

What's the difference between World Align and UV Aligner

• UV Aligner has World Align integrated in itself by default, while World Align is its own standalone addon (separated from UV Aligner) in the case where only the World Align functions are wanted and not the rest that UV Aligner offers.

VIDEO DOCUMENTATION

DOCUMENTATION

Location
Panel
3D Viewport ‣ Sidebar ‣ Mallet

Actions
World
Will align the faces of all selected objects to the world. If clicked while in Edit Mode, it will only align the selected faces. Doing this ensures consistent scaling and positioning of materials across different objects, regardless of the objects’ own transforms. The operation’s progress is visible by opening the Blender Terminal before starting the process.

Justify
Top/Bottom/Left/Right
Shifts the UV of the selected face(s) until its edge is aligned (justified) to the given direction. It always uses the closes vertex in the UV map to the given edge.

Fill
Adjusts the UV mapping of selected face(s) to attempt to cover the entire UV space. A pop-up appears in the 3D Viewport with further settings. The “X” and “Y” values dictate how many times the texture should repeat across the UV map. One will be grayed out to maintain proportional scaling unless overridden by the "Stretch" setting. "Round" will round the “X” and “Y” values to the nearest whole number, ensuring the texture is fully displayed without cropping. This aids in preventing any portions of the texture from being truncated at the boundaries of the UV space.

Center
Shifts the UV of the selected face(s) to be in the middle of the UV map

Transform
Move
Moves the UV of the face in the given direction. The fraction is in relation to the full UV space, where 1 (as in 1/1) would move the face fully across it so there would be no visual difference. Holding shift will reverse the direction.

Rotate
Rotates the face in the given direction, by the given degrees. By default it rotates clockwise. Holding shift will reverse the direction.

Flip
Mirrors the UV face about a given point. If ‘Center’ mode is being used, it will mirror about the centre. Otherwise, ‘Edge’ mode will flip it against the left edge (for Flip X) or bottom edge (for Flip Y). This is reversed by holding down shift (top and right edge will be used).

ScaleAdjusts the scale of the selected face(s) UV. “X” and “Y” can be scaled independently. If ‘Center’ mode is being used, it will scale about the centre. Otherwise, ‘Edge’ mode will scale it against the left edge (for X) or bottom edge (for Y). This is reversed by holding down shift (top and right edge will be used instead).

Settings
ScaleUV Mapping density factor which adjusts how “big” the world coordinate is. The Scale sets how many units of world space correspond to 1 tile of the UV map. A value of 4 means that every face of 4 meters will fit 1 full UV plane

Multiple Face BehaviourOffers three distinct modes for handling multiple selected faces. These modes are primarily the behaviour of the Justify and Transform tools.

“Treat as One” treats all selected faces as a unified entity. When justifying, for instance, all faces move together until one of them aligns with an edge.

“Treat Separately” will process all selected faces individually. When justifying, each face moves independently to align with the specified edge, disregarding the positions of other faces.

“Active Face” moves all selected faces as a single unit, similar to "Treat as One". However, calculations only consider the 'active face' relevant. Consequently, justifying moves the active face to align with the designated edge, while other selected faces adjust their positions relative to it.

Addon Preferences
Move/Rotation
Allows setting your own offset values for the Transform tools ‘move’ and ‘rotate’. For example, a value of 8.33 will give an offset of 1/12th, for those of you using an Imperial workflow ((1/12)*100).