UV mapping control when exporting parts or surfaces

[mnico]

I am trying to export a curved surface to subsequently add a texture. For doing so I need to have the UV mapping of the surface. I know that there are different tools (even free one) that are better suited than Creo for UV mapping, but in my company at the moment we want to use only Creo, so I was wondering which are the limits and what I can do using it.

What I am currently doing is to export the surface in Wavefront and while doing this it is possible to select a reference frame (in this case the UV mapping is spherical) or a plane (in this case the UV mapping is planar). For my purposes the planar one would be good enough, the problem is that the mapping is a "projection" of the surface in the UV space (from 0 to 1). If the curvature of the surface is low, this mapping is fair enough, but when the curvature increases some distortions of the texture appear. To avoid this problem I would need an "unwrapped" mapping, where for "unwrapped" I mean that the surface is unwrapped into the planar UV space, and not only projected. Do you know if this is possible in Creo, maybe using a different format to save the surface (not only Wavefront)?

Thank you

[bbrejcha · Accepted solution]

There is only one tool in the current release of Creo 3.0 and past releases that will unfold a surface.  Flatten Surface.  It does not work well w/ compound surfaces.  We at Design-engine use Maya and photoshop (then illustrator) together to unfold the compound surface like that of a cushion   I hear solidworks has a new module that allows complex/compound surfaces to unfold.  Previously other software packages charge 30k for this type of unfolding.

Your question is more focused onto UV mapping.  Shouldn't you be using Maya or Mudbox for this stuff?  Are you doing something special for rendering?  

Bart Brejcha

Design-engine.com

[mnico]

We are working with a multi-body simulator called Gazebo‌ (that exploits OGRE as graphics engine) and we need to export the bodies of our system from the CAD model. For better performances (in terms of visualization quality and simulation speed) we would like to use textures instead of materials. So far we have been using the Wavefront with planar UV mapping, but this solution works well only for low curvature of the body faces.

As you suggest one option could be to flatten the surface and then export it with a planar mapping. We give it a try, but probably Creo is not the right tool for this purpose.