I was playing around with my airframe model, and trying out the UV features in Modo and comparing them to Houdini. In Modo they have a UV tool called UV Unpack, which, from what I can tell, is roughly the same as Houdini's UVPelt. However in Modo the tool seems to do a better job of keeping the basic shape of the geometry when it unwraps it.

When you use the UVPelt tool, at least with rectangular/boxy geometry, it seems to want to round out the edges as the vertices are stretched out and come a little closer to the circular frame. Is there a way to keep the edges straighter? The documentation mentions a “Stiffness Attribute” and a “Weight Attribute”, is that what these are for? The sidefx tutorial doesn't mention these and haven't found an example about this either.

Take a look at the UVUnwrap sop instead. It will do a nice job on boxy geometry and you have the option of how the projection is generated and the pieces are arranged.

Yeah I tried that too. However UVUnwrap sop doesn't pay any attention to which edges you'd like the geometry to break at, like the UVPelt sop does. Sometimes it works OK, other times it breaks the geometry into too many pieces and there's doesn't seem to be the finesse like there is with the UV Pelt tool - it'd be nice if there were something inbetween or the UVUnwrap could be altered to accept edges like the UVPelt does.

You probably mean something like this

http://www.houdinitools.com/HT_HDK_UVunwrapLSCM.html [houdinitools.com]

unfortunately I've been rather tardy about recompiling for H10… ops:

I'm a C++ developer myself (http://vcf-online.org/ [vcf-online.org] is a project I used to work on quite a bit). How difficult is this to build on Windows? I have Visual Studio 2005 Standard, is that the correct version?

http://odforce.net/wiki/index.php/HDK [odforce.net]