Hello !

First post here. I recently began to learn Houdini, and for the most part I'm doing okay, but there's one thing I can't find a clean solution for.

I currently have a model for which I can't combine all the part into one object. This is because of my animator who want to have every part separated (body, eyes, hat, etc…). Problem is, I want to do the UV layout for this model, but since it's not combine I can't use “uv layout” node. Right now I'm stuck with either :

- Combine everything, do the UV layout, separate every thing. Which seems very messy (also I don't know how to do that for now).
- Keep them separated and use a “UV edit” to place them manually on my sheet. Would works fine, BUT, I can see only one activated UV at the time (the one I'm editing). Which means that I must constantly go back and forth between editing one object UV and looking if it is not colliding with another object.
- Duplicate all object, combine them, do the layout, freeze the last node, copy/paste it back on each original object, and clean everything every time by deleting merge face I don't need on each object and making sure the pivot point is at the right place…


These are the “solutions” I found, but they all seems very impracticable to me.
How do you do to edit multiple objects UVs, so that you can arrange them on one sheet ?

Hi Luven,

here is an example file in which several geos converge on a common uv layout.
Is this what you mean?

Yes but it's only half of my problem solving.
Here you've got your objects sharing a common UV layout and that's what I want. But now they are all merged, making them a single object unless you go into the trouble of separating them again. Which I guess would mean duplicate them and then deleting what you don't want to keep each time ? This way seems overly complicated to me.

I'm looking for a solution where I can keep objects separated, but still having them share a common uv layout.
Or then maybe someone could indicate a good way to separate them if you really have to merge them no matter what to lay out their uvs together.

Example would be if I had a character with their weapon, the two of them being separated objects, but them still sharing the same texture and uv space. How do I do that in Houdini ?

Disclamer : I've been working with Maya up until now, where basically you could just select 2 objects, which would make both of their uvs appears in the uv viewport (even though they were not combine), and then you could just manipulate their UV to re-arrange them as you wanted.
I know Houdini is a different software so it may work in different way, but I'm looking for some solution to obtain this same simple result.

like this?

Christoph_H_
like this?

Yes! Exactly what I was looking for. Thanks for posting.