Advanced last UV editing

Once we have a flatten last we may want to do further editing to the texture coordinates and get a better flattening than what initially given by the tool. Botcha offers a feature-rich UV editor that allow you to do multiple things with it. We are going to cover an interesting workflow here, starting from an unwrapped last and getting a basic pattern that we will use for flowing and re-unwrapping.

Flowing and adjusting the pattern

We will first use the B_FloweEdge command to match the initial flattening to the existing basic shell pattern. This command will allow us to select which edges should be matched to which curves of the pattern. Once the command is run the result should be something similar to what is shown here:

Cutting and re-flowing

The second step is to remap the pattern between the flat version and the 3D one. What we suggest is to cut the original mesh and remap it to 3D, then weld it and remesh it so you will end up with very clean geometry that you can work with. To reacap:

• Use MeshTrim to cut the mesh with the u-throat curve of the pattern. This will guarantee consistency with the remapped geometry.
• Use B_RemapObjects to flow from 2D flat to 3D last the cut geometry
• Weld and fix any potential issue so that you get a nice 3D pattern around your last
• QuadRemesh to get very clean geometry in the 3D
• B_Unwrap and add the unwrapping to the document.

the result should be something as seen here:

Getting the heel flow

Now we want to get the back side of the last isolated from the rest. We copy/paste the 3D last and weld the back side and cut the front side to get a clean heel connection. As seen in picture.

Now we want to use B_TransferUV to copy the UVs from the complete last to the heel-only last. We can use the Distance-based transferring with a cut distance of 15mm. After we complete this operation the UVS will be completely overlapping to the ones from the complete u-throat open last, as seen in picture.

Then we select the vertices on one side, whichever we prefer and we can pin those vertices, using the menu that we can get either from the right click onto the UV manipulator or the third button on the UV editor UI.

After that we want to start the live unwrap from the same menu and get the proper relaxation of the model as seen below. This operation can be used for all sorts of unwrapping. Here we are presenting the most common one but other kind can be performed.

You can also perform this type of unwrapping on different type of lasts, here we have completed a more close to production workflow, if your objective is visualization only, you can skip steps about cutting and re-flowing. The tools that you can find in botcha are very flexible and will allow you to perform all sorts of flattening and flowing workflow, depending on your need.