Automap - UV islands with flipped U or flipped V compared to other islands

[Trasna]

I'm using the automap function quite a lot to unwrap sculpts and have now got a workflow that is working for me but there is one step of it that is bothering me.

 

After doing an automap to unwrap a sculpt all the various islands are created but it seems to be random as to whether each island is correct for UV. So I'm having to go via the complex UV checked and check every single island to make sure it is not flipped the wrong way as this shows up as seams in the normal map when I bake it out if any of the islands are flipped the wrong way.

 

Whilst going through and checking all the islands for correct U or V orientation is ok, on a big sculpt it can take quite some time and some of the smaller islands are very difficult to asses for U/V direction.

I can't help but wonder why the U/V directions are getting flipped in the first place, is it part of everyone's workflow to have to go through and check all islands for U/V direction and flip appropriately as I'm struggling to understand why they are getting flipped in the first place as I would have thought they would get laid out as per the normals on the mesh?

 

I'm just wondering if I'm doing something wrong here or whether what I'm doing is right and it's just part of the automatic UV unwrap workflow?

 

Thanks ... Ash.

Edited October 9, 2015 by Trasna

[Tony Nemo]

I can't address your issue directly but I assume you are using "Auto Seams", hence the abundance of tiny islands.  You might try creating your own seams or deleting many of the tiny ones. Creating your own would be expedited by using the Path Tool as your edges aren't sharp.

[Trasna]

At the moment I don't know if manual created seams does the same thing but I'll be making some more sculpts shortly and I'll try out some manual unwraps and see what it gives.