UVHighlight

Addon to improve blenders uv display, and a a few uv-tools as well.

Limitations

Working on high polycounts is rather slow in python, so some of what this addon does, should really be implemented on the C side of blender, as it's quite a heavy task to calculate the preselction etc. In general it should be fast enough for base meshes. Just be aware that this isnt the fastest thing ever!

I also added a vert count limit - so that it wont stall/crash blender on high poly meshes.

There are probably quite a few things a more experienced blender programmer would solve differently - especially how I fetch triangulated faces is slow - hit me up if you have some good solutions/ideas :)

Installation

1. download archive (zip) from github
2. rename the zip file to "uv_highlight.zip" - this is important
3. in blender preferences/addons "Install Add-on from File"

Release Notes

0.2:

• dropped some of the tools to focus solely on uv highlighting related issues.
• tried to adress the script reload issues
• other bugfixes/tweaks

0.1:

• initial release

I created some gifs which should show what each toggle and some of the tools do:

Display Options

Show selection in viewport:

Show preselection:

This shows what you will select with your current mouse position, and it also shows you which verts / edges belong toghether on seams.

Heres a small demo of how it shows edges:

Show non selected faces:

Displays all the non selected faces of the mesh - handy to not mess your layout

Show UDIM indices:

Eventhough blender does not support UDIMS as far as I know, it's sometimes handy to know how the UDIM tiles are laid out.

All the colors can be tweaked in the addon preferences!

Convert Mode:

Converts the current selection to/from Sync Mode. I'm really not a fan of this dual mode approach in blender, but to easen the pain I though it would be cool to convert back and forth between the two modes. Please notice that going back to Non-Sync Mode selects the whole mesh.

Auto convert sync uv mode:

Keeps track of mode change and converts automatically. The same as if you would press the button.

Auto mark boundaries as seam:

Marks UV island borders as seams

Auto mark boundaries as sharp:

For normalmapped models it's often desired to have hard edges around UV shells. This should do this automatically.