Manually Placed Seams (3dsMax)

Manually Placed Seams

Unwrella can preserve existing UV seams during the unwrapping process.
This is useful for workflows where you need more control over the final UV layout, such as manual texture painting or custom seam planning.

When the Unwrella modifier is applied, existing seams from the selected source channel are displayed in the viewport, similar to the standard UVW Unwrap modifier in 3ds Max.

Keep Existing Seams

If Keep Seams is disabled, Unwrella discards existing seams and generates its own seam layout based on the selected unwrap settings.

If Keep Seams is enabled, Unwrella uses the existing seams as the starting point for the unwrap process.

Stretch Limit and Manual Seams

Manual seams and stretch limits may conflict with each other.

If the current seam layout cannot meet the defined stretch limit, Unwrella may add additional seams automatically. These extra cuts help reduce distortion, but they may also create UV charts that are less suitable for manual painting.

To resolve this, you can:

• add more manual seams yourself
• relax the stretch limitation
• find a balance between fewer seams and lower distortion

With a Stretch value of 1.0, Unwrella will try to use your manual seams as much as possible, even if this creates strong stretching. New cuts are only added when the mesh cannot be unwrapped otherwise.

With a very low stretch value, Unwrella will usually need to create more additional seams to stay within the distortion limit.

Redundant Seams

Unwrella may remove manually placed seams if they are considered redundant.

This usually happens when a seam does not fully separate a UV chart, for example when it only cuts partially into a flat surface. If both sides of the seam end up directly next to each other in the UV layout, Unwrella may attach them again to avoid unnecessary gutter padding.

Polygonal Unwrapping

When using polygonal unwrapping mode, manually placed seams that split polygons along internal triangle edges are preserved, even if they conflict with the polygonal unwrap constraint.

However, any additional seams created automatically by Unwrella will follow the polygonal constraint and will not further split polygons.

Seam Colors

By default, Unwrella uses different colors to distinguish seam types:

• Green — existing seams
• Blue — new seams added by Unwrella

This makes it easy to see where Unwrella had to add cuts to maintain the selected stretch settings.

You can change these colors in the Parameters rollout using the Colors button.