Beginners question: how to solve a mis-aligned UV island

[RedRay Visuals]

For the intro: I am a bloody beginner when it comes to everything related to 3D. So please bear with me.

I just started a little project to learn. It's a jacket I have created in Marvlous Designer. For the part marked in the attached screenshot I used a texture and as you can see the orientation of the texture is mis-aligned for the left part. For the right part it is as it should be. So now I am very glad that I found out that it is caused by the UV map - when I added the single islands of the jacket in Marvelous Designer to the UV tile I thought it would be very smart to fill in as much of the space by the islands and the one island for the part which is now causing the issue is an island I place vertically to use the space - the other parts of the mesh are placed horizontically. As I now understand it wasn't that smart.

So now my question: How can I solve this. When I re-create the UV map in Marvelous Designer I am sure I will need to re-import the mesh to Substance Painter and I would re-create all the layers again, is this right? Or can I just re-import the UV map after the changes are made to Substance Painter in any way? Do I need to re-bake the maps in Substance Painter then? Or can I somehow tell Substance Painter to change the orientation of the texture for this one part of the mesh only?

[Cyril Dellenbach · Accepted solution]

Hello @RedRay Visuals,

Welcome to the 3D community!

In fact, it was smart to fill as much as you can your UV tile, because the more space your UV islands take, the more detailed your textures will be. But you're right, the UV island's orientation is also important and can cause some issue depending on the project.

Unfortunately, you cannot tweak your UVs inside Substance 3D painter, but from your picture, I would say it isn't a big deal and I'd simply advise you to use the Cylindrical Projection on your stripes material. This should solve the issue of the orientation.

And if you really wish to correct the UV island's orientation, you can perfectly reimport your mesh with the new UVs (Edit > Project configuration > File > Select) and you shouldn't lose any of your work. 

Best regards,

[RedRay Visuals]

Thank you for this prompt response. I see why and how Cylindrical Projection could help here... in my case unfortunately not as the same texture is applied to the end of the sleeves (which is not visible in my screenshot) and these parts are located/orientated differently in 3d space. Here this projection method leads to a mis-alignment of the textures on these parts.

So tried to reimport the mesh - and I am pretty sure that somewhere on the way of trial and error exporting from MD and importing to Substance I lost something so this is not crucial for me but maybe you can help me understand what happens here. When I re-import the mesh after I did my updates in MD in Substance painter the texture sets are created completely new with some other numbers (marked red in the new screenshot) - and the former texture sets seem to loose everything (marked blue). Do you have an idea what happens here?