UV map and topology messed up

[Nightingalia]

Hope I'm posting in the right place! I'm trying to make clothes but the UV mapping is really frustrating me. Here's my issue:

When I started I was dumb and used a lot of triangles. The UV map turned out like this:

I looked up the issue and people were saying to use follow active quads. So I turned everything into quads but now it's even more *****ed up. I picked a quad, did lightmap pack, and then follow active quads. How to fix this mess?

After second method:

 

What am I doing wrong?

[arton Rotaru]

Before you unwrap, make sure you have applied Rotation & Scale on the mesh.

[Aquila Kytori]

If your goal is to straighten out the UV islands then:

Mark seams and use a simple UV unwrap:

 

Next in the UV Editor, Edge Select mode, you need to first straighten out all four edges of one of the quads in one of the UV islands :

 

 

Then, in Face Select mode with that quad selected use the Follow Active Quads unwrap on that island:

 

And repeat for all the other islands:

 

 

[Aquila Kytori]

Another option is to use an Add-on to do the the above operations for you.

The UvSqares add-on by Reslav Hollos has this option and the free (older) version which works with Blender 3.1 (and earlier) can be downloaded from Github.

https://github.com/Radivarig/UvSquares

.

Download the .zip file and without unzipping Install as an add-on in Blener.     Edit > Preferences > Addons >Install > UvSqares-Master.zip.

 

You will find the add-on added to the left hand tabs in the UV editor.

Now you can use the To Grid By Shape option from the UvSquares menu:

 

The shortcut keys for the To Grid By Shape tool are Alt E.

So using only shortcut keys ...........

Select quad > L > Alt E    on each UV island in turn straightening can take less than a minute :

[Nightingalia]

On 7/2/2022 at 11:03 AM, Aquila Kytori said:

 

Select quad > L > Alt E    on each UV island in turn straightening can take less than a minute :

 

Just tried this out, this is amazing! Thank you so much!