Detailed description of your suggestion
Hi. I've run into the same issue at work several times — either my colleagues or I myself would end up making a major mistake in modeling by building everything relative to the X coordinate. This often caused problems with animation, and the plugins or mods we needed to import the model into were very reluctant to accept it. As a result, we had to spend a long and painful time redoing the models and manually rearranging the UV islands.
Yes, in the classic Blocbench there is a way to create a box texture, which sped things up a bit, but it still took a lot of time.
Together with my coder friend and some scary neural networks that sometimes spout utter nonsense, we managed to implement a small plugin — but it doesn't quite match the idea I'll describe below. Since my thinking is far from technical, I'll try to explain my idea with pictures.
Originally, I imagined it like this:
Let's say there's a cube. It was created along the X axis, and I rotated it by -90 degrees on Y.
In the classic version of Blocbench, there are scissors — but imagine there's a new tool called "split cube into faces." This makes the cube fly apart into separate planes (north, east, south, west, top, bottom).
In my vision, there's also another new tool — "merge faces back together" — which assembles a new cube from those cut‑apart faces.
Or another exotic example.
Now I'll show you what my plugin does and how I managed to force‑convert "bad cubes." Let me say upfront that my plugin is designed to bake only Y‑axis rotation, so sometimes you still have to do some manual work. However, because it dynamically adjusts the texture on the fly, it's way more convenient.
Let's take this model as an example. It was originally built along the X coordinate. I created groups and rotated them by 90 degrees on Y.
But as I mentioned earlier, this model is fundamentally broken.
Next, I ungroup the group.
Next, I use my tool that this plugin adds.
Voilà — and just like that, the cubes are good to go!
Now let's take a look at some fancier cubes — like these, for example.
Like I said, my plugin isn't flawless — you'll have to roll up your sleeves and do a bit of hand-tuning to get things looking right.
Now let's spin that exotic cube straight up.
Now let's fire up my tool.
And then we simply rotate it so that it takes the place of the WRONG cube. You can also save the wrong cube and snap the correct one into place using Vertex Snap.
In conclusion, I simply lack the knowledge to implement everything I had in mind. However, I believe you could take this idea further. I tried my best to present it clearly, and thank you in advance for reading this.
P.S. Sincerely, zxterProxy
bake_transform.js
Detailed description of your suggestion
Hi. I've run into the same issue at work several times — either my colleagues or I myself would end up making a major mistake in modeling by building everything relative to the X coordinate. This often caused problems with animation, and the plugins or mods we needed to import the model into were very reluctant to accept it. As a result, we had to spend a long and painful time redoing the models and manually rearranging the UV islands.
Yes, in the classic Blocbench there is a way to create a box texture, which sped things up a bit, but it still took a lot of time.
Together with my coder friend and some scary neural networks that sometimes spout utter nonsense, we managed to implement a small plugin — but it doesn't quite match the idea I'll describe below. Since my thinking is far from technical, I'll try to explain my idea with pictures.
Originally, I imagined it like this:
Let's say there's a cube. It was created along the X axis, and I rotated it by -90 degrees on Y.
In the classic version of Blocbench, there are scissors — but imagine there's a new tool called "split cube into faces." This makes the cube fly apart into separate planes (north, east, south, west, top, bottom).
In my vision, there's also another new tool — "merge faces back together" — which assembles a new cube from those cut‑apart faces.
Or another exotic example.
Now I'll show you what my plugin does and how I managed to force‑convert "bad cubes." Let me say upfront that my plugin is designed to bake only Y‑axis rotation, so sometimes you still have to do some manual work. However, because it dynamically adjusts the texture on the fly, it's way more convenient.
Let's take this model as an example. It was originally built along the X coordinate. I created groups and rotated them by 90 degrees on Y.
But as I mentioned earlier, this model is fundamentally broken.
Next, I ungroup the group.
Next, I use my tool that this plugin adds.
Voilà — and just like that, the cubes are good to go!
Now let's take a look at some fancier cubes — like these, for example.
Like I said, my plugin isn't flawless — you'll have to roll up your sleeves and do a bit of hand-tuning to get things looking right.
Now let's spin that exotic cube straight up.
Now let's fire up my tool.
And then we simply rotate it so that it takes the place of the WRONG cube. You can also save the wrong cube and snap the correct one into place using Vertex Snap.
In conclusion, I simply lack the knowledge to implement everything I had in mind. However, I believe you could take this idea further. I tried my best to present it clearly, and thank you in advance for reading this.
P.S. Sincerely, zxterProxy
bake_transform.js