is there a way to convert a UV map in an actual mesh in the 3d view, in any plane?
Export the uv layout as a .svg file. Then import that .svg file back into blender. It will be a curve object so you will need to then convert it to a mesh (Alt+C)
Interesting! I didn’t even fully understand the question…But how does one export a .svg file? In the UV Editor, I went to Save Image As, but .svg isn’t an option.
UVs / Export UV Layout menu in UV Editor window. svg is one of the export file formats
If you don’t see the option you may have to enable the export uv layout addon in user preferences
Richard thank you for the support, I have some additional questions
1.My model is set in metric units with a scale of 0.001 (I found those settings working fine for stl exporting and 3d printing): importing svg with such settings gives me a tiny tiny tiny model. what is the relation and/of scaling factor?
2.importing the svg gives me a bunch of objects with single curves in them: do I have to join them before the mesh conversion?
I thought so but I got something with a lot of holes and edges deleted after the conversion
Convert to mesh then join
works good but it did not keep the original topology, which is mandatory for my purposes.
It0s kind of weird, beacause the UV wrap respected the topology
here is the final results with the not matching topology
here is the original mash and the UV mapping
There’s a convert to quads option which will clean up the model after you have joined the imported svg curves and converted them. I would be good if this could occur all in Blender because we could then use the unwrapped object as shape key data.
I have the same task - converting UV map into mesh - we have 2023, did anything changed? What do you recommend?
Thanks, very interesting but with one important caveat - this method does not preserve scale.
BTW I just found simple solution - TexTools addon can transform UV grid into mesh - with one single click, the button is located at the bottom of the addon panel in section ‘Mesh UV Tools’.