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Trim Sheet Tool
A trim sheet is one texture holding a row of reusable strips. A panel edge, a pipe, a moulding. The Trim Sheets tab puts your selected faces onto whichever strip they should wear, without opening an unwrap editor.
Everything on this page acts on the object and faces you've selected in 3ds Max or Blender.
| Section | What's in it |
|---|---|
| [ LIBRARY ] | Which set is loaded. CAT, STYLE, SET |
| [ MATERIAL ASSIGNMENT ] | The P, S and T material slots, with a badge counting how many matched |
| [ TRIM SETTINGS ] | UV Split and Angle |
| [ HOTSPOT TOOLS ] | See The Hotspot Tool |
| [ UV ADJUSTMENTS ] | Fixing a result after the fact |
| [ SET ] | The Trims / Hotspot view toggles, Run Hotspot, the PALETTE swatches, the status strip, and the trims themselves |
Click any heading to fold that section away.
In [ LIBRARY ], choose CAT, then STYLE, then SET. Changing SET loads that set and redraws the trims at the bottom of the page.
Select your object before you load the set. The P, S and T slots fill with whichever of that object's materials match. An unmatched slot reads None, a matched one shows the material ID it landed on. That ID is what a Shift, Ctrl or Alt click will put your faces on.
▾ PALETTE, under [ SET ], holds six swatches, three across. An unused one shows a dash.
- Right-click a swatch to save whatever CAT / STYLE / SET you've currently got chosen into it. If the swatch already holds a set, a Slot In Use card asks first, offering Replace or Cancel. Right-clicking an empty swatch saves straight away.
- Left-click a swatch to switch that set on or off. One on shows that set. Two or more shows all of them at once, a set per column. With none on, the grid keeps whatever the Library dropdowns last loaded.
Saved swatches survive a restart. With more than one on, [ LIBRARY ] grows a MULTI badge and a Columns: dropdown appears in the [ SET ] toolbar.
- In 3ds Max or Blender, select the object and the run of faces you want trimmed.
- Left-click the trim you want, in the grid at the bottom of the page.
The faces land on that strip. Each connected run is fitted on its own and comes out square, tiling along its length. The status strip reads Trim applied to N face(s) when it's done.
| Do this | To get this |
|---|---|
| Left-click a trim | Apply it to the selected faces |
| Right-click a trim | Flatten each connected piece on its own and give every piece a full copy of the trim. Reach for this when a left-click comes out kinked because the selection isn't a clean strip. |
| Shift + click | Also put the processed faces on the set's Primary material |
| Ctrl + click | …on the Secondary material |
| Alt + click | …on the Tertiary material |
Nothing held, and material assignments are left alone. The modifiers work on the right-click too, and on Run Hotspot.
- No object selected at all. The status reads No poly object selected. and nothing changes.
- Object selected but no faces. The whole object gets trimmed, and every face is left selected afterwards.
In Blender, select some faces or drop back to Object Mode first.
| Control | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| UV Split | Off | Breaks the UVs at sharp corners. A bend sharper than Angle gets its own band of the sheet, instead of being forced into one shape with the straight run either side of it. |
| Angle | 25° | How sharp that bend has to be. Greyed out until UV Split is on. Lower it and you split at gentler corners, leaving more, smaller pieces. |
With no corner sharp enough to split at, the selection is applied as one piece.
Angle is remembered between sessions. UV Split starts off each session.
Two rules cover the whole panel:
- Anything with a direction acts along the loaded set's own grain, and holding Shift switches to the other one. Every button says which it'll use, so Flip (U) becomes Flip (V) the moment you hold Shift.
- Right-click does the opposite of what the button says. That covers Rotate, the three + presets, the two scale presets, Grow and Shrink.
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| Flip (U) | Mirrors each UV shell about its own centre, along one direction. Never both at once, that'd be a half turn rather than a flip. |
| Rotate +90° | A quarter turn clockwise, and right-click turns it the other way. Rotate has no direction of its own, so Shift does nothing to it. |
| Unitize (U) | Stretches the selected UVs to fill 0–1 along the active direction. Good for a shell that's drifted off the sheet, though it changes how large the texture reads. |
| + 0.25 (U) / + 0.5 (U) / + 0.75 (U) | Slide the UVs by that exact distance. Right-click sends them the other way. |
| + 0.66 (U) / + 0.75 (U) | Scale the UVs. Left-click grows, right-click shrinks by the number as it reads. |
| Nudge slider | Slides the UVs live as you drag, springing back to centre when you let go. The direction is fixed the moment the drag starts, so letting go of Shift mid-drag won't swing the shell onto the other axis. |
| Scale slider | Same again, resizing instead of sliding. |
| Rand | How far Offset may shift things, as a percent. Starts at 10. |
| Offset | Shifts the selected UVs by up to the Rand amount, along one direction, to break up obvious repetition. A fresh amount every press. |
| Tex Res | The resolution you're actually working at, so a pixel means the right distance. Starts at 2048, offers 128–8192. |
| Inset | How many pixels each Grow or Shrink press moves by, at that resolution. Starts at 4 px. |
| Grow / Shrink | Push the selected UV area out, or pull it in, by that step. Right-click either for the opposite. |
| Uniform | Belongs to Grow and Shrink alone. On, they inset both directions at once and the buttons read plain Grow and Shrink. Off, they follow the set's grain, or the other direction with Shift held, and read Grow (U) / Shrink (U). |
All of these need at least one face selected.
Grow and Shrink treat each UV island separately, so faces from two islands scale about their own centres rather than as one lump.
The Hotspot toggle in [ SET ] swaps the trim grid for the automatic view, and Run Hotspot fits the selected faces for you. Everything under [ HOTSPOT TOOLS ] belongs to that, and none of it touches a hand-clicked trim.
Tiles in the Hotspot view click exactly like ordinary trims, modifiers and all.
Full detail: The Hotspot Tool.
An Apply Trim failed report opens, with Copy and Dismiss. Press Copy and send the lot when you report it. See Buying, Help and Feedback.
- Select the object before you choose the set, or the P, S and T slots come up empty and a Shift/Ctrl/Alt click won't land the faces on the material you expected.
- If a click trimmed far more than you meant, you had no faces sub-selected, so the whole object got it.
- If a left-click comes out kinked or twisted, the selection isn't a clean strip. Right-click the same trim instead.
- If a bend in a long run comes out stretched, switch UV Split on and lower Angle until that corner breaks into its own piece.
- If Grow and Shrink move by a distance that looks wrong, check Tex Res matches the texture you're really working with.
- Unitize changes how large the texture reads, so re-apply the trim afterwards if you wanted the original scale back.
- Applying a trim over previously hotspotted faces overrides them. Faces you didn't select keep what they had.