I think it’s really awesome that Microsoft and Xin Huang released the source code of their D3DX mesh parameterization library. Chuck announced it on his blog.
There’s a lot of good stuff in there, more than in any of the previous D3DX source code releases. I was never too happy with the k-means style clustering that we use in The Witness, top-down spectral clustering seems a much better approach. Also their stretch-minimization parameterization is certainly better than our plain LSCM.
I wrote about our implementation in this article. A few people asked for our code and we released it here. However, today I’d recommend using Xin Huang’s as a better starting point.
I read this post and the post on The Witness blog and it looks like “parameterization” is a professional term for UV unwrapping.
So basically UVAtlas and the LSCM thing you mentioned are methods to do automatic UV unwrapping. Am I correct?
Is there a difference between the good old UV map that I create in a 3D program and “parameterization”?
In this setting they are the same thing. Parameterization is just a technical term. Automatic parameterizations can have nice properties that are very difficult to achieve with manual uv maps, for example, LSCM is a conformal parameterization, which means that isolines always met at square angles.