ArtUV: Artist-style UV Unwrapping

Abstract: UV unwrapping is an essential task in computer graphics, enabling various visual editing operations in rendering pipelines. However, existing UV unwrapping methods struggle with time-consuming, fragmentation, lack of semanticity, and irregular UV islands, limiting their practical use. An artist-style UV map must not only satisfy fundamental criteria, such as overlap-free mapping and minimal distortion, but also uphold higher-level standards, including clean boundaries, efficient space utilization, and semantic coherence. We introduce ArtUV, a fully automated, end-to-end method for generating artist-style UV unwrapping. We simulates the professional UV mapping process by dividing it into two stages: surface seam prediction and artist-style UV parameterization. In the seam prediction stage, SeamGPT is used to generate semantically meaningful cutting seams. Then, in the parameterization stage, a rough UV obtained from an optimization-based method, along with the mesh, is fed into an Auto-Encoder, which refines it into an artist-style UV map. Our method ensures semantic consistency and preserves topological structure, making the UV map ready for 2D editing. We evaluate ArtUV across multiple benchmarks and show that it serves as a versatile solution, functioning seamlessly as either a plug-in for professional rendering tools or as a standalone system for rapid, high-quality UV generation.