Hi, folks. I’m struggling to find s sensible way to put uniform spacing between the UV islands of my unwrapped objects when I just use “unwrap” after marking seams. I know that if I use “Smart UV Project” it guves me an option to set some uniform spacing between the islands, but if I sut use “unwrap”, the islands are always right up to the edge of the UV image and all the islands are touching. Is there a way to ask Blender to lay out the islands with a minimum space between the islands and the image’s perimeter? It’s not so bad when I just have a few large islandfs to reposition, but when I have lots of small islands, it’s quite a problem.
When you unwrap there is the margin slider in the unwrap options for you to adjust how big you want the margin surrounding the islands
Also in the UV Editor you can use the UVs / Pack Islands menu and set the margin in the 3d view toolshelf
I’m not presented with any options at all when I choose “Unwrap” after pressing the U key, or when I use the “Pack Islands” option in the from the UVs menu. Why might this be? If I press the U key and choose “Smart UV Project”, I get a small dialog where I cab enter a margin value, but not when I use the plain “Unwrap” option.
When I use the plain “Unwrap” option, there does seem to be an extremely small margin around the islands, but It doesn’t really look big enough to stop the margin settings in the Bake options from overlapping and bleeding into neighbouring islands.
I did some test bakes with lowered samples and the colour did seem to bleed into nearby islands. Is there some add-on that I need to enable to get a margin dialog to appear when I use Unwrap or Pack Islands?
The options appear at the bottom of the tools panel in the 3D View (tools panel is the side panel on the left, toggle it with T). Alternatively, you can press F6 to get an options popup.
Took me a while to find the island margin input because I didn’t realize I had to re-unwrap my mash to make the input box appear, but I’ve finally got it, thanks!
One thing is still puzzling me, though. When I use Image -> Pack Image from the UV editor, I get a message saying “Can’t pack edited image from disk, pack as internal PNG instead?” It says this no matter what I do. Even if I ask Blender to back the image without so much as zooming in/out, it stills says it can’t pack an edited image. Why can Blender not pack the generated image and is there anly loss of quality as a consequence of of using the PNG format?