Hey guys,
I work for a gamedev company using Blender for creating 3D models. We create games for smartphones mostly, that is why performance and memory usage is big concern in our pipeline. The trick we use really often in order to save resources is having separate objects sharing same materials and textures. Off course such objects have to have non-overlapping UV maps at the same time. Here’s the problem: Blender doesn’t allow editing UV maps of multiple objects without joining them into one object. I am aware of MultiEdit addon, which allows editing multiple objects at the same time, but I found out it doesn’t work properly with more complicated object hierarchy (simply try to edit two objects with one being parent of another and check what happens when exiting MultiEdit mode).
I decided to create my own addon solving this issue: Multi UV Edit. It uses similar idea as the MultiEdit addon but was created having only UV editing functionality in mind. That is why it is relatively simpler than MultiEdit and less error prone. It works well with different object hierarchies.
The addon was created for UV editing, but it should also work well when editing other data like vertex colors, vertex groups etc. It should even work properly when transforming already existing geometry, but adding new geometry might cause problems (some geometry-generating operators like loop cut or extrude should work properly though, but I didn’t do any extensive testing on that).
The addon may be downloaded from here. I will be grateful for feedback and testing 