For answers to most important questions regarding UVPackmaster 3, visit the FAQs on our site (recommended especially if you are a UVPackmaster 2 user already).
I developed a new UV packing solution for Blender. It is very efficient due to the core of the algorithm is performed by a multithreaded C++ application. (Is it the first C+Ā±based Blender addon ever? Do you know any other? ;). Still the solution is a usual Blender plugin from the user viewpoint - you install it like a standard add-on.
In order to prove how efficient it is I will give you 2 examples:
It took less than 3 sec. on my quite old i5-2450M (two cores) to generate such packing:
What is more the underlying algorithm used by the packer was designed with a bunch of useful features in mind, e.g. grouping islands by material, packing additional islands to those already packed. I am going to implement them soon.
Currently the add-on is supported on two platforms: Linux 64 bit and Windows 64 bit. I will add Mac support if there are many requests for it. If you still are on a 32 bit platformā¦ well itās time to refresh your hardware probably
Note that I didnāt have possibility to test the application on many systems and configurations, so some errors still might be present. If you encounter any issue please let me know. I will try to fix it as soon as possible.
The add-on will be available in two versions: basic and extended. The basic version has limited functionality, but it is available for free.
Functionalities NOT available in basic version:
rotating islands during packing
checking for overlapping islands (might be useful when you do some manual packing).
You can download the basic version from here: [EDIT]: the basic version is currently available on gumroad only: https://gum.co/uvpackmaster (free download).
I am going to upload extended version to gumroad in a few days. Beware
Looks very promising, what kinda planned features you have in mind for the future of this packing addon? IPack that and headus uv layout has some very good ideas you could try to implement to this as well
So I just gave it a test run, it is indeed just a straight addon install but it really runs fast
I did a test here, the tool appears in the Tools panel in edit mode within the UV image editor. You can see below a packed result with a time of about 6 seconds to pack. I got one error but the UV layout on the right is what it packed successfully.
Regarding the error:
In a test model that I have I did run into this error popup stating that selected islands have invalid topology. Here is a more in depth screen to show only the āinvalid topologyā
Also I hope you donāt mind, here is some UI development feedback as I had a look through your UI code
Debug mode
Blender has this neat bpy.app.debug_mode build in which you can trigger using Ctrl + Alt + D. So when I wrap your debug code into this
All I have to do is press Ctrl + Alt + D and change the value other than the default 0 to show the debug stuff. I use this a lot in TexTools to hide incomplete features in public releases.
Bigger buttons
To get bigger button in Blender, e.g. your Pack button to stand out more, wrap it into another layout e.g. row and set the scale. Itās something that I recently discovered and have been applying to TexTools as well for dominant features.
Custom Tab
To have your own tab instead of inside the Tools tab just use your own name here:
Will it support offset for islands size? (This is a thing that always have doubts, if a pack system can suport a little difference in texel density to make better packs)
Will it support Island groups?
Will it support a better margin input format? (in pixels)
PD: I have tried a 1000 iterations solutions, and instead of make a solution in the x3 time that 300 iterations (2s) the addon need near to one minute to give a solution Āæit is normal? Similar happens when I tried big margins.
PD2: maybe the multithread doesnāt work always? my monitor tell that only use 14% of the CPU
on a i7-3770 cpu it also shows maximum 12/13% usage of the uvpack.exe.
Even thou its necessary in most cases to avoid overlappings,could there be for the cases where the user intentionally
wants to pack with overlaps, an āignore overlappingā function be added?
renderhjs, thank you for your tips, I didnāt know about Blender built-in debug mode, it is very useful thing indeed. Also could you send me a blend file containing only the islands which were reported as having invalid topology? It would be nice to take a look on them. I guess that for some of them invalid topology state is perfectly expected (for example an island with all verts scaled to single point), but for other the issue might be on packer side.
DcVertice, yes, it is expected that algorithm run time grows faster than linearly with iterations increasing. It is more sophisticated than that. Anyway, 300 iterations is usually enough to get decent result.
Also you cannot see much mulithreading usage, because currently it is mostly used when enabling island rotations, and this feature is not present in basic version. It will come with extended version
Regarding new features: what you can see now is just early phase of development. Working on this project is nice experience for me, thatās why I am planning to develop a lot of features to make it more useful. The only question which bothers me is which functionalities should have priority now. In other words: which features are the most wanted? Maybe I should create a survey regarding this
I can see people successfully using the packer on Windows. Can anybody confirm that it also works on a Linux system? I would like to check whether it runs smoothly on an end user machine.
Very cool, Iāve been wanting a improved uv pack inside blender, right now I use a external tool for uv packing.
I also got the same error as @renderhjs I also got this error
When it worked though it made a nice and tight pack, excited to try it when it gets rotation++
thanks to a new developer in the team we were able to implement additional feature for the first release: the heuristic search algorithm for an optimal packing.
we decided to enable island overlap check feature in the basic version as well so even if you are not going to buy the extended version I recommend doing an update.
Stromberg: were you able to reproduce this error or it just happened only once? If you can reproduce it, could you send a blend file? (scale all the geometry to single point if you donāt want to share your work).
