The Xatlas based packing algorithm was just committed, so will be in the next 3.6 buildbot build!
UV: Add option to Pack UVs using the xatlas strategy · e0d05da826 - blender - Blender Projects
Based on : https://github.com/jpcy/xatlas
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He’s around blender.chat’s modelling module channel. It’s probably not a great channel for lengthy feature requests, feedback, or suggestions (primarily for developers after all), but I think it’s okay to simply direct him this thread for feedback.
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I hope that not only UV editing will improve, but also the mesh editing and curve editing mode.
I’d like to see the Slim algo unwrap …
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Glukoz (author of UvPackmaster) did some work on SLIM finishing: https://archive.blender.org/developer/D15195
bud development ended on glukoz question to developers and i cant see it anywhere on gitea.
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What makes me crazy is when you do an unwrap of something with a ring structure and it leaves giant empty holes in the center of every circular island, which is a total waste of space. or any shape.
Then it is a good thing the BF has gotten around to really improving the packing code then.
If anyone remembers the release notes that were written in the pre 2.5 days, you will find that, perhaps because resources were tight then, they left some points on how a feature can be enhanced in the future, but it turned out to just be wishful thinking and the code would not be touched again unless a volunteer or GSoC student picked it up. Two distinct cases I remember were points related to proportional editing and SSS.
The packing code has more or less been largely the same since Blender 2.3x, so improvements were way overdue.
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the future is now!
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Almost, just waiting for Simulation Nodes to finish off the old and crusty particle system code (as recent releases already removed its place as a system for object scattering and hair).
We may need a new thread for Simulation Nodes when the commit is made, as it might be too much for the general thread on nodes.
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Unwrapers (LSCM and ABF (Angle/Conformal)) are also from that era and they were pretty good back then and there were people that used Blender only for unwraping, and there was comments like that:
Blender’s unwrapper (2.42) is amazing though, hopefully we’ll see somemore of it’s features in
Maya/Max eventually.~Jul '06 @ cgsociety
since then there were only few uv improvements, and unwraping was on low prority, even VSE got developer grant before UV got one 
On the other hand i’ve heard complains of stagnation in other DCCs, eg. maya’s unwraping until ‘recent’ improvements.
Gladly we have addons like packmaster, uvtoolkit, textools, texel density checker. And even fully devoted software like RizumUV.
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A good reminder that the UV code in blender, though a bit dusty now, was state of the art when it was released.
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It was so state of the art that Maya tried to steal it. The Blender Foundation had to set them straight.
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Wow. That looks almost as good as UV Packmaster.
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I’ve been putting off buying UVP3 for a while, I’ve been using an old dusty copy of 2.52 for years now… if this keeps up, though, I might postpone UVP3 indefinitely 
Packmaster does have some added advantages though, like stacking similar islands. I’ve used it a couple of times over the last few days.
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I got it, but never end up really using it. It was a little too fiddly for a lot of cases. The new packing works really well though 
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I have it too and for what is worth is more advanced and can tightly pack things better to suck out all that pixel space as much as possible…
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Packing’s a good feature in UVP, but I couldn’t live without the other stuff, like setting scale, rotation, stacking etc per UV island.
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Updates on the UV progress from Chris Blackbourne in the meeting notes.
- Add xatlas packer, the brute force, bitmap occupancy, packer that supports irregular shapes. commit
- WIP Alpaca_Rotate, the fast L-Packer which also supports rotation.
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Investigate 105860, Crash when adding UV Layer.
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Planning “perfect” packer, the packer which produces optimal results for some inputs. e.g. optimal square packing
Example output of the optimal square packing is very impressive!
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