Hey everybody!
I’ll be working on the UV Tools for Google Summer of Code, you can find my proposal here:
https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:SaphireS/gsoc2016/proposal
Besides adding smaller tools and improvements I’ll try to improve the UV packing algorithm (“Pack Islands”) to achieve a much better automatic usage of available UV space. Currently all the islands use a rectangular bounding box, which makes “interlocking” of parts not possible and wastes space.
I’m currently researching 2D bin-packing algorithms for this task, but haven’t found a really awesome algorithm yet, so if anybody happens to know a paper I should definitely take a look at, I’d be very thankful for that information!
I’ll use this thread to post progress and gather feedback from testers.
Looking forward to working on this!