UV Editor - Packing/Grouping

Support Materials and Textures
1

Hello!

I’m aware there is probably a better way to unwrap the object here (I used UV Smart Project), but ignore that for the time being. This result, however, leads me to this question; am I able to keep the orientation of the UV islands while they are re-packed into the editor bounds? After I performed the unwrap function, the letters were rotated to maximize the UV space. So I’d like to re-rotate them and then re-pack them into the editor.

Question 2, when I join this object, containing a UV map, to another object with its own UV map, will those maps keep their own data (island orientation and relative positions)? In other words, when I join the letters (Philips) to another object, I’d like to keep the letter grouping together. Hopefully what I’m asking makes sense. I recently learned about the Texture Atlas add-on, but I don’t know if that does what I need it to do…?

Any help will be greatly appcreciated! Thanks all.

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2

  1. You could either use project from view method, or you could pin the UV coordinates which will keep their place with normal unwrap. When packing them with ctrl+P, operator panel on the 3D view tool shelf, or F6 in either, shows the rotation option after packing.

  2. When joining objects, the UV maps with the same name gets merged. The UV layout those have keep their coordinates. Each UV map contains all mesh coordinates in an object, whether or not you have a usable layout done with unwrapping.

If the objects have UV maps with different name, those don’t get merged but it adds to the UV map list. The UV map limit is 8, so don’t join more than that without merging the UV maps, otherwise you lose that data.

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3

There are no groups for uvs but you can use vertex groups for grouping uvs.

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