UV-Packer for Blender (Free) (Windows + MacOS)

Pi-gor · February 25, 2021, 1:11pm

3d-io has released Packer-IO (formerly UV-Packer), a free and fast automatic UV packing solution for Blender.

Packer-IO now consists of two parts:

Packer-IO Standalone (Free)

The standalone application allows you to:

Perform high-quality UV packing
Manage and organize UV layouts
Preview meshes

It works independently from Blender and can be used for general UV inspection and packing tasks.

Download here:
https://www.uv-packer.com/

UnwrellaBridge for Blender (Free Extension)

To use Packer-IO directly inside Blender, install the free UnwrellaBridge extension.

UnwrellaBridge connects Blender with the Packer-IO standalone app, allowing you to send objects from Blender, pack the UVs, and receive the results back seamlessly.

Download free extension:
GitHub
Blender extension thread:
https://blenderartists.org/t/unwrellaconnect-automated-uv-unwrapping-packing-bridge-for-blender/1602204
Check Homepage:
Unwrella

Important:
The software was previously known as UV-Packer. It has now been renamed to Packer-IO.

This separation ensures:

A powerful standalone packing engine
A lightweight Blender integration
A free workflow for both production and experimentation

If you have questions about installation or workflow, feel free to ask.

Youtube Featurette & Playlist

UV-Packer Add-on for Blender stands out due to its power to optimally pack UV sheets with a single click . It is unrivalled when it comes to crunching thousands of UV islands and millions of polygons in minimum time.

Key features:

Free: built for Blender.
Fast: massive geometry packing with ease.
Optimal: Minimal UV space waste.
Automated: simply select object(s) and press “Pack”
Accurate: precise padding and no overlapping.
Elegant: simplistic UI for efficient work.
UV tiling support, multithreading, customizable output.

Youtube Featurette & installation instructions

UV-Packer Add-on for Blender stands out due to its power to optimally pack UV sheets with a single click, without tedious manual work. It is unrivalled when it comes to crunching thousands of UV islands and millions of polygons in minimum time. The modern architecture of the application also features precise padding, UV tiling support, multithreading, maximized UV area use and no overlapping. As such it is specifically designed to serve the needs of 3D artists, game studios, arch-viz, photogrammetry, industry and 3D product designers.

At minimum, simple application of the Add-on and one press on the “Pack” button is required for the full packing and rescaling operation. The previously unwrapped UV map is rescaled to reduce pixel stretch and packed tightly to cover as much area of the texture as possible. In vast majority of the cases, no additional artist tweaking is necessary. This saves signicficant amounts of time usualy spent on manual packing and rescaling, and improves the final texture quality, when compared to the same, artist performed results.

Download & installation instructions

Download this new free UV crunching add-on from the official homepage:

Additional Community Forks & Extensions of the Add-on:
Thanks to Xylvier, he has patched it in his fork so it works on 2.83 LTS!
GitHub - Xylvier/uvpacker-blender-addon: Blender Addon for 3d-io’s UV-Packer standalone plugin

Novice users: please read and follow the instructions from the UV-Packer download site.
Expert users: get the init.py from GitHub and the UV-Packer.exe and put them in one folder.

# Blender UV-Packer 1.4 Changelog
Packer-IO 1.4 introduces a rewritten UV Tile packing interface and improved internal mechanisms. The result is cleaner interaction and more predictable results.

– Correct uniform scaling across UV cells
– Dynamic UV tile packing Added
– New Turbo Packing mode for maximum speed
– Preset manager
– Windows ARM Support
– Blender 5+ Support

Packer-IO
UV-Packer Stand-Alone

User Interface:

Packing Features:

UV-TIles and UV Channel Management:

Stan_Pancakes · February 25, 2021, 3:44pm

Hey, this is decisively awesome! A free alternative to the Packmaster? You rock!

Can us Linux users hope for maybe, one day, eventually, perhaps, tentatively, a native version?

Pi-gor · February 25, 2021, 3:51pm

Thanks Sten!
Yes, i wanted first to “misuse” Win-users (by far the largest user group) to see it it there are some major problems and if it is vulnerable to some specific geometry cases. The Linux/Mac port will be compiled if the current version has no bad surprises.

kkar · February 25, 2021, 4:17pm

Thanks for the add-on. Will you release a Real3D version as well ?

Pi-gor · February 25, 2021, 4:33pm

good idea! Must write to Juha and Vesa Meskanen first, do not have the latest SDK

Lamia · February 25, 2021, 4:37pm

Honestly off topic a little but would it be at all possible to get a better unwrap addon it’s been years and there is not a single addon or word from blender and you don’t even need to make it free ill pay what ever at this point and im sure others would as well. Ill test this out now although already use UVPMP.

Renzatic · February 25, 2021, 4:39pm

Ditto on this.

Pi-gor · February 25, 2021, 4:40pm

One battle at a time. Next month(or so) we will port Unwrella, so you can unwrap with it in Blender.

Lamia · February 25, 2021, 4:44pm

You are literally going to make me cry, i was so hype back in 2016 when we where supposed to get better unwrap and stretching tools and the 2021 nothing. i pay for Rizum and it’s annoying back and forth to only use like 10% of the tooling.

Stan_Pancakes · February 25, 2021, 7:04pm

PSA for Linux users, the program works via Wine, so we can already help in testing it, and benefit from using it. Even more thanks to @Pi-gor and everyone involved for making a no-fuss executable!

If you want to try yourselves, there are a few steps to take:

install Wine (duh)
download the __init__.py and the executable as per first post of topic and put them into ~/.config/blender/<version_number>/scripts/addons/uvpacker
create a new file packer.sh in the above directory with following contents:

#!/bin/bash
DIR="$( cd "$( dirname "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}" )" >/dev/null 2>&1 && pwd )"
wine "$DIR"/UV-Packer-Blender.exe $@

make packer.sh executable via your favorite file manager or the chmod command
edit the __init__.py file, search for this line:

    packerExe = packerDir + "\\UV-Packer-Blender.exe"

change it to this:

    packerExe = packerDir + "/packer.sh"

activate the add-on in Blender

Pi-gor · February 26, 2021, 2:06pm

Incredible… must put you in the beta-tester list if you want

What about Apple, is it still relevant in the 3D market or should we skip it and invite them to run Linux VM or so? Last time I worked it in, it was Macintosh Quadra 700, with PageMaker.

Stan_Pancakes · February 26, 2021, 2:45pm

Sure, I may have a need for improving the UV workflow in the near future, might as well test things!

I can’t say anything about Apple personally, but from what I’ve seen here and on the dev tracker there’s a user base for Blender there for sure.

Safetyman · February 26, 2021, 2:50pm

Wow – thank you.

Renzatic · February 27, 2021, 2:00pm

Mind if I pick your brain for a second on this?

Per your instructions, I’ve installed the addon, created the appropriate script, made the edit to the .py file, set the script to executable both from the UI, and via chmod, and activated it from within Blender.

The addon pops up no problem, but when I go to pack my UVs, it does nothing. Obviously, something isn’t firing off here, so I went back to check my syntax and verbiage, make sure I have the most up-to-date rev of WINE, and even set the .exe file to executable. Still nothing. Tried running Blender from the terminal to see if it’d spit out some error message I could follow, but it isn’t telling me anything.

Do you have any idea what could be failing me?

Stan_Pancakes · February 27, 2021, 2:06pm

Let’s take this to DM so as not to pollute this topic.

seanr1978 · February 28, 2021, 2:28am

I manage the Mac builds for Bforartists. I suspect we Mac users are about as much in the minority in this field as any others, but there are still no shortage of us. I’m a graphic designer and web developer (Drupal, mainly) professionally and wouldn’t even attempt much of what I do on a Windows machine.

Pi-gor · February 28, 2021, 7:51pm

Hi Sean! thanks for your feedback!
We will include Mac Version too, as stated. I just want to wait to see if there are some major issues in the Win release before recompiling it. I do not know how long it will take, but once we have Linux, Mac should be “waste-product”.

I know Mac is still around when it comes to 3D, and Blender. In my classroom, from 30 students there are always 2-3 with MacBooks and try to do their works on it.
The only problem is, that they are so loud and insisting that they ruin the party: UV-Packer has already two dislikes and comments like “you bustards!” in Youtube - and both are from militant mac users because, oh tragedy, there is at this moment no Mac release available. They embarrass me, themselves and the Mac community with such behavior and not even notice it. Actually, sometimes I don’t feel like I must do anything for them after such escapades…

kkar · February 28, 2021, 8:36pm

https://wiki.winehq.org/MacOS

H-S · March 5, 2021, 10:56am

Nice, does it support UDIMs?

Pi-gor · March 5, 2021, 11:16am

Yes, when you look exactly at the feature list and the buttons in the interface, you will discover it very fast

(although most people do not know the difference between UDIMs and Tiles, and call everything UDIM even it is not. We try to hold on conventions, Tiles is the method, UDIM is a form).