thanks for the explanation, it’s a useful thing.
I didn’t know how to approach to understand if they were related or not.
My question was if Slim goes this direction?
At the mom i batch export every object as .obj.
Run in batch MoF.
Batch import all unfolded obj s and repack it with UV Packmaster.
It s working perfect but a free solution would be great.
Hello, I’ve tried that some time ago. But was the trial version, so I was unable to
check it fully.
Does it worth spending money on it? How does it cost?
Does the final packed alignment makes sense, or you have to track things back? For painting with an external tool, I mean.
If you don’t mind sharing your experience with it.
The only problem is that you can load one obj, unfold and export the result as merged obj.
So all models in the video are perfect unfolded but merged after export.
I created the batch workflow i descrided above to have seperated objects after.
It works.
Now i try to batch per material and pack per material island grouping and packing to udims.
It s not finished but thats all i need.
Mostly cars, charakters and environment race track stuff.
Results for these are same like the video shows.
I payed only some bugs directly after he showed it on first time on siggraph last year. So the actual full price i don t know.
Sure. I was hoping to find some informations about new methods on comparable level.
I really hope someone can tackle UV Unwrapping as a whole as well. This is one of the most lacking areas in Blender currently, and doesn’t seem like is getting any attention :(. If the folks at Blender want people from 3DS Max/Maya to switch to Blender, they cannot currently, without proper UV tools.
I can use Blender almost exclusively, but have to switch back to Max, pretty much only to Relax my UVs, then go back to Blender. I do have to use Max in the end for our pipeline at work, but I can do most everything else in Blender otherwise, which is great! Just need some UV love imo. 
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There is task on blender developers UV Mapping Improvements
But unfortunately it is marked as “Less Important” (You guys can go there and give it heart token to let know developers that UV is important)
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UV unwrapping in general is less important than it’s ever been. Nearly all production painting is done in 3D these days, and tools that can auto unwrap whole minimizing stretch and area distortion have existed (Blender included) for ages. The last production I worked on before switching careers only hand UV’d maybe 3 or 4 assets. On top of all of that, Mesh Colors are getting some very serious attention within the industry, and would more or less be the death knell of UVs.
edit: nevermind this post. I didn’t understand @m9105826 correctly.
I have a hard time buying that. Vertex color can’t be as detailed as UV maps. For instance I can bake fur on a creature in order to use less 3D fur for a convincing enough visual effect. That would be impossible with vertex color unless I’d use a billion polygons. And for a furry creature, minimizing UV stretch has revealed a serious optimization. For instance, without SLIM, the nose of this hare was noticeably pixelated.
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oh! So it’s kind of like Ptex but… not copyrighted? (and probably different in some ways)
If so that’s pretty good news.
However I still don’t think it should change the priority of implementing the SLIM algorithm. Why implement UDIM if we don’t improve unwrapping? And why stop so close to a working feature (the SLIM branch works fine for me)?
UV will not be fully deprecated by a 3D texturing tool. It will always have its own advantages in some situations.
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UV’s aren’t just a way to store a texture, they’re also a way to simplify a complex 3d surface down to a more manageable 2d one. Most of my unwrapping centers around making it easy to apply a tiling pattern to clothes, hair, skin.
Even in the example they show, the Mesh Colors were converted from a 2d texture!
Mesh Colors seem to have other benefits, and I’m keen to try them out once there are mature tools to edit them, but I see UV’s having uses even after that point.
edit: and I just read this: “mesh colors cannot be directly used with hardware texture filtering on current GPUs. Filtering operations must be implemented in software”
For someone who works mostly in gaming and realtime animation, that’s an issue. Not only that though, it also eliminates a possible optimisation for painting the colors without lag (say, in Blender).
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That’s from the very old paper that originally started the ball rolling. This year’s and last year’s work has hardware filtering working with Mesh Colors.
Glad to hear it! Still, that was only an afterthought to my comment, which was about how 2d representation of a 3d mesh is useful, so I don’t think UV’s (or an evolution of them) are going anywhere in the foreseeable future.
Also @ChameleonScales note that Ptex has been Open Source since 2010!
Yes but open source doesn’t mean free of copyrights. As I understand Ptex is copyrighted and therefore not GPL compliant: http://ptex.us/documentation.html#license
So it can’t be implemented in Blender.
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I wouldn’t want it anyways. Ptex is as good as dead.
It’s a waste of developer time.
Indeed, PTex was a half-baked solution. The data structures were nonsensical and performance was awful.
if you say so. I’ve never used it.
Have to agree on Ptex. The idea itself made kind of sense, but performance was horrid and rendering quickly could become a network bottleneck nightmare.
Only used it a couple of times as a testbed, quickly went back to regular UVíng. And as soon UDIM showed up, PTex was basically obsolete as a concept.