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Better UV Packing

Better UV Packing

At the moment, native max packing can't be used for anything apart from quick tests and prototypes. It wastes too much space. Preparing UV2 for lightmap is a pain without third-party solutions. Best what I've seen from competition is UVPackMaster (can you buy them please?). It can do pretty much anything you may want from UV packer.

 

Notable features that are currently missing or lacking in 3dsmax implementation:

- coverage percentage is shown

- automatic stacking of similar elements and locking existing stacks

- filling existing layout with additional elements, say you want to add a bunch of tiny elements into existing unwrap without moving elements that are already there

- better grouped distribution, grouped elements can try to stay together, not just be treated as a single shell, but for example fill topmost third of UV space with group 1, middle is group 2 and bottom is group 3. Distribution is not limited to this layered stripes of different groups, it is just a simplest example

- separate margin and padding (shell-to-shell and shell-to-border distances can be different)

- and most important imho is iterative (heuristic) packing, which will endlessly search for better solution, updating unwrap when better-than-current is found. Combined with its flexibility in general (adjustable precision, allowed rotation angle step etc) it can provide very accurate and tight packing with minimal UV space loss

and those are just ones I used. I think it can also pack into UDIMs among other features, but didn't tried it personally.

 

This part of UnwrapUVW didn't change much for decades, I believe it's about time to give it some TLC.

4 Comments

I think there is already a similar idea here!

dmitriy.shpilevoy
Collaborator

@Kranos_Orphydian can you link it please? I'll report myself to get merged.

gandhics
Advocate

I'm not sure which version of Max you are using. But, Max got a new unfold3d pack, peel, relax in 2022.2.

I actually did tons of tests between unfold3d and UVPackMaster and other solutions at work.

UVPackMaster was the worst among all candidates. So, I'm not sure about buying that.

 

But, I do agree on some of your items like stacking or only packing selected elements on existing results.

dmitriy.shpilevoy
Collaborator

@gandhics 

Really? Maybe in your testcase it is, but for me native linear is absolute worst.

 

I'm using current version - 2024.2

Unfold3d is simply unusable for me at the moment. Here is an example - I need to pack existing shells to maximize UV space usage. It should keep relative size of shells, but I just can't find a way to do this with Unfold method. It always scales shells, doesn't matter what I pick in settings (normalize on scaling off, normalize off scaling on, both on, both off)

All native packing methods use same settings shown here.

 

UV-Packer is a decent solution. Doesn't do well with curved shells, precision sometimes off.

RizomUV does a good job on packing, my only concern is padding seems to be quite inconsistent and I need to throw UVs back and forth between max and Rizom which is inconvenient.

 

packing.png

 

 

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