UVPackmaster 2 PRO

Quick links:

• demo version download (no login needed)
• the standard edition
• editions comparison table
• packer video presentation
  

UVPackmaster 2 is an efficient UV packing engine available as a command line tool. Its robustness comes from the fact that it was written in C++ and runs as a multi-threaded application.

The engine can be used together with Blender with the UVPackmaster add-on installed (the add-on is available for free in two variants: for Blender 2.79 and for Blender 2.80).

Watch a video showing packer capabilities with Blender:

User reviews:

• I bought the pro edition here a couple weeks back, and I have to say, it’s a brilliant add-on. It’s quick, easy to use, produces excellent results, and saves me from the freakishly boring exercise in tedium that is UV packing - Renzatic (source)
  
• The best UV packer ever - Tosky (source)
• Just tried it on a complex model I did last year with 3ds Max. Many curved shapes, many tiny islands. Back then UV packing was done with PolyUnwrap and lots of manual improvements. I don’t know any more how much time I spent on it but it must have been one or two hours at least - standard_owl (source)
  

Why is the UVPackmaster worth buying?

First of all UVPackmaster is probably the most speedy packer out there. It can pack a UV map consisting of 1000 islands in about a second on 2-core i5 CPU. If the number of cores in your CPU grows the packer is getting even faster, due to our sophisticated algorithm which always make use of all cores, no matter what packing parameters are. And it was about packing on CPU. Note that with UVPackmaster you can also pack on Cuda-enabled GPUs - then it totally outperforms all other packing solutions available.

Secondly UVPackmaster is a fully featured add-on. It supports: heuristic search, locking overlapping islands, packing to other islands, island grouping, UDIM support, aligning islands of a similar shape, packing for a texture of any ratio and UV map validation.

Why is packing speed important?

One might actually ask: why is speed so important? Does it really matter whether a UV map is packed in 1 second or in 4 seconds? 4 seconds is not a long time to wait at all. The point is that in case of many UV maps a single packing run will give you a good result (with decent coverage), but it won't be the most optimal one. In order to achieve really tightly packed UV map one needs to iterate packing many times, using random modifications to the process at every iteration and storing the best result found (so called heuristic search). This is the case when the time needed to perform single packing iteration becomes crucial - the shorter the time of single iteration the faster the optimal solution is found. UVPackmaster, thanks to its efficiency, is able to perform a heuristic search really fast even when packing on CPU only. But keep in mind that UVPakmaster 2 supports different packing devices. Not only CPU, but also Cuda-enabled GPUs. Starting from version 2.1 the add-on has capability to perform heuristic search on all available packing devices simultaneously. If you have a GPU in your system the add-on will use it together with your CPU, so it will perform iterations much faster. If you have more GPUs, it will be even faster, being able to perform thousands of iterations every second.

Upgrade note:

If you already bought any UVPackmaster license (including UVPackmaster 1) and want to upgrade to a more expensive license, you only have to pay the difference between the new license price and the amount you originally paid. Send us an e-mail to glukoz@glukoz.dev with an update request and we will send you back a discount code.

Packer Editions

The packer is available in two editions: standard (with limited features) and professional (fully featured). The differences between editions are depicted in a table.

The standard edition is available in a separate gumroad product.

The demo edition is available for free. It has all capabilities of the professional edition, but the packing result is rendered in a separate window - it is not applied to the UV map.

For more info read the Blender Artists thread.

Supported platforms

• Windows 64-bit
• Linux 64-bit
• Mac 64-bit, OS X 10.11 or higher

OS-specific Requirements:

Windows:

Visual C++ 2017 Redistributable must be installed.

Linux:

Distribution should satisfy VFXplatform CY2020 requirements. If you are not sure, simply download the demo version of the packer and verify whether packing works on your distribution.

Mac:

No specific requirements.

Add-on Interface

The UVP Blender add-on interface has its own tab named 'UVPackmaster2' in the UV Editor. The tab is located at the left side of the editor in Blender 2.79. In Blender 2.8 it is located at the right side.

Troubleshooting

I see an error when trying to activate the Blender add-on

Restart Blender once - it should fix the problem. Blender restart might be also needed after upgrading to a newer add-on version.

I restarted Blender, but the add-on still doesn't work

If you have antivirus software installed, check whether it is not blocking the packer binary from being run. (Some antivirus software is picky about an executable being called from a Python script, as it is the case with UVPackmaster - it is a false positive alert).

I don't see my GPU in the packing device list

Note the packer supports CUDA-enabled GPUs with compute capability 3.0 and higher. If you have such card and still don't see it in the packing device list, then installation of the newest GPU driver should solve the problem.

If you encounter any other issue with the product, contact us at glukoz@glukoz.dev.

Packing Options

Legend: letters in parenthesis describe the add-on editions the given option is available with:

S - standard

P - professional.

Precision (S|P): number describing how exact the algorithm will be when searching for island placement.

Margin (S|P): margin to apply during packing.

Rotation Enable (S|P): allow packer to rotate islands in order to achieve better result.

Pre-Rotation Disable (S|P): disable the initial rotation of islands before generating other orientations. The pre-rotation operation usually optimizes packing, use this option only if you have a good reason.

Post-Scaling Disable (S|P): do not scale islands after packing in order to fit them into unit UV square. Enabling this option is not recommended in most cases.

Rotation Step (S|P): rotation step in degrees to apply during packing.

Automatic Overlap Check (S|P): automatically check for overlapping islands after packing is done.

Automatic Area Measurement (S|P): automatically measure islands area after packing is done.

Enable Heuristics (S|P): perform multiple packing iterations in order to find the optimal result. This feature is most useful when a single packing pass doesn't take much time (a few seconds). Use it with a limited number of islands and with limited island orientations considered ('Rotation Step' == 90). The current heuristic algorithm is most efficient for packing UV maps containing limited number of big islands of irregular shape. Before doing a long search it is recommended to run a single packing pass in order to determine whether overlaps are not likely to happen for given 'Precision' and 'Margin' parameters.

Heuristic Search Time (S|P): the time in seconds the add-on will spend searching for the optimal packing solution using the heuristic algorithm. Value '0' means the packer will continue iterating until the operation is cancelled by the user.

Use Texture Ratio (S|P): take into consideration the ratio of the active texture dimensions during packing.

Pack To Others (S|P): add selected islands into those already packed in the unit UV square (no scaling will be applied).

Similarity Threshold (S|P): a greater value of this parameter means islands will be more likely recognized as a similar in shape.

Pixel Margin (S|P): Margin in pixels of the active texture the resulting UV map should have. If this parameter is set to a value greater than 0, then the usual 'Margin' option will be ignored and packer will try to determine the correct pixel margin. The pixel margin functionality needs the 'Heuristic Search' option enabled in order to work properly in a general case. For more info click the Help button

Automatic UV Pre-Validation (P): automatically validate the UV map before packing. If any invalid UV face is found during validation, packing will be aborted and the given UV faces will be selected.

Group Islands (P): make sure islands belonging to the same group are packed together.

Packing Mode: enum with the following values:

• Singe Tile (S|P) - standard packing to a single tile
• Tiles (Fixed Scale) (P) - pack islands to many tiles without scaling them. If there is no room to pack an island in the current tile, it will be packed into the next tile
• Groups Together (Experimental) (P) - group islands using the 'Grouping Method' parameter. Pack all groups into the same UV space, islands belonging to the same group will be neighbors after packing. For some UV layouts it is required to use the 'Heuristic Search' option in order to obtain a decent result in this mode
• Groups To UDIM Tiles (P) - group islands using the 'Grouping Method' parameter. Pack every group into a separate UDIM tile

Grouping Method (P) - enum with the following values:

• Material
• Mesh Part
• Object
• Similarity
  

Lock Overlapping (P): treat overlapping islands as a single island.

Advanced Heuristic (P): use advanced methods during a heuristic search. With this option enabled add-on will examine a broader set of solutions when searching for an optimal one. As the number of solutions to check is much bigger it is recommended to use longer search times in this mode. Note that in many cases this method provides best results with 'Rotation Step' set to a large value (e.g. 90 degrees) because such setting considerably increases the number of packing iterations which can be performed in a given time.

Use All Devices (P): if this option is enabled, the add-on will use all packing devices simultaneously whenever possible. Simultaneous packing mode will be used in the following situations: heuristic search is enabled or grouping mode is set to 'Pack Groups to UDIM Tiles'

Enable Island Rotation Step (P): enable per-island rotation step

Release notes

Release 2.0.7

• fix occasional packer crashes
• tweak the UV validation feature

Release 2.1.0

• add the 'Search On All Devices' option
• add the 'Pixel Margin' option
• add 'Mesh Parts' and 'Object' island grouping methods
• bug fixes

Release 2.2.0

• add the 'Packing Box' option
• add the 'Pack To UDIM Tiles' grouping mode
• add per-island rotation step

Release 2.2.5

• add the 'Pack To Tiles (Fixed Scale)' packing mode
• add the 'Heuristic Search Time' parameter

Release 2.2.6

• improve result rendering in the demo version
• bug fixes