UV Packing Rollup

UV Packing in UVReactor is polycount independent, which means it will barely affects the speed of the packing. In other words the system doesn’t really take care of how many polygons you want to pack, it will not affect the performance. This is due to a technology that uses a model that can represent each UV shell in an abstract way.

The packing algorithm consists of 4 properties.

1. Packer Resolution (this is not the resolution of the texture map, but the packing resolution) The higher the number leads the more precise the packing.
2. Num Threads defines the number of threads for Multi-Threading. This value is the number of cores you want to use, minus 2. So on an 8 threads machine, it’s 6.
3. The padding relates to the Packer resolution. In this case it will be 1 pixel for a 512 resolution. If you are using 1024 as the Packer Resolution, then it must be modified to 2, to get similar results.
4. If the “Pack Selected” checkbox is checked it will pack only the selected UV shells, when you are working with a single object. In case of multiple objects the algorithm will pack everything.

Currently the packer doesn’t use any kind of heurestic, which means you have to find the ideal Texel Density for UV Shells. The packing is vert fast despite of that. The heurestics will be added later to the system and in that case the UVReactor will find the appropriate texel density for you, to get the best result.

Also the packing only supports the 0..1 space right now.

Note: If you have unselected shells in a UV Space, then the algorithm will keep them in their location and it will pack the rest of the UV Shells around them.