Tiles
The Tiles packing mode packs the selected UV islands into a grid of tiles.
In order to use the Tiles packing mode select it from the Packing Mode selection menu:
You configure the dimensions of the grid to be used in the operation in the Tile Setup subpanel:
An exemplary UV map packed to a tile grid 5x2:
The Tiles packing mode also supports the Custom Target Box functionality:
A custom target box (if used) determines the shape of the first tile in the grid - all other tiles in the grid will follow the first one accordingly.
Tiles filling limitations
A UV map can be usually packed such that it properly fills up almost every number of tiles. There are rare cases though, when a given UV map cannot be fitted into a specific number of tiles with great accuracy, even with scaling enabled. This might be the case, for example, when the UV map contains one island which is much bigger than other islands. In such a scenario, the maximum scale, which can be applied to the islands is limited by the size of the biggest island (the island must fit into a single tile). The same limit will also apply to the smaller islands (because scaling is always uniform across the UV map). As a result, the smaller islands might not cover the requested number of tiles. In this situation the packer will scale the islands up during packing, so that they cover as much area as possible, but a large part of unused area in the tiles will still remain. In order to mitigate this issue, the user should adjust the UV map so that the proportions between islands are more uniform.
Supported packing functionalities
The mode supports the following packing functionalities: