For the UVPackmaster 2 release notes visit this page.

Release 3.0.4

First official release.

Release 3.0.6

General improvements:

  • Linux support. For more info regarding Linux-specific requirements visit the documentation.
  • New packing mode: Groups Independently – useful when you want to process many UVs in a batch. Read this page to learn more.
  • New parameter in the Pixel Margin subpanel: Extra Margin To Others – specifies an additional pixel margin between islands being packed and the other islands (unselected islands when using the Pack To Others mode). In result the final margin between these islands will be calculated using the formula: Pixel Margin + Extra Margin To Others. When using the Groups To Tiles mode and packing two groups into the same UV space, the islands from the other group are also treated as Others. It means that the Extra Margin To Others parameter will also be taken into account when calculating the margin between islands belonging to different groups.
ExtraMarginToOthers
  • Reimplement the operation to select/deselect all islands in the active box:
  • New addon general option: Box Border Width – determines the width of box borders rendered in the UV editor during the operation.
  • New addon general option: Append Mode To Operator Name – this option should only be enabled temporarily, only for the time when you want to add an UVPackmaster operator to Quick Favorites. If you add an operator with this option enabled, the selected mode name will be permanently appended to the operator name in the Quick Favorites list. After the operator was added, you can disable this option immediately.
  • You will find the general addon options when you expand the engine status panel (the top-most panel):
  • Minor user experience improvements.

Improvements for the Groups To Tiles mode: 

  • Ability to override selected global options for particular groups when using a grouping scheme (manual grouping):
  • New automatic group layout modes: AUTOMATIC (VERTICAL), AUTOMATIC (HORIZONTAL). Visit this page for a visual presentation of the new modes.
  • New parameter Tile Count Per Group – specify tile count per group when using an automatic grouping method.

Bug fixing:

  • Fix for a bug when using Fixed Scale in the Groups To Tiles mode.
  • Fix for disabling particular packing devices in the addon preferences.
  • Other minor bugs fixed.

Release 3.1.0

General improvements:

  • Mac support (Intel and Apple M1). For more info regarding Mac-specific requirements visit the documentation.
  • Significant performance optimizations for UV maps containing a huge number of UV faces (a few millions and more). Our benchmarks show that the new engine release can now pack a UV map containing 15 million faces in about 160 seconds. All users who are going to deal with heavy UV maps (e.g. for photogrammetry applications) should read this article in the documentation – it provides a bunch of additional useful tips.
  • New mode for aligning islands: Topology. This most-advanced mode takes into account not only vertex positions of two UV islands, but also how the vertices are connected (island topology). For more information on how the aligning tools were refactored in the new release read this article in the documentation.
  • Support for Blender downloaded from the MS Store (on Windows).
  • New auxiliary operation for island grouping: Apply automatic grouping to a grouping scheme. Read this article to learn more about this functionality.

Bug fixing and minor improvements:

  • Fix for crashes when pixel margin parameters were set to larger values.
  • Increasing the Texture Size max value to 32K and the Pixel Margin and Pixel Padding max values to 256.
  • Fix for a packer hang when using an automatic grouping method together with the Pack To Others mode.
  • Fix for occasional packer crashes when using the Normalize Islands option together with GPU packing.
  • Other minor bug fixes.

Release 3.1.1

General improvements:

  • Split Overlapping Islands operation can now order islands according to Align Priority values assigned to them. That is why the Split Overlapping Islands and Undo Island Split buttons were moved in this release from the Auxiliary Operations panel to the Aligning Tools mode (see the picture below). For a presentation of the feature watch this part of the tutorial.
  • New parameter for island stacking Match 3D Axis: when aligning, accept only those UV island orientations which result in the same mapping (texture) direction along the given axis in the 3D space. For a presentation of the new parameter and important details regarding its usage watch this part of the tutorial.
  • New parameter Flipping Enable: allow the packer to flip islands when performing the operation (flipping means scaling by a negative value over one axis). The parameter can be used during packing as well as aligning (stacking) islands.
  • New general parameters allowing to control font sizes for the packer output:
  • Improvements to the topology analysis algorithm: invalid topology errors are now less common in the new release.

Release 3.1.2

General improvements:

  • new functionality: Orient UVs To 3D Space – make all your UVs follow the specified axes in the 3D space with a single click:
  • The functionality is available in the new mode: Other Tools:
  • Better multithreading implementation in particular scenarios.
  • Improved packing density for UV maps containing a huge number of tiny UV islands.
  • Ability to resize the active target box by mouse dragging and to snap to other boxes boundaries:
  • Significant performance optimizations for the Overlap Check operation (in case the UV map contains a huge number of islands).
  • New Texel Density Policy: AUTOMATIC: handle relative texel density automatically: two groups will have relative texel density maintained if and only if their target boxes intersect.
  • New general addon option: Hide Engine Status Panel: hide the Engine Status Panel in the addon tab (the panel showing the engine version in the header):
  • New general addon option: Orientation-Aware UV Islands: this option defines the approach the packer uses to determine whether two UV faces belong to a single UV island. The default approach (the option unchecked) is equivalent to the way how Blender divides faces to islands but it can be problematic in some cases – for example when two islands of similar shape are stacked on top of each other, the default approach may merge both islands together (start considering both islands as a single island). In such a situation enabling this option will solve the problem (prevent the islands from being merged):

Bug fixing and minor improvements:

  • Fix rare packer hangs after the packing operation is done.
  • Fix for the Thread Count parameter not affecting the packer operation on some Linux distributions.
  • A bunch of other minor fixes and improvements.

Release 3.1.3

General improvements:

  • New functionality: Stack Groups – make the packer automatically align (stack) particular islands on top of each other before packing and then pack stacked islands together. Stacked islands will not be split during packing:

Release 3.1.5

General improvements:

  • Performance optimizations: packing times reduced by 20-30% on CPU and by 30-40% on GPU.
  • New option for Groups To Tiles mode: Pack To Single Box – force every group to be packed into a single target box (one of the target boxes configured for the group). Note that different groups may still be packed into different boxes, also different groups may be packed into the same box. The option can be set globally (for every group) but it also can be overridden on a per-group basis.
  • New operator: Group By Similarity: group all selected islands by similarity and save generated groups in a grouping scheme. The resulting grouping scheme can be then used during packing in the usual way. The operator is fully compatible with all similarity-based options provided by the packer. Refer to the video tutorial describing the options in detail for more info.
    The Group By Similarity operator is available in the Aligning Tools mode:
  • New Group Layout Mode setting for the Groups To Tiles mode: Tile Grid.
  • Improved convergence of the pixel margin algorithm – the algorithm now needs less iterations to finish packing.
  • In order to simplify the learning process for new users, the packer now shows various usage tips in output:

If you are an advanced user, you can disable such tips in the packer global options (the Disable Tips option):

  • New operator Remove UVPM Data From Objects: remove UVPM data from selected objects (UVPM color attributes). The operator is available in the Other Tools mode:
  • IMPORTANT change for users who manually embed the engine in the addon (as described here): in order to simplify the process, the required engine folder name is now engine3 (instead of uvpm). Thanks to that, one doesn’t have to rename the engine folder after moving it into the addon folder.

Bug fixing:

  • Restore group names when rendering target boxes:
  • Fix the OpenGL warning on all platforms.
  • Fix a bug causing a rare inconsistent islands error when running Split Overlapping Islands.
  • Fix a bug resulting in an occasional packer hang when very large islands were provided as operation input.
  • Fix a bug causing a packer error when the Flipping Enable option was used together with the Stack Groups functionality.

Release 3.1.6

General improvements:

  • Performance optimizations: new implementation of CPU multithreading. Packing times on CPU reduced by up to 80%.
  • A new parameter for Split Overlapping Islands: Overlap Detection Mode – the operation may use two different detection modes: Any Part or Exact.
  • Split Overlapping Islands and Undo Island Split buttons were moved to a separate panel Split Overlapping (the panel is available in the Aligning Tools mode):
  • Possibility to use a grouping scheme to define lock groups or stacked groups. The old method which uses numbered groups is still available. More info on this change in the documentation:
  • new UI mode: Grouping Editor – the mode provides tools exclusively dedicated to defining and tuning island grouping schemes:
  • In the editor the user can:
    • create/remove grouping schemes
    • add/remove groups in a scheme
    • edit groups (e.g. group names)
    • manually assign islands to groups in a scheme
    • edit group target boxes
    • apply automatic grouping to a grouping scheme
  • A new general option Allow Inconsistent Islands: when the option is enabled, the packer will not raise an error when it finds an island with inconsistent per-island parameter assignment. Instead, it will take the parameter value assigned to the island face with the lowest face id as the value for the entire island.
  • Support for Blender 4.x (starting from addon version 3.1.6-u2).

Bug fixing:

  • Fix for the Thread Count parameter not working on Mac OS.

Release 3.2.0

CAUTION: this release changes how per-island parameter assignments are stored internally in Blender. It means UVPM 3.2.0 won’t recognize parameter assignments made by previous versions of UVPM. That’s why it is not recommended to upgrade to UVPM 3.2.0 in the middle of a project if it depends on a per-island parameter e.g. island rotation step, lock groups, stack groups, grouping scheme (manual grouping), align priority etc.

General improvements:

  • UI rework – UI is now based on a concept of multi panels. More info in the documentation.
  • UV tracking – make a set of duplicated islands follow the transformation of the original islands relatively to the offset in the UV space. More info in the documentation.

  • Ability to pack groups into the same UV space with independent texel density – the packer will find optimal scale for every group on its own.

  • Support for Blender 4.X.

  • New useful usage tips in the packer output.

  • Starting from version 3.2.0 the packer does not transform pinned UVs during packing by default. What is more, pinned UVs are treated as others when running the Pack To Others operation. The default behaviour may be changed using two options Don’t Transform Pinned UVs and Pinned UVs As Others in the Add-on Options multi panel:

Bug fixing:

  • Fix for a rare bug causing the packer to run in background after Blender is closed.

Release 3.2.1

CAUTION: starting from this version the engine installer on Windows is signed. Accept the certificate if Windows asks you for it during installation.

General improvements:

  • Significant boost when packing a huge number of islands into many tiles thanks to the new option Tile Filling Method. The option can be set to one of two values: Simultaneously and One By One. The Simultaneously method is much faster, when packing a huge number of islands (thousands of islands) into many tiles. When packing a moderate number of islands, performance of both methods is similar. The new option is available in the Tile Setup subpanel:
  • Improvements for the Normalize Scale functionality. The user now has a possibility to specify scale multiplier to be applied after normalization is done on a per-island basis. The multiplier is specified in percentages. The idea is the user may assign a scale multipliers larger than 100% for islands having higher priority and/or multipliers less than 100% for islands with lower priority:

  • WARNING: this new functionality is going to replace the older feature Island Scale Limit (which was less convenient to use). The Island Scale Limit feature is now obsolete and will be removed in a future release of UVPM.

  • New option for the Border Shape similarity mode: Check Holes. When enabled, the Border Shape mode will also take into account shapes of inner holes when determining if two islands are similar (not only outer shapes).

  • Ability to move the active target box in the box edit mode directly in the UV editor when pressing and holding LMB inside it.

  • Speed up the Select Similar operation using multithreading.

  • New general UI option Short Island Operator Names: make island parameter operator names in the UI shorter. For example: change the name Set Rotation Step to Set, the name Reset Rotation Step to Reset etc

  • Increase the maximum group number from 100 to 1000.

Release 3.2.2

General improvements:

  • New option for Heuristic Search: Allow Mixed Scales. When enabled, the packer may apply non-uniform scaling to islands during the search in order to maximize UV space coverage:
  • A new general add-on option to draw the multi panel toggles in the horizontal layout (Horizontal Multi Panel Toggles):

Bug fixing:

  • Fix a bug causing the Orient To 3D Space operation to corrupt the UV map in rare cases.
  • Other minor improvements and bug fixes.

Release 3.2.3

General improvements:

  • New functionality: Scripting – allows the user to run a custom set of scripts before and after every Pack operation. Every script can optionally be group-based (using a grouping scheme). For more info read this page.

  • New option for normalization: Normalize Space – determines which 3D space to use when normalizing islands (Local or Global).

  • Improvements to the Tracking functionality: a new option Matching Mode. It determines the method used for finding duplicate islands (for driver-tracker matching). The possible choices are: Border Shape, Vertex Position, Topology. The modes work analogically as the values of the Similarity Mode option used by Aligning Functionalities.

  • General improvements to driver-tracker matching in the Tracking functionality.

Release 3.2.4

General improvements:

  • New option Pack Strategy – determines the scheme how the target UV box will be filled by islands. It is works analogically to the obsolete Fixed Scale Strategy option but it can be used in every packing mode (not only in the Fixed Scale mode). The new option also supports start corner selection.
    The new Pack Strategy option is located in the Advanced Packing Options subpanel. The Fixed Scale Strategy option was removed.

  • New option for Split Overlapping Islands which will make the functionality compatible with your UDIM grid setup: Max Tile (X): maximum tile (in the X coord direction), overlapping islands will be moved into. If an island is already in a maximum tile and needs to me moved further, it will be moved one tile up in the Y direction.

  • Improvements for the new Scripting functionality: new parameters for a script: Function Name, Function Args.
  • UI improvements

Release 3.2.5

General improvements:

  • Implement GPU-acceleration for the Groups Together mode (it was the last mode which didn’t support GPU-acceleration – now every packing mode can run on a GPU). An example of 4 groups packed using the mode:

  • Groups Together mode now supports packing to a UDIM tile grid.

  • Important fix for the Grouping Compactness option for the Groups Together mode – it works properly now.

  • General performance optimizations for Cuda GPU-acceleration (not only for the Groups Together mode but for all modes). In certain scenarios the iteration speed-up on GPU during a heuristic search is 100% (GPU iterates twice as fast).

  • New option for aligning/stacking similar islands: Non-Uniform Scaling Tolerance – determines to what extent the packer will be allowed to apply non-uniform scaling when determining if two islands are similar:

Release 3.2.6

General improvements:

  • The Groups To Tiles mode now supports the Groups Together option: when enabled, islands belonging to the same group will be packed into a single box so that they are neighbors in the resulting layout. The option can be overridden on a per-group basis.

  • The obsolete Island Scale Limit option was removed. The Normalize Scale Multiplier option  was introduced to replace it.

  • Minor bug fixing.

Release 3.3.0

General improvements:

  • Support for the Vulkan API to accelerate packing on AMD Radeon GPUs.
  • Significant performance optimizations for processing heavy UV maps on Linux.
  • Support for Blender 4.3.
  • Option to move the target box together with selected islands inside:

  • Bug fixing.

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to JurandM  for providing photogrammetry models and feedback.