Release notes

For the UVPackmaster 2 release notes visit this page.

First official release.

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.

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):

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:

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.

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.

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:

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.

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:

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to JurandM for providing photogrammetry models and feedback.