How to edit multiple UVs at once?

I know the common workaround for this: combine (join) objects, edit UVs, separate. BUT!
What if we have a complex scene with a bunch of rigged objects? All this combining thing won’t work in this case. Or we have a complex scene with a lot of objects, which are combined somehow according to a pattern or a rule. If you combine them all into one and then separate, i’ll need to restore all the combined structure you’ve had before, right?
There should be a way in blender to edit multiple objects UV at once. Should it go to the feature request?

There isn’t a good way to do this, unfortunately. And the way Blender handles the whole edit mode thing internally apparently makes it very complicated to change this. In the meantime, the best way to go is to enable the “draw other objects” option in the UV editors view menu, select all your objects, and edit them one by one. The “draw other objects” option will ghost on the UVs of your other selected objects, so you can at least see what you’re doing.

Well, thanks for that anyways.

I meet this problem very frequently. There are two methods I use, both of them are very painfull.

  1. Use the texture atlas addon.
    Pro: It is very easy to group/ungroup objects to UV together.
    Con: It generates an additional UV set and assigns a checker to it. You have to delete original UVs (optional: rename the new UV set) and reassign your own textures in the Image/UV window.

  2. Duplicate your models, move them away for example with 100 unit, join them, do the uv modifications, divide into them, join them one by one to the appropiate original ones, in edit mode move the vertices 100 units back, delete the vertices of the original ones.
    Con: It is more painfull (for a lot of objects for sure) but
    Pro: This way you can preserv the transformations and you have the same UV sets and texture assigns as at the start.

poison, thanks for the solution!
The texture atlas addon does the trick! At least it keeps the original joined structure intact after separation. I don’t know if it works with a rigged scene. Will try that later. Thanks again.

I’d marked it solved, but i can’t find the button…