Hi folks!
I discovered few days ago this interesting tool on Steam.
Now it’s still undure development, but looks promising and it is free to test at the moment, enjoy!
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=357062004&result=8
imo as witnessed, it has one of the best algorithms for packing UV shells.
the demo versions have the export disabled.
btw the program is already available to buy. 
finally someone has created a powerful tool for packaging UV 
It is a pity that this is not a Blender 
how is it different to blender’s packing? 
it looks super slow
the difference is huge !!
check personally
blender creates something like a bounding box around the uv shells
This program takes full account of the form, dents, ridges uv shells and packs them in a more compact!
sorry for my english
Blender’s packing tool is good… but it is not as good as iPackThat’s. Blender will do something much like the left hand side, compare that to the right hand side (and the difference in wasted space between the two) and you’ll see why this is a tool worth getting:
Note how the zig-zag blocks and the like are arranged to sit near one another in a more optimal layout?
Sweet. I always wanted something like Flatiron uv packing that doesn’t require 3ds Max or cost 300 euro.
I think this is a genetic algorithm. I wanted to implement this for a long time, also for CAM purposes. I have some papers for this laying around. All I need is some Minkowski sum in python, then I could do the rest easily.
But yes, there’s no lib for python and minkowski sum of polygons or do you know about some?
EDIT:
this is the paper:
http://cimar.mae.ufl.edu/CIMAR/pages/thesis/Pasha_A_CISE.pdf
I’ve seen papers describing uv packing methods that used simulated annealing and genetic algorithms together to get something similar. The last (unoptimised) project I implemented using simulated annealing had a long processing time though. What is the performance of iPackThat?
It’s fast. What you see is it continue to process best combinations to reduce wasted space. So like letting Cycles run to reach higher samples, the same is going on for Ipackthat, you can stop the process at any time as usually you get the best results right away.
On a side note, this software is an internal tool that created by the developers at the studio known for the Gothic and Risen franchise.
If you stopped it halfway wouldn’t it be unfinished? The videos on this page don’t really look like it just iterates repeatedly. I’d try the demo, but I don’t have Windows up at the moment.
Anyway, judging by the videos it looks slow in performance, but it still would save a ton of time on medium to complex models.
Not quite, what he did in that video was click the draw packing option, which the popup warns slows down the process. I can do one click and the first bar along the bottom will take a few seconds to layout the UVs, and then every bar process after that is just computing possible solutions, so it keeps ticking… 2nd solution…3rd solution found…4th… ect.
The speed I noticed also depends on the mesh. I imported a mid range poly human mesh, with arms, legs, head, hands…all separate UV islands. They were oddly shaped naturally. Packing this was much slower than when I packed a low poly asset with more square like UVs. I had also duplicated it many times to see how the UVs would sort themselves out. It was almost instantaneous with the low poly boxy UVs.
So I would guess the shape of the UVs also factors into the speed.
Finally!
I have been waiting for them to release this tool for what feels like half a millennium
So…
I like to texture paint, that requires UV margins so that painting does not have overlap or artifact, can I specify that in this program, if so, I’m sold.
you have two options for that in Ipackthat;
the Margin size - minimum distance between each UV cluster
and the border margin size - minimum distance of the UV clusters to the border
Yep. You can specify both margin size and border margin size. In addition to that you can specify whether to rotate UV clusters or not along with a bunch of other settings. It is really awesome.
(
No way…
great stuff