UVPackmaster 3 video tutorial and new update: Mac support, drastic optimizations for heavy UV maps and other features!

Dear users!

We are proud to announce a new update for UVPackmaster 3 for Blender. Of course you get this update for free, if you already purchased UVPackmaster 3 - you can download the latest version of the packer from your library on Gumroad. At the very end of this message we are also including upgrade instructions for the UVPM 2 users.

Release 3.1.0

General improvements

• Mac support (Intel and Apple M1). For more info regarding Mac-specific requirements visit the documentation.
• Drastically 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. Generally you should notice an algorithm speed up starting from UV maps containing a few thousands of faces. 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.

Video tutorial

For those who missed it: recently we have also released the first video tutorial for UVPackmaster 3 for Blender, created in cooperation with Markom3D. The tutorial presents the most sophisticated and feature-rich mode of the packer: Groups To Tiles. This mode already existed in UVPackmaster 2, however it was significantly improved in UVPackmaster 3, so that the user now has a lot more control over the entire process. 

Upgrading from an old version of UVPackmaster (1 or 2)

Since the beginning of the project, one of the main rules we follow is that the user doesn’t have to pay twice for the same thing. It means that when you want to make an upgrade to a more expensive license, you only need to pay the difference between the new license price and the price you originally paid.

In order to get a discount code for UVPackmaster 3 on Gumroad, write to us directly at upgrade@uvpackmaster.com. Make sure you write to us from the actual email address you used to purchase a previous version of UVPackmaster (otherwise the code won't be generated).

Also keep in mind that it may take up to 24 hours for our system to send the code back to you. If you don’t see the message in your inbox, check also your spam folder (discount code messages are sometimes classified as spam).

Thank you for your support!

UVPackmaster team