Plugin developer 3d-io announced that UV-Packer, their powerful UV packing tool, is now available for free.

Plugin developer 3d-io announced that UV-Packer, their powerful UV packing tool, is now available for free. The developer noted that the latest version of the tool is massively optimized for 2020+ workflow and capable of dealing with extreme high-polygon assets.

The developer is also working on a new Blender version of the plugin. The toolkit lets automatically arrange the UV islands of a model to minimize wasted UV space, allowing users to reduce total file sizes for sets of texture maps.

Features: 

• Rapid packing procedure
• Minimal UV area waste and off-cuts
• No overlapping, exact padding
• Fast and precise packing of massive polygon assets and UV-clusters
• Optimized for contemporary 3D design
• Multi-object packing
• Resolution independent

The tool is resolution-independent supporting tiled UV layouts for apps like ZBrush. One of the demos shows packing 8,000 UV clusters for an 80,000 polygon building in 3 seconds getting 48% UV space usage which is better than 110 seconds and 35% space usage with 3DS Max’s native UV tools.

You can learn more about the toolkit here.