Best Of

**TEXTOOLS 1.5**

*NEW RELEASE*

UV LAYOUT

General refactor. Performance and polishing.

- Massive performance gains in Rectify, Straight, Edge Peel, Select Bounds, Create UV Mesh, Randomize, Align World, Align Sort, Select Similar, Texel Density Get and Texel Density Set, among others, from x2 to 10000x (https://blenderartists.org/t/textools-for-blender/700811/829?u=franmarz). Basically it should be possible now to use any utility of this addon with high-poly meshes.

- Relax: added new utility for UV vertices smoothing.

- Unwrap: new custom operator to unwrap only selected UVs, with the capacity to constrain the operation to the U or V axis (_BenjaminSauder_)

- Straighten: any chained sequence of edges is supported, not only edge loops. Added support for multi-object UV editing.

- Align: Fix weird behaviour with partial selections while in Face UV Selection Mode; made it to work on the selected faces only.

- Rectify: recovered align verts, edges. Updated, simplified code. Tuned detection of lines in Rectify, triangular faces and ngons are discarded now.

- Create UV Mesh: it now works on the whole object or the selected UVs. Most of the original mesh data is now preserved. The created UV Mesh will inherit the origin location from the original mesh, instead of being placed in the global origin.

- Randomize: Within Image Bounds now takes into account strenght values and rotation. Adjusted defaults. Simplified code.

- Align World: process only coincident UV loops per vert for a more accurate and predictable result; removed simple and recursal modes. Highly optimized "Per Face".

- Edge Peel: implemented multi-object UV editing support. Improved unwrapping of pipe caps. The Rectify fase is now -hopefully- error proof. Better organized outcome. Introduced verification to avoid crash when faces are selected. Do not perform average islands scale and packing if the main functions wasn't executed in any of the selected objects. Some fixes when improper selection input and if no internal rectification of selected faces could be performed.

- Iron Faces: cancel the script before the unwrap fails (no seams marked in entirely selected manifold meshes)

- Crop and Fill: fix for working with the Active Object while in Edit Mode even if no object is selected.

- Texel Density Get/Texel Density Set: restructured code for working with multiple objects selected in all cases. Functionality with UV Sync On fixed.

UDIM SUPPORT

UV Layout

- Added support to work within the active UDIM Tile in UV Layout utilities that may take advantage of it: Align (to Canvas), Centralize, Randomize (Within Image Bounds or Pre-Centered), Texel Density Set (Combined mode), Edge Peel, Iron Faces, Crop - Fill.

- Added Active UDIM Tile detection mode in the TexTools panel: from the Linked (background) Image in the UV Editor, or from the Active Object (bare in mind the Active tag when working in multi-object editing as the object where the last element selection was performed will be the Active)

- Added Active UDIM Tile select list under the TexTools panel.

Texel Density in Image Get Mode.

- The resolution of the image bound to the active UDIM Tile is taken into consideration when computing texel densities in both get and set modes. This follows the workflow pointed before, that is, the user must manage the active UDIM Tile as needed in the first TexTools panel for the tools to work based on it, which would be sufficient in most common scenarios.

- For some utilities, switching the active status to the UDIM Tile closest to each UV island on the selection may be nice to have, but would be overkill for the script to work. Anyway, it may be considered for the future.

BAKING

- 3.0 CyclesX and Principled BSDF material support, while maintaining backward compatibility with pre 3.0 Blender releases.

- Thickness material for baking no longer missing.

- Baking Samples fix: it have to be an integer, not a float. _flakusha_ pointed it out.

- AO pass is not available in Blender since 3.0 and, consequently, have to be ignored in the Combined baking mode.

MESH UV TOOLS

- UV Smoothing: renamed to "Smooth by UV Islands" and moved to the also renamed "Mesh UV Tools" panel, in order to avoid it to be confused with the new Relax tool or vice versa. Added option to ignore islands uv borders to itself, improving shading and normal map baking (_BenjaminSauder_)

GENERAL

- We rely on a custom, more stable version of the 3dn_bip library v1.0.8, for loading the addon icons faster.

- TexTools Popup restored: was deleted by error during the 3dn_bip library usage implementation, disrupting a number of TexTools operators. Restored by _TitusLVR_.

- VC limit reached warning: some bake modes use internally a custom Vertex Color layer which is removed once the bake finishes. If the maximum number of VC layers are in use in an object to be baked from (that is, 8), warn about it and gray out the Bake button to avoid an exception.

- Displayed UV controls under the TexTools panel: better detection of the Active Object while within a multi-selection of objects.

- Update_edit_mesh arguments error fix.

- Fixed variable name collision with built-in "set". Use enumerate() where it makes sense (_consolegrl_)

- Nicer arrows for the UV Layout panel (_BenjaminSauder_)

- Adjusted, reorganized menus entries.

- Use copys instead of tuples to store changeable states.

- Remove unnecessary selection mode changes.

- Avoided as possible selection store and restore, in general.

- Removed some annoying console prints, some old commented-out code.

- Make sure materials without node tree don't make the addon UI refresh fail in the search of UDIMs, writing an error in the Console.

https://github.com/SavMartin/TexTools-Blender/releases/tag/v1.5

sorry, you're right.

rephrased in an edit