Seems like impressive results in the screengrabs, but I wasn't able to replicate anything useful.
Load times were very overwrought.
Control over the pack as very light.
Pack times were extremely heavy (left it for a few hours but had to abandon the pack after the first pass, as my internet browser was crawling due to the gpu draw of this tool
when i cancelled the pack (or tried to) the solve i was left with was useless (only solved a small amount of the islands).
Is anyone else having similiar struggles with this demo?
[PB]Snoelk I tried to find any unmapped faces on my model and couldn't, I also ran cleanup searching for unmapped faces, model still loads forever so I'm still not able to try the software.
@malcolm i know the problem with the obj file now. the loading times are very large for this obj file. the mesh is larger than the mesh from andreas st
1. would be best. overlaps you want should be there so the packer can treat them as one.
2. i dont split or merge stuff, i only change the uv vert positions. so that should be no problem
3. currently overhaul the entire import export to fbx. that way i can handle fbx, 3ds, dae, dxf and some other formats. already did a major increase in loading times (files that took 10 mins are now loaded in some secs) but depends heavily on co,mplexity on the scene. i also do more outputs so user see whats going on
Waw, your software is insanely awesome ! I can't wait for the release, I have a load bunch of assets to produce the next months, and I'm losing most of my time in packing !
Do you have more informations on the release date ? You said a month ago that it was a matter of days, maybe weeks ?
im very sorry for the delay. our notary told us the stuff is all at the court and is waiting to be approved. we can't push things more. german court is german court.
i still hope that all the papers will come within the next 2 weeks. when we got all the corporation papers, i can finished the steam and gumroad documents and upload the tool.
still updating and adding more features to IPackThat while waiting for the papers.
here a short list of the new stuff
integrated latest fbx sdk 2015.1
supported import file formats are
fbx
dae
dxf
3ds
obj
supported export file formats
fbx binary/ascii
fbx 6.0 binary/ascii
dae
obj
dxf
added support for multiple uv channels
settings are now uv channel based, means every uv channel has their own settings.
saveable settings (global and file) are uv channel based also
autosave is now a property of the packing options
context menu fixed ( now shows checkboxes and arrows for submenues )
new import dialog when more than one mesh or material is found
you can split by mesh, by material and allign to grid for each available uv channel individualy
improved loading and packing (loading 6-7 times faster now, pacing 30-40%), performance scales more with available cpu
fixed and optimized overlap detection
uv area bound check before packing starts (will be scaled down to fit the regions, this fixed the bug where uv shells are larger than the true uv area from 0 to 1 and produces nasty packing behaviour)
more tooltips
packing will abort automaticly if one shell is found which is filling the width of the solution area. on aspect ratio 1:1 the heigth is used also
removed cluster browser ( He's dead Jim ), to much problems and performance loss
select by group added to context menu item Selections
group colors are remembered now within the runtime of the application.
more outputs on loading to show user that the tool is not dead
fixed cluster rendering (no more invisible polygons or segments, normal polygons are polycount greenish ^^ and clusters with overlaps are colored blue with alpha)
changed formula to get used and wasted area to use half of the givin margin size ( uv shells individually should resepct half of the givin margin size )
UV Channel Tab name shows on what view you are ( without * its showing original layout, with * the packed solution )
in exchange for the cluster browser i will add a new menu tab to the main control do do selections via different properties ( select clusters between 20% and 30% area, select clusters with CanRotate=false, select clusters with rotation steps between 45° and 75° etc )
when the tool can finaly be shipped, most of the stuff you all wanted will be available then and not part of some later patches.
things ToDo on my roadmap
property for clusters to allow them to scale down within giving ranges to be used as filling shells
UDIM support ( not yet desided, need more test and checks to see if its possible or not)
Selection Tab Menu
C API ( tough one ^^ this tool is managed so this will be tricky )
split by materials ( there is one rule, uv shells are not allowed to have mixed materials, every material should be a unique uv shell, the tool is not supposed to alter uv indices and break apart uv shells on their own)
select by mesh
select by material
new demo build
Special thanks to Andreas Strømberg, Warren Marshall and Christophe Desse for their support and beta tests they found a lot of bugs and giving me great ideas to make this tool a packing beats ^^
i have a problem: i import a obj. and without changing anything i press "start packing", it packs once and stops... why doesn't it pack more often than once?
is one uv shell filling up the entire uv area? that is another abort condition. it wont find a better solution if one shell reaches from one side to the other.
the bar at the bottom does not move... it always says the same thing: "Best Solution has 33 % wasted area, found after 1 tries and 1s 563ms. courrent solution 1, run time 1 s 563ms"
just as i said, the bootm uv shells is reaching from 0 to 1 in x. there is no way to get a better packing ever with this given shells.
this was one of my latest improvements to stop the packing when this happens. make no sense to continue packing. try set to aspect heigth 2
this come to my mind just as i saw the image. when you allow smaller rotion steps it could find a better solution. will do the test and abort if the shell is rotsteps=90° and filling side by side. when rotsteps are smaller it wont abort anymore. will be in next update. then you can see the internal pactch mechanism at work
The tool is running on CPU. But uses parallel operations on many methods. That way ya scaling currently with available CPUs. I just read an article about CUDAfy. A managed wrapper around cuda and OpenCL. This will be a huge change, so this would come in a later update. Today I moved all texts out in a seperate XML file. That way I could add other languages for the tool. Like Klingon or pirate ^^
i want to keep this tool portable so its independent of the tools the user is using. that way anyone is able to use this tool. in the professional version you can execute the tool via commandline with a xml file as agrument to execute automatic packing. a script would so be able to start a proces and wait until the process is completed. the xml file you use as argument contains meshes to be packed and specificiations for the automatic packing (in filepathes and out filepathes). currently changing the xml file definition for handling different uv channels.
when the layout of the xml file is solid and no more major changes will happen, i will post a format description so people can do their own scripts to start ipackthat and retrive the datas
new update available. the demo will automaticly check for updates in startup and ask to update itself.
a small command window will apear with some messages. at the end when its done it will wait for a nay key to be pressed. this key press will be removed later when the tool is released. its just for safety to see when something is not going right to prevent the widnow from closing.
this the patch is doing
adding language file for adding and handling different languages
the dropdown box is located on the top left window between the question marker sign and the lightning symbol
fixed some crashes
the entire changelog can be viewed inside the tool ( the newspaper smybol, main tollbar aside save mesh settings )
while testing the latest build today i thought of some features that would be incredibly useful to have.
1. ability to manually rotate uvislands so i can set a rotation and then lock it later
2. ability to match uvisland rotations to the objects orientation so that for example if i`m unwrapping a head the head is oriented the right way in the uv.
3. ability to create clusters by topology continuity , so lets say i have a subobject split in 2 uvislands i usually want to keep those packer together
1. ability to manually rotate uvislands so i can set a rotation and then lock it later
already there. go to the cluster settings. the first group inside the cluster settings tab let you transfom selected clusters in any way you want.
move
setup the move speed in texels and press the buttons left of the move section ( up, down, left, right )
rotate
setup the angle in degrees and use the button left of this section to rotate clockwise and counter clockwise
scale
setup a percentage and use the left button of this section to scale up or down
will try to implement a mouse handling for those action later
ctrl + lmb move
ctrl + mousewheel rotate
ctrl + rmb scale
now go to the cluster properties and uncheck "find smallest bounds" and check "Can Rotate" on those clusters. that way the cluster won't get rotated where the bound of them are smallest and won't rotate at all either.
2. ability to match uvisland rotations to the objects orientation so that for example if i`m unwrapping a head the head is oriented the right way in the uv.
that's a problem. imagine a shpere where the uv got a seam on the back of the sphere from one pole to the other pole. the uv is then releaxed and unfolded. the relative rotation now depends on what section you look at. the polygons on top of the sphere will result in different rotation than the bottom polygons or front polygons. i could use the centroid (the weighted center of the uv shell) but this would be also a rough guess and will result in wrong orientation most of the time. i will think about it and check if there is another possibility to get this feature running
3. ability to create clusters by topology continuity , so lets say i have a subobject split in 2 uvislands i usually want to keep those packer together
called grouping. select the clusters you want to stay together and assign them to the same group
on the last one i meant actually having a function that does the grouping for you. It might be overkill for an object with 2 uv islands but there could be a scenario where theres 30 uvislands for 1 mesh and trying to find all of those might be a lot of extra work
Currently doing some refactoring on the internal operations to speed things up again.
when im done with this i try to implement cuda.
one question
with the fbx sdk you can load and save obj files. we stumbled across a weird behavior of how fbx handles obj files when importing them. every uv polygon is seperated and splitted. my tool still handles this and merges them back to the right uv isands. but if you export to fbx or anything other even obj, the uv polygons stay splitted.
i could implement a way to merge thise uv polygons when i detect a obj import. then the fbx files which are exported will be merged again. this i will do via question box if i should merge uv verts on export. the only problem at this stage, when i merge them, even overlapps will be merged so far.
is this ok or the alteration of uv vert amount and reindexing polygons is a nogo
sounds a bit like it might break baking with cages if you export the cage prior to the ipackthat step. having to export the cage after reimporting the mesh with the packed UVs wouldn't be awesome, but probably something one could live with.
unrelated to that - is there some way to set a desired texel ratio and an option to see how far away you are from that with the current UVs so one might want to reconsider using non-square UVs instead and see how close those would get?
Hey, been trailing this software - looks nice so far. Since we can't save yet I've been just mimicking the output of it as best I can, since the difficult part is calculating optimal solutions.
Is there a way to make IPackThat automatically group clusters/islands for you based on the element of which they belong to? If not then I feel that could save a lot of time for artists.
I'm a Games Design/Art student at University, I was wondering if you'd be offering a version for personal/student/non-professional use too? - As cheap as that may make me sound! :P
the papers from the german court finaly arrived. we are currently signing the digital papers for steam now. so the release of the tool will be shortly.
i have found a solution for handling obj fileformats now. i go back to my original one
means that i will not use the fbx sdk handling for obj files.
the drawback will be, that you cant convert between different fileformats anymore.
So if you import an obj file, you can only save as obj. if you import an fbx file you wont be able to save as obj.
fbx sdk is doing a lot of nasty things with obj files ( splitting every uv polygon, killing smoothing groups, destroying vertex normals ). so the way of obj via fbx is totaly screwed.
Now another information.
We had a discussion about the professional version here and with some of our beta testers. I will remove the professional version and all features will be available in the normal version.
That means you can pack any uv shell you want, you can load files with unlimited uv channels and you can batch pack via commandline.
I also increased the packing performance and efficieny again in the current beta test branch. also fixed a lot of threading bugs.
You will also be able to buy bulk licenses of IPackThat directly from us. This will be something for some companies or groups that want to buy more than 5 version or so. That way the tool wont use gumroad or steam protection and is usable in restricted networks (many companies forbid outgoing internet access). I will hand out an email soon where you can order such versions.
Later i will also add a c++ api sdk. this will add the abbility to use the packer from inside a tool as plugin.
We had a discussion about the professional version here and with some of our beta testers. I will remove the professional version and all features will be available in the normal version.
There will not be a student version neither will there be an advanced version.
Just the normal version
Replies
Load times were very overwrought.
Control over the pack as very light.
Pack times were extremely heavy (left it for a few hours but had to abandon the pack after the first pass, as my internet browser was crawling due to the gpu draw of this tool
when i cancelled the pack (or tried to) the solve i was left with was useless (only solved a small amount of the islands).
Is anyone else having similiar struggles with this demo?
1. it is needed to pack the uv roughly in one square space before i can use the tool?
2. its able to manipulate overlapped uv's later on in max with textools? (like two sides of the same object)
3. i loaded an obj with several single objects into the program and its loading all the time and nothing is happening. maybe an issue?
2. i dont split or merge stuff, i only change the uv vert positions. so that should be no problem
3. currently overhaul the entire import export to fbx. that way i can handle fbx, 3ds, dae, dxf and some other formats. already did a major increase in loading times (files that took 10 mins are now loaded in some secs) but depends heavily on co,mplexity on the scene. i also do more outputs so user see whats going on
Do you have more informations on the release date ? You said a month ago that it was a matter of days, maybe weeks ?
im very sorry for the delay. our notary told us the stuff is all at the court and is waiting to be approved. we can't push things more. german court is german court.
i still hope that all the papers will come within the next 2 weeks. when we got all the corporation papers, i can finished the steam and gumroad documents and upload the tool.
still updating and adding more features to IPackThat while waiting for the papers.
here a short list of the new stuff
- integrated latest fbx sdk 2015.1
- supported import file formats are
- fbx
- dae
- dxf
- 3ds
- obj
- supported export file formats
- fbx binary/ascii
- fbx 6.0 binary/ascii
- dae
- obj
- dxf
- added support for multiple uv channels
- settings are now uv channel based, means every uv channel has their own settings.
- saveable settings (global and file) are uv channel based also
- autosave is now a property of the packing options
- context menu fixed ( now shows checkboxes and arrows for submenues )
- new import dialog when more than one mesh or material is found
- you can split by mesh, by material and allign to grid for each available uv channel individualy
- improved loading and packing (loading 6-7 times faster now, pacing 30-40%), performance scales more with available cpu
- fixed and optimized overlap detection
- uv area bound check before packing starts (will be scaled down to fit the regions, this fixed the bug where uv shells are larger than the true uv area from 0 to 1 and produces nasty packing behaviour)
- more tooltips
- packing will abort automaticly if one shell is found which is filling the width of the solution area. on aspect ratio 1:1 the heigth is used also
- removed cluster browser ( He's dead Jim ), to much problems and performance loss
- select by group added to context menu item Selections
- group colors are remembered now within the runtime of the application.
- more outputs on loading to show user that the tool is not dead
- fixed cluster rendering (no more invisible polygons or segments, normal polygons are polycount greenish ^^ and clusters with overlaps are colored blue with alpha)
- changed formula to get used and wasted area to use half of the givin margin size ( uv shells individually should resepct half of the givin margin size )
- UV Channel Tab name shows on what view you are ( without * its showing original layout, with * the packed solution )
in exchange for the cluster browser i will add a new menu tab to the main control do do selections via different properties ( select clusters between 20% and 30% area, select clusters with CanRotate=false, select clusters with rotation steps between 45° and 75° etc )when the tool can finaly be shipped, most of the stuff you all wanted will be available then and not part of some later patches.
things ToDo on my roadmap
- property for clusters to allow them to scale down within giving ranges to be used as filling shells
- UDIM support ( not yet desided, need more test and checks to see if its possible or not)
- Selection Tab Menu
- C API ( tough one ^^ this tool is managed so this will be tricky )
- split by materials ( there is one rule, uv shells are not allowed to have mixed materials, every material should be a unique uv shell, the tool is not supposed to alter uv indices and break apart uv shells on their own)
- select by mesh
- select by material
- new demo build
Special thanks to Andreas Strømberg, Warren Marshall and Christophe Desse for their support and beta testshere are some shots of some of the new features
Context Menu
Import Dialog
Multi UV Tabs
cheers
:nerd:
IPackThatDemo
with the lates features, optimization's and bugfixes.
cheers
:nerd:
really looking forward to this awesome packing tool!
i have to press star packing again... so it does not work in the background
this was one of my latest improvements to stop the packing when this happens. make no sense to continue packing. try set to aspect heigth 2
so when i want a better result i have to tell him, that he can rotate it with more degrees?
Might be worth telling the user about that then. So they don't think it's broken...
It's a really inspiring technology. This would be a really productive tool.
A question: The tool already performs really well, but i was wondering if the calculation is running on CPU or GPU ?
Thanks
Also, is there any plan of porting this to 3dsmax or Maya as a plugin or you are keeping it portable ?
Again, great job on the tool.
when the layout of the xml file is solid and no more major changes will happen, i will post a format description so people can do their own scripts to start ipackthat and retrive the datas
a small command window will apear with some messages. at the end when its done it will wait for a nay key to be pressed. this key press will be removed later when the tool is released. its just for safety to see when something is not going right to prevent the widnow from closing.
this the patch is doing
the entire changelog can be viewed inside the tool ( the newspaper smybol, main tollbar aside save mesh settings )
cheers
1. ability to manually rotate uvislands so i can set a rotation and then lock it later
2. ability to match uvisland rotations to the objects orientation so that for example if i`m unwrapping a head the head is oriented the right way in the uv.
3. ability to create clusters by topology continuity , so lets say i have a subobject split in 2 uvislands i usually want to keep those packer together
anyway great tool so far man!
yeah i see
on the last one i meant actually having a function that does the grouping for you. It might be overkill for an object with 2 uv islands but there could be a scenario where theres 30 uvislands for 1 mesh and trying to find all of those might be a lot of extra work
i'm very exited for this tool ^^
nothing new so far from the german court. *sigh*
Currently doing some refactoring on the internal operations to speed things up again.
when im done with this i try to implement cuda.
one question
with the fbx sdk you can load and save obj files. we stumbled across a weird behavior of how fbx handles obj files when importing them. every uv polygon is seperated and splitted. my tool still handles this and merges them back to the right uv isands. but if you export to fbx or anything other even obj, the uv polygons stay splitted.
i could implement a way to merge thise uv polygons when i detect a obj import. then the fbx files which are exported will be merged again. this i will do via question box if i should merge uv verts on export. the only problem at this stage, when i merge them, even overlapps will be merged so far.
is this ok or the alteration of uv vert amount and reindexing polygons is a nogo
unrelated to that - is there some way to set a desired texel ratio and an option to see how far away you are from that with the current UVs so one might want to reconsider using non-square UVs instead and see how close those would get?
Is there a way to make IPackThat automatically group clusters/islands for you based on the element of which they belong to? If not then I feel that could save a lot of time for artists.
I'm a Games Design/Art student at University, I was wondering if you'd be offering a version for personal/student/non-professional use too? - As cheap as that may make me sound! :P
Cheers for a good tool.
As far as i know, there will not be a student version.
There will be the standard version for about 50 Euro and a professional version.
the papers from the german court finaly arrived. we are currently signing the digital papers for steam now. so the release of the tool will be shortly.
i have found a solution for handling obj fileformats now. i go back to my original one
means that i will not use the fbx sdk handling for obj files.
the drawback will be, that you cant convert between different fileformats anymore.
So if you import an obj file, you can only save as obj. if you import an fbx file you wont be able to save as obj.
fbx sdk is doing a lot of nasty things with obj files ( splitting every uv polygon, killing smoothing groups, destroying vertex normals ). so the way of obj via fbx is totaly screwed.
Now another information.
We had a discussion about the professional version here and with some of our beta testers. I will remove the professional version and all features will be available in the normal version.
That means you can pack any uv shell you want, you can load files with unlimited uv channels and you can batch pack via commandline.
I also increased the packing performance and efficieny again in the current beta test branch. also fixed a lot of threading bugs.
You will also be able to buy bulk licenses of IPackThat directly from us. This will be something for some companies or groups that want to buy more than 5 version or so. That way the tool wont use gumroad or steam protection and is usable in restricted networks (many companies forbid outgoing internet access). I will hand out an email soon where you can order such versions.
Later i will also add a c++ api sdk. this will add the abbility to use the packer from inside a tool as plugin.
thats all for now
Cheers
:nerd:
There will not be a student version neither will there be an advanced version.
Just the normal version