[UV mapping] How can you determine the distance between UV islands?

Shuriken UK · May 2012

Hi, I just wanted to ask a quick question that I've never asked until now, but always wondered about since reading somewhere that lightmaps should have no less than something like 4 pixels of space between their islands.

Is their some measuring tool I've missed thats built into Max's UVW Unwrap modifier or something? Otherwise I dont see how it would be possible to judge such small distances without zooming in SO far that pixels are about 1x1cm, and when I zoom in to absurd levels, Max starts to lag, HEAVILY lol!

Thanks in advance!

respawnrt · May 2012

From Polycount wiki: "
Visual Packing Guide

If you want a visual guide when creating your UVs, one easy way to see the spacing is to use a checker as the background image in your UV editor, with each checker square set to the padding width.
For example to get a 4-pixel-wide checker on a 512x512 image, tile the checker image 64 times... if you calculate that the checker image has 2 checker squares across it, then the checkers bitmap should be 8 pixels across for a 512 image, and 8 pixels goes 64 times into 512, so that means it needs to be tiled 64 times across your UV square. Remember though, that if your UV space isn't square, then the checker tiling needs to be adjusted."

Shuriken UK · May 2012

Thanks for that!

[UV mapping] How can you determine the distance between UV islands?

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