UV Packer for Maya?

jordank95 · Aug 2021

I use Maya to do my UVs and dont have an issue with the actual UVing part. The issue I have is the Maya UV layout tool. Its awful. Either that or I have no idea how to optimize it the best for my needs. I see some people use things like iPackThat, but I cant find that for sale anywhere anymore.

Does anyone have some tips for packing UVs in Maya, or another program I can use to pack? Or a script? I end up just doing it all by hand and its so extremely tedious.

Sorry if this topic has been talked about recently. I couldnt find any recent discussions on it.

oglu · Aug 2021

The maya packer is really good. Show us your issues.

Kanni3d · Aug 2021

jordank95 said:

Its awful. Either that or I have no idea how to optimize it the best for my needs.

Likely the former. Max/maya's got great uv tools. If you know what you are doing, UVing and packing can be a breeze but still naturally be a bit time consuming. My first piece of advice wouldn't be to shell out money to buy a $60 piece of software to pack UVs.

But if you are inclined to use something third party, i used to use ipackthat and it's definitely abandoned and unsupported. Maybe look into RizomUV - unwraps and packs super well.

jordank95 · Aug 2021

Kanni3d said:

jordank95 said:

Its awful. Either that or I have no idea how to optimize it the best for my needs.

Likely the former. Max/maya's got great uv tools. If you know what you are doing, UVing and packing can be a breeze but still naturally be a bit time consuming. My first piece of advice wouldn't be to shell out money to buy a $60 piece of software to pack UVs.

But if you are inclined to use something third party, i used to use ipackthat and it's definitely abandoned and unsupported. Maybe look into RizomUV - unwraps and packs super well.

The UVing itself is great. I have no issues with Mayas UV tools, its just the packing I cant ever to get the results I want. It doesnt fill any empty spaces UV shells might have (like a tire with a hole in the middle for example) so there ends up being tons of wasted UV space. I just always seem to get a much better pack when doing by hand. But when its a much bigger object and theres more shells, it ends up taking way longer than I want it to.
Ill look into iPackThat, Ive heard things about it over the years. Thanks

gnoop · Aug 2021

I never tried modern Maya so couldn't compare but I like UVPackmaster2 addon. it does exactly that : fills the holes when Heuristic and Advanced heuristic ( for a fewer big islands) checkboxes checked in if you give it some time to process .

It's so good I am lazy to even try 3d max native UVing. iPackThat had always been a half working mess from what I remember.

Joopson · Aug 2021

jordank95 said:

Kanni3d said:

jordank95 said:

Its awful. Either that or I have no idea how to optimize it the best for my needs.

Likely the former. Max/maya's got great uv tools. If you know what you are doing, UVing and packing can be a breeze but still naturally be a bit time consuming. My first piece of advice wouldn't be to shell out money to buy a $60 piece of software to pack UVs.

But if you are inclined to use something third party, i used to use ipackthat and it's definitely abandoned and unsupported. Maybe look into RizomUV - unwraps and packs super well.

The UVing itself is great. I have no issues with Mayas UV tools, its just the packing I cant ever to get the results I want. It doesnt fill any empty spaces UV shells might have (like a tire with a hole in the middle for example) so there ends up being tons of wasted UV space. I just always seem to get a much better pack when doing by hand. But when its a much bigger object and theres more shells, it ends up taking way longer than I want it to.
Ill look into iPackThat, Ive heard things about it over the years. Thanks

Not sure what your settings are (or what version of Maya you're using), but Maya does fill up holes in the UV while packing, just as you describe. Bad example below to prove it, and my settings:

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5021068/uploads/editor/jt/3y830bg21a8j.jpg

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5021068/uploads/editor/yv/a44owfjujkff.jpg

jordank95 · Aug 2021

gnoop said:

I never tried modern Maya so couldn't compare but I like UVPackmaster2 addon. it does exactly that : fills the holes when Heuristic and Advanced heuristic ( for a fewer big islands) checkboxes checked in if you give it some time to process .
It's so good I am lazy to even try 3d max native UVing. iPackThat had always been a half working mess from what I remember.

Yeah this is exactly what Im looking for, except it doesnt seem to be for Maya. But how this makes the UV packs the most optimized it could be with eliminating as much empty space as possible. This is great. All the more reason for me to switch to Blender at some point.

poopipe · Aug 2021

I have never seen anything that works as well as maya's packer and doesn't take literal hours to complete on large assets.
do what Joopson posted or pack stuff manually

jordank95 · Aug 2021

@Joopson ah, I must have missed the setting to fill in holes of UV shells. But what Im looking for the Maya UV packer to do is basically what gnoop mentioned above with UVPackmaster2. Its basically laying out the UVs in the most optimized way possible with as little empty space. I dont think Maya can do that, unless theres some settings Im missing? But from what Ive played around with and have known over the years, its always just been way more efficient to layout UVs in Maya by hand. Unless theres a UVPackmaster plugin for Maya, which there isnt.

walter · Aug 2021

I find the Maya UV tools very complete,..
For the Layout options, I'm missing options like in UVPackmaster to group shells together according to their materials or their island group.

Joopson · Aug 2021

jordank95 said:

@Joopson ah, I must have missed the setting to fill in holes of UV shells. But what Im looking for the Maya UV packer to do is basically what gnoop mentioned above with UVPackmaster2. Its basically laying out the UVs in the most optimized way possible with as little empty space. I dont think Maya can do that, unless theres some settings Im missing? But from what Ive played around with and have known over the years, its always just been way more efficient to layout UVs in Maya by hand. Unless theres a UVPackmaster plugin for Maya, which there isnt.

I don't quite understand how its current functionality meaningfully differs from what you're saying. You can control scaling, rotation, spacing between islands, padding on the edge of the 0-1 space. It literally does, by default, what you're asking for.

Which version of Maya are you using? These layout tools were added around 2015-2017 (I can't remember exactly), but they've been in for a short while now, and are very very capable.

Here's a before and after of a weirdly shaped mesh. All I did was automatic-mapped it (I wanted lots of weird islands, to show the packing), then hit layout with some tweaked padding settings. It does a pretty great job of efficiently using space. And if you don't care about maintaining the aspect ratio of individual islands, or maintaining the 3D scale ratio of the islands, you can get even better packing.
This is in Maya 2019.

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5021068/uploads/editor/4r/ybzc0m8u35s4.jpg

janoshx · Aug 2021

i can imagine that if you have unfolded something and you have several rings nicely unfolded and then you have some round caps and they are unfolded nicely as well. What happens when packing is that it can be very possible that your islands wont fit inside the rings. To solve this you may want to to scale them so they seem to fit. Now when you pack them there is scaling settings in that you can set to respect either UV or Worlds geometry sizes. By default maya rescales when when packing since it tries to get same UV resolution to all islands. You have to change two different settings to make it so it does not scale at all but packs the islands as they are. Note also that your padding values and texture target size values will affect. In general I would say that after Nighshade UV editor was intergrated to maya it got a lot better but then again nightshade made only UI better not the actual algorithm. Nightshade uv UI is was better than mayas own ui is but now i have gotten used to mayas UI.

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5021068/uploads/editor/7q/21xgwdtpv9tb.png

to make sure that maya does not rescale at all when packing you should make shell pre-scaling off and the layout scale mode off. For shell padding and tile padding you should use values that give enough space the texture map size you have selected. I usually use 8-16 pixels depending of map size.

jordank95 · Oct 2021

Ive been using the settings here and it’s all been great.

Now I’m wondering how I can pack things but keep certain groups. I have a bunch of different assets that are sharing the same textures, so I want to keep the UVs for each one together while still being able to pack them all. Is this possible?

UV Packer for Maya?

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