Calculating space used by uv's
Is there a way to select the area your uv's occupy in photoshop (I know how to do that bit) and calculate how much of the image it occupies as pixels/percent? Just interested how efficiently I may have packed my uv's sometimes thats all.
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edit: I thought it was obvious that when you eyedropper the color you simply check the B% in the color picker's HSB numbers to see your percentage, sorry
Why would you do this?
If you are using 3D Max you can use my script to calculate the area used by your UVs. It gives the output as a percent. For example, a box that has 6 sides planar mapped will be using 600% of the texture space.
Copy it to the UI/MacroScripts folder. Restart max and look in the "monsterBlues" category to bind it to a hotkey or quad menu.
Ghostscape is saying you could base the value of the gray off how efficient your uvs were. the lighter the gray, the more efficient your uv's were, the darker, the more space you've wasted.
Also be careful not to pack them so tight that you loose out on any and all padding. That can be really important if your textures get mip-mapped.
You could be using 99% of your image's space for UV layout and still have a crappy layout, similarly you could have a layout that uses only 80% of available space that is actually really good (eg. fast for painting and producing quality normal bakes)
As long as you've minimized stretching/number of seams etc that's all that matters cheers for indulging my query tho!
You can't compare area used between two different meshes (IE, a shotgun that uses 87% isn't objectively better than a rifle that uses 72%) and judge one to be more efficient than the other. The only time you can compare this stat objectively is when you're talking about the same mesh with the same UV island breakup, and in which case it will be obvious which one is more efficient because you will have scaled up your more efficient unwrap. Am I being clear here?
thanks for the link, works like a charm