headus 3D tools

[Teyon]

I was wondering what purpose the Show Repeats serves and in what way would it be used? I see that it makes outlines of your UV's outside of the 0-1 range but to what end?

[headus]

By exploiting the fact that UV maps can be made to wrap around, you can arrange the UV shells so they go outside the UV square, thereby reducing the wasted space even more. By reducing wasted space, you can get the same applied texture resolutions for less RAM usage (or crisper textures for the same RAM usage). Its probably more useful for real-time applications (e.g. games) where all your textures need to be loaded in RAM uncompressed.

Unfortunately its a manual process at the moment ... you have to move the shells around by hand, using the repeat outlines to pack them together tightly by eye. I hope to add an option to the automatic packing tool at some point that will do this for you.

So the images below show a simple example of the process.

[Teyon]

Thanks! That cleared that up