UV-Packer 3 Free Released

hi jbm

sorry for the long text, but you have a very interesting question for something never explained in the past. I though it would be good to hijack CGP and write my observations from the point of product publishing from the past 20 years. I will write as I would talk with you in a room, it is a kind of authentic, less academic. Hope it is OK for you. (it is good for me, i can pause now my tax declaration, a horrible experience)

This comparison you address, it is very likely it will hot happen. At least not as you have imagined it. Let me explain it and you can correct me if I go astray.

First: we, the (all) developers, never review or compare software to or against each other. Neither me nor Ryzom nor any other I know will do it: it is an unwritten gentleman agreement and all stick to this rule since decades. The only case I can remember (and few of you) was few years ago, a renderer-developer and his comparison and how it backfired. The guy drowned within few days in an epic shit-storm and never recovered from it. For developers there is nothing to win and a lot to lose, most of all the reputation and the decency.
Developers avoid this pissing contests, initialized by forum users, like the plague.

We compare mostly against DCC, host apps like Max, Maya. I did it with UV-Packer, where I can empirically prove that UV-Packer is packing X00.000 faces XX times faster and better: and this is OK, since AD does not care about it. Actually it is the best thing that can happen to AD. They get a plugin for free which does better results, which they do not need to invest in and that gives them the edge to other competitors. It is for them a win-win situation. If I would be AD, I would never put my programmers to do things done better – and focus the man-power to develop something else.

Second: I do not see a realistic chance where someone will sit down and do this job for you.
You see, if you want a rational, exact and unbiased comparison, you need to collect and create about 50+ cases and run them through. Arch-Viz, organic stuff, game, Zbrush models, photogrammetry, 100 UV-cluster, 10.000 UV-clusters etc. Running a teapot in UV-Packer and X-Packer and saying “LOL, X-Packer is the killer!” is insufficient (it is silly, no one is interested in it, it is not serious). You need hours of work, a shitload of material, an almost ontological approach and later the correct, documented facts. And you need to present them in form of a video, a blog-editorial, a paper. The evidence the community can verify and double-check.
A professional artist has no time for this, we are all to dying in jobs to finish our crunches and deadlines. If you find some jobless kids to do this, great; but we need to see if they were enough qualified.

At the end it all falls on you. If you want to see the serious, honest comparison fitted to your workflow, you need to do it yourself. Everything else tends to smell like a false comparison fallacy.

The only thing i can say is that it is a comparison between fishes and refrigerators. Ryzen is a stand-alone software for unwrapping, packing. You bring your stuff in and take it back to 3dsMax. UV-Packer is an integrated plugin in the Autodesk 3dsMax. My idea, back in 2008, was NOT to LEAVE 3ds Max. I have had 3 games, 100 characters and 1000 assets to do in one year. We have created in-house, one-click software to automate Unwrapping, Packing and Tex-Baking process. The only thing I wanted to avoid in my life (and I am a veeery lazy person) it to waste my life-time. To export my object, to lose other UV-Channels, to risk morphs, textures, skin-weights, all this agony and horror, I wanted to cut the variables to the minimum. Concerning 2020 and the fact that today trend is digitize, automate and optimize, it was and is still a visionary idea and approach. Maybe the only right guess in my life 🙂

Therefore there is a UV-Packer in 3dsMax – it is one-click and not 30-clicks for export, import, open, close, check, wait, reassign, repair. I hate already UVW-Unwrapper in Max, because I have to make 4-6 clicks just to pack UVs! This is a broken UX! These are minutes per day. Hours and hours per year, a time I can spend with the girlfriend, learning, playing.

I hope this helps a bit to understand my train of thought.
I assume, since no one reads today more then 280 letters, this will be read across by most and picked only stuff one wants to argue about – and here is a lot of ammunition 🙂 …

and it`s so much better than the max one, thanks Igor !