TexTools 1.6.1

What's Changed

• Added UV Sync Selection compatibility to most tools thanks to @Oxicid
• Speed up BBox calculation x2 times by @Oxicid
• Speed up align min bounds calculation x2 times and fix break uv seams by @Oxicid
• Speedup x200 calc uv islands and add bbox module and apply new tools to Sort Align operator by @Oxicid
• Makes uv_unwrap available to Repeat Last by @MightyBOBcnc
• Centralize: Speed up x50 times by @Oxicid
• Crop and Fill Refactoring by @Oxicid
• Refactor Align by @Oxicid
• Refactor Flipped by @Oxicid
• Refactor Select Zero (Degenerate UVs) by @Oxicid and @franMarz.
• Don't show the Redo panel for action-inherited properties. Remove Undo or Repeat from some operators when not really supported, by @franMarz
• Fixed tiled Image detection for uncommon Materials by @franMarz
• Make bake set and bake type selectable in Edit Mode by @franMarz
• Fixed global cursor reset in Align Edge and UV Resize by @franMarz
• Embed gravity checker image in materials_3.0 by @franMarz
• Make Overlap to not deselect the final island when only 1 island is selected, because it would be a self-overlapping island by @franMarz

Full Changelog: v1.6...v1.6.1

TexTools 1.6

UV LAYOUT

• Stitch added, an accelerator to the vanilla UV Stitch operator which preserves the position of the original selection and can sew multiple edges from multiple islands and objects at once.
• Align World improvements: added Axis option to gain control on the tool when the global orientation of the object is hard to auto-detect, and selection sensitivity, so now the tool aligns the whole island based in the determined orientation of the partial selection of it. This two new features would help to get a good result in some complex scenarios, with collaboration of the user. The previous behaviour can be replicated by selecting the whole island before using the tool and by leaving Auto selected as the Axis option.
• Improved UX: disabled popups in Align World and Relax.
• Revision of several operators so that only a few act on the island when it's not entirely selected.
• Straight fixed: selection no longer detaching from the rest of the island.
• Randomize "Int mode" added for random integer displacements of selected UVs.
• Select Flipped improved using the same approach as the MagicUV add-on.
• Improved Select Outline based on Blender UV Edge selection current capabilities.
• Added Texel Density Unit Scale in preferences: allows to adjust the system unit scale to a custom unit by a multiplier for the texel density, so it is shown and managed in that custom unit (e.g., pixels per centimeter when the system unit is meters)

BAKING

• Add UDIM tile baking support, taking benefit of the baking UDIMs support added in Blender 3.2.
• Reordered bake modes, so that the correct channel on the new Principled BSDF v2 of Blender 4.0 is chosen in line with the active bake mode.
• Corrected wrong image naming when baking over an existing texture.
• Added new "Multi" option into an also new "Force" list, to force baking a texture for each selected object, avoiding automatic object pairing; the "Single Texture" option is now under the "Force" enum as well.
• Better avoid circular dependency when baking over a saved image used in the material node tree, solving the multi-user escalation and allowing the newly baked image to be saved over the old.
• Fixed custom bake modes rendering black in macOS and Linux (thanks to @dmax3d for helping to fix this)
• ACES Support: added options in the Color Space dropdowns of the TexTools add-on settings and the bake panel.
• Disabled denoising during baking as the noise there is often minimal and the bakes were taking much longer than expected in most cases.
• Enhanced Explode feature. Basically, it will be more reliable now.
• Don't limit the Bevel radius too much in Bevel Mask, Normal Tangent Bevel and Normal Object Bevel baking modes (by @SavMartin)
• New option in the add-on preferences to decide whether to auto-detect objects with subdiv or bevel modifiers as a highpoly pair for baking when multi objects are selected (credits to @MustangEnthusiast51)
• Some errors prompted in the console after some type of bakes are to be expected and can't be avoided in any case, either an erase of users is forced or an image with no real users is removed. This seems to be a Blender specific issue.

CHECKER MAPS & TEXTURE PREVIEW

• Rewrite: These two tools finally work in a safe way, introducing a kind of Material overrides thanks to the use of Geometry Nodes; previously, due to the overwrite of the original materials, the risk of unintentionally losing data was high. The added Geometry Nodes Modifiers are by default disabled in renders, otherwise, texture baking would be affected by them.
• Added texture_preview_cleanup and checker_map_cleanup operators for cleaning data linked to the Preview Texture and Checker Maps tools: Geometry Nodes Modifiers, Materials and Textures will be purged from the selected Objects (or in all the Blendfile if the Alt key is pressed while clicking their buttons or menu entries)
• Checker Map: Added support to work on all selected objects.

MESH UV TOOLS

• Create Pattern: fixed error when trying to create the "Hexagon" and "Triangle" shapes.

GENERAL

• Version compatibility: Select Bounds, Stitch, Relax, Create UV Mesh, Trim and Wrap will only be present in the menus and the add-on panel for Blender versions where '.select_edge' is part of the API (Blender 3.2 and later). Checker Map, Preview Texture and their Cleanup tools are compatible with Blender 3.0 and later, being disabled for previous versions.
• UV Channel Select, Add, Remove (new) and Swap now works on all selected objects, not only in the active one.
• Fixed TexTools activation error in Blender 4.0 caused by trying to import the removed FaceMap type (by @bookyakuno)
• Fixed context issues in Baking, Edge Peel, Pattern Create, UV Resize and other tools: use the new temp_override for changing context when executing an operator.
• Added a workaround to several operators to retain the selection from UV loops to UV edges and faces.
• Fixed detection of the active Vertex Colors layer in some Baking and Color ID modes, fixing Element ID bake overwriting existing Vertex Colors, Color ID assignments failing and other inconsistencies.
• Excluded instance objects from calculations: increases most tools performance in proportion to the number of excluded instances, and makes sorting operations behave better (by @Oxicid)
• Point to the IDs of the Principled BSDF nodes, rather than discover them by their names, which may have been edited manually or by a translation.
• Use an exact context for operators: fixed context errors when having the Image Editor and the UV Editor opened in the same workspace.
• Improved multi_object_loop function flow. Most tools should behave better when performed over a single selected object which is not the active one.
• Safer data removal, especially fixing baking temporary images removal: when trying to delete data helpers used in any script, avoid pointing directly to Blender data which may have been re-allocated. Scripts with intensive memory usage like Bake should be expected to re-allocate data in memory.
• Clarified descriptions on all operators.
• Code deduplication on Island detection functions.
• Other code style tweaks.

META

• Some operators have been updated to newer versions of the Blender Python API. Now, the minimum version of Blender which is fully supported is 3.2, but most tools work for versions as old as 2.80. This should be expected to change in the (far) future towards dropping support of older versions in order to take benefit from the faster access to the new data structures of Blender 4.0 that the latest API provides.
• From now on, corrective releases should happen more often for all people to be informed in time of important changes to the add-on.
• @SavMartin and I agreed on a repository transfer. He ported the original TexTools so that it were supported in Blender 2.80 at the time, made some tweaks to the code and helped others like me to take responsibility maintaining and improving the add-on. He will remain as a much needed collaborator. Thank you for everything you've done so far.
• Credits to the people mentioned above who helped with development and thanks to every person who reported issues in the past year.

TexTools 1.5

UV LAYOUT
General refactor seeking performance.

• Massive performance gains in Rectify, Straight, Edge Peel, Select Bounds, Create UV Mesh, Randomize, Align World, Align Sort, Select Similar, Texel Density Get and Texel Density Set, among others (from x2 to 10000x). Basically it should be possible now to use any utility of this addon with high-poly meshes.
• Relax: added new utility for UV vertices smoothing.
• Unwrap: new custom operator to unwrap only selected UVs, with the capacity to constrain the operation to the U or V axis (BenjaminSauder)
• Straighten: any chained sequence of edges is supported, not only edge loops. Added support for multi-object UV editing.
• Align: Fix weird behaviour with partial selections while in Face UV Selection Mode; made it to work on the selected faces only.
• Rectify: recovered align verts, edges. Updated, simplified code. Tuned detection of lines in Rectify, triangular faces and ngons are discarded now.
• Create UV Mesh: it now works on the whole object or the selected UVs. Most of the original mesh data is now preserved. The created UV Mesh will inherit the origin location from the original mesh, instead of being placed in the global origin.
• Randomize: Within Image Bounds now takes into account strenght values and rotation. Adjusted defaults. Simplified code.
• Align World: process only coincident UV loops per vert for a more accurate and predictable result; removed simple and recursal modes. Highly optimized "Per Face".
• Edge Peel: implemented multi-object UV editing support. Improved unwrapping of pipe caps. The Rectify fase is now -hopefully- error proof. Better organized outcome. Introduced verification to avoid crash when faces are selected. Do not perform average islands scale and packing if the main functions wasn't executed in any of the selected objects. Some fixes when improper selection input and if no internal rectification of selected faces could be performed.
• Iron Faces: cancel the script before the unwrap fails (no seams marked in entirely selected manifold meshes)
• Crop and Fill: fix for working with the Active Object while in Edit Mode even if no object is selected.
• Texel Density Get/Texel Density Set: restructured code for working with multiple objects selected in all cases. Functionality with UV Sync On fixed.

UDIM SUPPORT
UV Layout

• Added support to work within the active UDIM Tile in UV Layout utilities that may take advantage of it: Align (to Canvas), Centralize, Randomize (Within Image Bounds or Pre-Centered), Texel Density Set (Combined mode), Edge Peel, Iron Faces, Crop - Fill.
• Added Active UDIM Tile detection mode in the TexTools panel: from the Linked (background) Image in the UV Editor, or from the Active Object (bare in mind the Active tag when working in multi-object editing as the object where the last element selection was performed will be the Active)
• Added Active UDIM Tile select list under the TexTools panel.
  Texel Density in Image Get Mode.
• The resolution of the image bound to the active UDIM Tile is taken into consideration when computing texel densities in both get and set modes. This follows the workflow pointed before, that is, the user must manage the active UDIM Tile as needed in the first TexTools panel for the tools to work based on it, which would be sufficient in most common scenarios.
• For some utilities, switching the active status to the UDIM Tile closest to each UV island on the selection may be nice to have, but would be overkill for the script to work. Anyway, it may be considered for the future.

BAKING

• 3.0 CyclesX and Principled BSDF material support, while maintaining backward compatibility with pre 3.0 Blender releases.
• Thickness material for baking no longer missing.
• Baking Samples fix: it have to be an integer, not a float. flakusha pointed it out.
• AO pass is not available in Blender since 3.0 and, consequently, have to be ignored in the Combined baking mode.

MESH UV TOOLS

• UV Smoothing: renamed to "Smooth by UV Islands" and moved to the also renamed "Mesh UV Tools" panel, in order to avoid it to be confused with the new Relax tool or vice versa. Added option to ignore islands uv borders to itself, improving shading and normal map baking (BenjaminSauder)

GENERAL

• We rely on a custom, more stable version of the 3dn_bip library v1.0.8, for loading the addon icons faster.
• TexTools Popup restored: was deleted by error during the 3dn_bip library usage implementation, disrupting a number of TexTools operators. Restored by TitusLVR.
• VC limit reached warning: some bake modes use internally a custom Vertex Color layer which is removed once the bake finishes. If the maximum number of VC layers are in use in an object to be baked from (that is, 8), warn about it and gray out the Bake button to avoid an exception.
• Displayed UV controls under the TexTools panel: better detection of the Active Object while within a multi-selection of objects.
• Update_edit_mesh arguments error fix.
• Fixed variable name collision with built-in "set". Use enumerate() where it makes sense (consolegrl)
• Nicer arrows for the UV Layout panel (BenjaminSauder)
• Adjusted, reorganized menus entries.
• Use copys instead of tuples to store changeable states.
• Remove unnecessary selection mode changes.
• Avoided as possible selection store and restore, in general.
• Removed some annoying console prints, some old commented-out code.
• Make sure materials without node tree don't make the addon UI refresh fail in the search of UDIMs, writing an error in the Console.

TexTools 1.4.4

BAKING
More reliable routines.

• Restructured code. Implemented a Try -> Finally structure to prevent data loss in case of error during the bake process.
• Avoided Circular Dependency when the image-to-bake-on is present in the blend file and used in the node tree of the materials that take part in the bake process. Two methods were used to take into account whether the image-to-bake-onto exists externally or only temporally inside the blend file.
• Added option in preferences: "Device for baking" (CPU, GPU or Default)
• Added option in preferences: global "Bake Color Space".
• Selection mode is now restored.
• Certain bake modes can now be performed without a material in the baked object.
• Baking can be now performed on the active object while in edit mode whether it is actually selected or not.
• Support for certain bake modes that don't need a Principled BSDF node for baking, like Diffuse of Roughness, to bake with any material Surface type.
• Glossiness is working correctly now in all scenarios.
• No more sloppy changes on baking-mode and UV editor image background when selecting an already baked texture from the list.
• Removed use of "temp_sets", duplicate baked objects materials to avoid restorations after relinks, discards.
• Optimization when baking custom modes (modes using a "material_loaded")
• Faster and cleaner poll messages.
• Remove and unlink material_empty and material_loaded when the bake of all sets is finished for no more hanging materials in the blend file after a bake. As a downside, they have to be created/imported every single time in certain scenarios (custom bake modes like material_id, cavity, etc, and lowpoly meshes in high-to-low bakes that wouldn't have a material). It's fast, though.
• Bake mode "Element ID" no longer delivers repeated colors when baking multiple objects.
• Added samples property to "Combined".

Last planned baking modes.

• Bake modes added: Thickness, Combined, Shadow, Environment and UV.
  Thickness baking was originally coded and illustrated by renderhjs, credits to him.
  The other added baking modes were already included with Blender and were lacking in the addon until today.

Extended controls in baking.

• SSS Color, Sheen, Sheen Tint, Transmission and Alpha affect Diffuse, and it would continue being like this for the sake of energy preservation. Base Color and SSS color bakes are no longer affected by this situations.
• Alpha value has been affecting all non-custom, PBR bake modes, except AO. Even itself. Now, there is an option in the addon Preferences to ignore the Alpha value when baking (except for Diffuse), and it's no longer affecting itself.
• Emission bake was affected by the Emission Strength, while both could render in values beyond 1. There is a new option in the addon Preferences, "Ignore Emission Strength when baking Emission", set to True by default. To take advantage of the previous situation, unset that preference and save the baked image in a file format without dinamic range clamping like EXR.
• The Transmission bake is affected by the Base Color, the Metallic and others. If you want to avoid this, uncheck the new "Ignore other channels when baking Transmission" option in the preferences (Alpha would still affect it if "Ignore Alpha when baking other modes" is unchecked); this has the downside of requiring all materials in the bake to have a Principled BSDF Surface type.

TEXEL DENSITY

• Added enum to select the Texture Dimensions to consider when getting or setting the Texel Density value: from an image present in a material for each object (default), a specified baking resolution (TexTools tab > Size), or from a list of common sizes.
• Texel Density was working on the mesh selected faces, but it should be working by design in the UV selected faces. From now, when getting -> setting the texel density over a single selected UV face/island, it would work as expected: its size will stay unchanged in any context.
• For anyone used to the previous behaviour of the tool: it works as before if UV Sync Selection is enabled.
• Texel Density Get and Set in Object Mode will continue to behave as before, operating over all faces of every selected object.
• The total area of every face is now calculated for better accuracy, and not only a random triangle per face, that could be heavily distorted or have zero area and thus make the script fail.

COLOR ID
Vertex Colors mode.

• Added mode in Color ID to directly assign ID Colors as Vertex Colors to objects or selected faces.
• Existing Vertex Colors layers will be respected from now, as a layer named "TexTools" would be created when using Color ID utilities "Assign Vertex Colors" or "Convert to Vertex Colors", and it would be the one deleted when using Color ID Clean.
• Smarter automatic changing of context (view and active panels) when switching modes within Color ID.
• Don't automatically delete colored materials when converting to Vertex Colors.
• Fix label in Color Select.

EDGE PEEL

• Fix error in Edge Peel if UV Sync is enabled.

TexTools 1.4.3

UV LAYOUT
Additions:

• Select zero area UV faces: aligned or coincidental UV edges or vertices that are not aligned or coincidental in the 3D mesh will be detected and selected if they make up a null UV face
• Centralize: moves the islands as close as possible to the 0-1 space without introducing changes in the texture projection: i.e., moves the islands an integer magnitude. Having the UVs next to the 0-1 UV space domain is important for precision in the operations, layout organization and to save memory while working and in the saved assets

Fixes:

• Rectify: Zero length edges on the UVs, if were part of the active face, were making the script crash
• Fill tool: Re-establish previous functionality, allowing distortion of the UVs again
• Mirror: Removed unnecessary "use_proportional_edit" argument; operate on faces instead of islands
• Select Flipped: operate on faces instead of islands; this way it should be more useful in combination with Mirror for fixing flipped UVs
• Randomize: Some operations won't happen from now on in case of empty selection
• Better saving and restoration of the selection, especially when working in Vertex or Edge selection mode in 3D view, or if combining multiple selection modes.
• Texel density set and get: the buttons were greyed out if entering edit mode without a selection (using the "active object fallback")

BAKING
Additions:

• Added ability to choose the output color space for the texture per bake: sRGB or Linear (Non-Color)
• New background color property in the preferences as a default, and in the Baking panel. Any solid, transparent or semi-transparent background is supported
• Added 14 new bake modes for completion of the Principled BSDF possible channels: sss color, sss strength, transmission, transmission roughness, clearcoat, clearcoat roughness, sheen, sheen tint, anisotropic, anisotropic rotation, specular, specular tint, alpha and emission strength

Fixes:

• Remove 256 max color limitation
• Avoid possible problems if Vertex Colors was selected as baking target (possible since Blender 2.92)
• For centain modes, baking is no further allowed (bake button disabled) if a required material or a Principled BSDF node is not present in some of the selected objects; a custom message is now displayed below the bake button informing on the matter
• Remove data instead of objects for temporary bake objects: no more deletion info messages showing in console
• Remove unnecessary use of user_clear() before data removal using do_unlink as an argument for remove(): no more showing of the alert "ID user decrement error" in console
• There was a problem with the baking image not being reused if its source was a file. It is fixed now, so that re-baked textures nodes don't get unset and de-linked in the materials, and the texture itself can be saved while in the UV / Image Editor without specifying its path again

GENERAL

• Fixed amiss use of is in several modules, causing SyntaxWarnings in the console
• No more loading of unused modules and classes in several operators and in settings.py
• Adjusted default padding: Padding affects some UV Layout operators besides the baking processes. In the Layout operators, a padding of 8 (previously, the default for textures => 1024) is usually too high, and in the bakes, it isn't needed to be as high either. It can be adjusted manually anyway in the TexTools panel, as always
• bversion by Lamia: a more generic approach that will work even if the versioning policy changes prior to the 3.0.0 release

TexTools 1.4.2

UV LAYOUT

• Align To corners added.
• Align modes: To Selection (current, default), To Canvas, To Cursor.
• Align: extended the align type compatibility in Edges and Vertices UV selection modes.
• Added Mirror operators.
• Randomize Rotation added.
• Rectify multiple islands per mesh support (originally implemented by renderhjs on his textools-blender bitbucket page)
• Select Bounds was considering seam edges as bounds.
• Select Bounds was extending the selection to the islands in 2.83 but not in 2.91 prior to determine the outline. Now it behaves the same in both versions, only working on the strict selection.
• Multi object UV editing support for Iron Faces (without automatic packing).
• Iron Faces unwrap margin shouldn't be hardcoded, use the TexTools global padding variable specified in the "TexTools" tab in the addon category panel.
• Align Edge, Align World, rotate 90 and Straighten were broken by new changes on Blender master in the behaviour of the rotate operator in uv space.
• Renamed Rotation operators to better comply with math and physics conventions.

BAKING

• There were unnecessary loops affecting deletion of temporary baking nodes and objects, only noticeable when baking several sets of objects.

GENERAL

• Added "Hide panels help buttons" in the addon preferences.
• Code cleaning and simplification.

Baking overhaul

• Correct results on Normal, Curvature an Ambient Occlusion maps; original shaders textures details will be preserved from now on.
• Weird rendering problems with Progressive Refine activated that happens since Blender 2.90 are now avoided by deactivated it temporarely while baking. AO, Curvature, and any Normal bake results should no longer differ between 2.83 and 2.90+.
• Speed-up for all bake modes, thanks to no more store/restore of materials. This is critical for baking high-poly objects, performance gains should be more noticeable as the polycount goes higher.
• New bake modes: Base Color, Metallic and Emission.
• Selected to Active changed in 2.90, Cage extrusion and Max Ray Distance properties were splitted, and this is now reflected internally and in the addon UI. Both can coexist, contrary to logic, and it is worth experimenting tuning them both on the same bake.
• No more pile of unnecessary messages in console when selecting baked maps in the bake panel - sets section of the addon.
• Curvature bake and Sun Position: bad relationship between addons fixed.
• Smoothness renamed to Glossiness, a more common term in the PBR shading world.
• ao_legacy hasn't been working since 2.80 because it was intended to be used along the Blender Internal renderer, it has been delivering the same results than the base AO all this time. Therefore, it has been removed from the list of baking modes.

UPDATE 2020/12/24:

• There were problems with empty selections in multi-object UV editing. Now, Sort and other operators which make use of the utilities_uv.getSelectionBBox() and utilities_uv.alignMinimalBounds() functions should be more reliable.
• Use of the time.monotonic() function in the bake module.

Fixes on several bake modes

• New Material ID baking: assign a unique, distinct color to every material, instead of using the material slot number as color index. Limitations: Support for up to 256 materials; due to the list being persistent only during the current session, between sessions (close and open de file) the result would be different if the materials with users in the scene change (creations, deletions, renames).
• Vertex Colors layers present in the objects were overwritten in certain bake modes (Material ID, Element ID, Cavity, Dust, Paint Base, Selection), with the side effect of making some of these modes don't work themselves, generating straight black images.
• Roughness and Smoothness were not delivering correct results due to the objects materials being replaced by void materials before the bake would start.
• Diffuse, Roughness and Smoothness weren't working properly in multi-object bakes, materials other than the active object active material slot weren't baking.
• Now, when baking Diffuse, Roughness and Smoothness, support image nodes created during baking are deleted once the bake ends.
• Roughness and Smoothness baked images backgrounds set both to black: no more white background for Smoothness.
• Some keywords used on object names during automatic detection of bake pairs (selected to active baking) were producing some false detections due to being too generic, so they have been deleted from the lists used for looking for matches. The letters that must not be used as acronyms from now on, for bakes of the like "high to low" not to fail, are: 'l' for lowpoly, 'h' for highpoly, 'c' for cage, 'f' for float

Extended support for multi-object UV editing

• Align, Sort, Crop, Fill and Select Similar now work with multiple objects while editing the UVs.
• Now, Select Overlap behaves like in previous versions: all but one of the overlapping islands are selected, making it posible to manually fix the overlapping by using this operator in conjunction with manually moving the selected islands.
• Further optimization of the 90º Rotate Island operator.
• Original Materials are now restored when cycling Checker Maps from a dictionary stored in utilities_texel; this means, to not lose the original material assignations: MATERIALS SHOULD BE RESTORED BEFORE EXITING BLENDER / CHANGING THE BLEND FILE BEING EDITED.
  The original materials won't be lost in any case, they will be marked as Fake Users while renamed with the prefix "backup_". Before, using this tool straigh deleted them and the materials slots, making imposible to reasign new materials easily in a multi-material object.
• Checker Maps operates in both EDIT and OBJECT modes for multiple objects without issues.
• The current UV Editor image won't be replaced by the "checker_map_gravity" map anymore.
• Some cleanup and minor corrections in op_smoothing_uv_islands, op_select_islands_flipped, op_select_islands_outline, op_rectify, utilities_bake, settings, init and LICENSE.txt

TexTools-Blender Icon 2.9x series update by: activemotionpictures DavidRivera

DavidRivera
Blender Foundation CERTIFIED TRAINER
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjBTceQ-XFxKNDoGk805zig
He has made these amazing icons to bite the look of textools, to the new Blender 29x.

inspired by this design by : https://youtu.be/dBWk2lwzgWc