Bake multiple objects to one map

[trixian]

Not having tried it, but looking at the examples, does flairtron have any way of forcing the uv shells to align them selves with the pixels?
I see quite a few instances where a perfectly rectangular shell has been packed at an angle where it should optimally be completely vertical or horizontal. Having pixels zigzag along the uv border makes for bad mipmaps or you need to up the map's resolution to compensate.

[Igor]

Not having tried it, but looking at the examples, does flairtron have any way of forcing the uv shells to align them selves with the pixels?
I see quite a few instances where a perfectly rectangular shell has been packed at an angle where it should optimally be completely vertical or horizontal. Having pixels zigzag along the uv border makes for bad mipmaps or you need to up the map's resolution to compensate.

Hello Christian,
depending on scene and output material, this aspects can play important or not-at-all important role. If you have for example "spheroid" meshes, characters, game levels or organic forms in the scene, there is no differences of how they are rotated - there is no axis by organic forms where we can logicaly make it look horizontal or vertical. Actually, FlatIron will deliver in this cases far better results then Max-Flattner, since it was originaly specially made for game development.

With buildings or square forms, using angle cut-out in FlatIron will mostly position them in the 90° position.
There is mostly no difference even in the worst-rotation-case between FlatIron and custom methods, since FlatIron gain additional space by better repacking calculations (s.image below). Having a floor mesh 3 times bigger on your UV canvas compared to custom unwrap, even 18.5° rotated, makes it still few times more sharper.

The only users who should sometimes take care of such details are IPhone and RT-3d Wii Developers, who need to use 256*256 pix maps for the whole city maps In this UV world scale, a wrong pixel can change a lot.

Best thing of course is to download a trial and check if does the job. Some users who don't like the algoritmical packing of FlatIron select simply UVWUnwrap from max and bake with FlatIron further. The core and the uniqueness of FlatIron lies in the ability to bake in a single pass entire scenes - the unwrapping of multiple objects can be done with the delivered engine or your own method.
thanks
best regards