Automatic UV simplification

Automatic UV simplification produces simplified UVs by merging nearby charts that would have similar lighting.

For many types of mesh, this significantly reduces the number of lightmap pixels required, without any manual intervention.

Example

The image below shows a simple modular building mesh.

Before automatic UV simplification, Enlighten groups the mesh into lightmap UV charts as shown in the images below. This lightmap UV layout requires 28x26 lightmap pixels.

After automatic UV simplification, Enlighten merges similar charts together as shown in the images below. This lightmap UV layout requires 16x16 pixels, only 35% of the original size.

Limitations

If you run into problems with lighting when using automatic UV simplification, check for distorted lightmap UVs.

This can occur when using automatic UV simplification with cylindrical charts, as shown below. 

To address this, we recommend to configure the mesh to use probe lighting instead.

If you prefer to use a lightmap, disable automatic UV simplification and author simplified lightmap UVs manually.

Visualizations

To help further investigate problems with automatic UV simplification, use the Chart and UV Generation mode in GeoRadiosity.