Is there a way to more "efficiently" pack textures with the "Merge Actors" tool?

The “Merge Actors” is a great tool to quickly condense blueprints and other collections.
However i noticed that the texture/material packaging tool tends to only divide texturespace equally over the new texture sheet.
This means that objects that only use a 128x128 texture will get the same amount as objects originally using a 2048x2048 texture.

Therefore i was wondering is there a way to more “efficiently” divide the available texture space for these merged actors, either in unreal engine or outside? (and if it’s not possible yet, could it be something to implement?)

Left: Standard packing
Right: Optimized packing with variable sizes

Hello MissStabby,

The options you are mentioning are already a feature within the ‘Merge Actors’ tool. Within the Material Settings dropdown there is an option to change the Texture Sizing Type. See below image for reference to this setting.

This allows you to control how your multi-sized textures from different materials and actors are merged together.

Let me know if you have further questions or need additional assistance.

Cheers,

Then there is a problem in the software.

I just tried this feature again to verify it (as i did it a few days ago as well)
However variable sizes did not occur.

In this picture the red outlines mark 128x128 textures, the green ones are 2048, the blue ones are 512, the rest is 1k
Still all sheets gotten equal texture space.

Can you provide me with the simple steps you took and which option (among the 4 you chose) to get the results you are reporting?

I just tested the various options on my end, and they worked as I expected based on the option chosen.

Thanks,

H

Hi

I made a video what i did (using the "automatically biassed texture sizes) and the result of it:

Here you see me merging together a lot of actors with varying texture sizes resulting in 1 texturesize for all items in it.

After further investigating this issue, the tool is behaving as expected. There might be a misunderstanding of how the texture merging is intended to work. When you are merging actors which use various texture sizes, the packing algorithm evenly divides up your texture space based on the number of textures and then packs them in to the set Texture Size. Since this feature was recently taken out of experimental it is expected some of the tool is a bit unclear and undocumented.

I can agree that this feature could use some improvement which is why I have entered a feature request to have the packing algorithm improved. You can find the request on our recently released Public Issues Tracker. You can vote for the issue to try and get more interest from the community to possibly have this feature implemented sooner.

Let me know if you have further questions or need additional assistance.

Thank you,

Thanks for clearing things up and adding the feature to the tracker!