Maya Better UV Packer

A UV packer for Maya that respects unselected UV shells: anything you didn't select is treated as an obstacle, and the packer packs around it instead of overlapping on top. Maya's built-in packing assumes it owns the whole UV tile; this one doesn't.

There's a demo on YouTube.

Setup

Download the zip and drop the uvpacker folder into %userprofile%\documents\maya\<version>\scripts\, restart Maya, then run:

from uvpacker import show_ui
show_ui()

Note on the binary

The packer leans on a small C++ binary for speed. A Windows build ships in the repo; on macOS or Linux you build it yourself — it's a plain CMake project with zero dependencies. If you'd rather skip the binary entirely, a native AABB fallback is available.

On the roadmap: grouping, so multiple shells can be packed together as a single unit.