IPackThat Reviews

Worked pretty good so far, but I had to reinstall Windows10 and now it's not starting anymore. People have the same problem in Steam forums and dev won't answer them... Assume that your 60 bucks are gone if you buy it...

Loading and packing of heavy meshes takes forever or plainly crushes the software. Too expensive for it's functionality and limited use case. Asked for a refund. Will keep using Headus UVLayout.

Where can I get a perpetual demo version? Demo version worked great. It was fast and had good results. The current purchased version barely functions at all, and if or when you get results, they are mediocre at best. Incredibly slow loading times, even for simple meshes. Packing speed is even worse... beyond slow. As for viewing the current progress, the "Draw Packing" option is useless or does not work (maybe it's just that slow). I can’t figure out how a great working demo version back in 2014/2015 begets such a terrible commercial version today. Seems like a scam now. What the hell happened? Patent conflict with NDA? Booze? Aliens? What? NOTE: If you want to revert to an older steam version that worked better than current: http://polycount.com/discussion/comment/2622730/#Comment_2622730

I'm a professional 3d modeler, and let's face it, doing UVs in Maya sucks. This little app makes the packing part less tidious. it automatically does a better job in few minutes that you would do manually in an hour. I like the "launch and forget" approach, the longer you let it work, the better job it will do. And since you can assign the number of thread it uses, you can just let it run in the background while doing other things. I have actually forgotten it several times, only to find very optimized UVs a couple of hours later. Really a big time saver, I convinced IT to install Steam on my computer just for this software

Best packer on the market. It respects your UV islands and doesn't ruin your overlaps and mirrored parts. It uses GPU so iterations are really fast. If you need to pack UV often, try this thing. There is free demo on steam.

works pretty much exactly as advertised. dev response to bug reports is quick and on point as well. 10/10 would buy again...

Is the best UV packing software out there however, a recent update seems to have broken it. I've tried it on new installations of Windows 10, and Windows 7 it no longer works. I have reached out to the coumminty discussions and emailing the developer directly without an response. I will update this to a positive review if this ever gets fixed because it is legitimately good software when you can actually use it. TLDR; Don't buy it until it's Fixed!

[h1]AVOID THIS LIKE THE PLAGUE[/h1] (until the dev(s) fix it, if they can be bothered). [b]My system specs:[/b] Windows 7 64bit Pro SP1, Intel i7-4770 @ 3.40 GHz, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GTX-760 2GB VRAM. [b]Model details used to test software:[/b] FBX 7.4 binary, 8,756 Tris, 261 KB, created in Blender. I had done chunk of research into this software before purchasing, so I was aware others were having issues with it and that the developer seemed to have vanished despite their enthusiasm in the early days of the IPackThat (IPT) software. Still, there was a demo on Steam, so it couldn't hurt to try that. Downloaded the demo version, and it worked amazingly, I mean … this was like magic — in 11 minutes, IPT had reduced 81.09% wasted space on a very dense cluster of UV islands down to 19.17% wasted space (retested this a few times, but it consistently achieved this reduction). Unbelievable results and £49.99 was nothing to pay for the full, Indy version, especially considering such UV packing would have taken hours/days by hand, and I'm not sure I could have matched the software's UV density. Purchased the Indy version, waited a few minutes for the 180 MB install to complete, and fired up the same FBX model with exactly the same settings (made a note of them from the demo beforehand), and clicked the 'Start Packing' button. Within a few seconds the software analysed the mesh, decided there was 100.1% wasted space, and then proceeded to have a go at solving this mathematical impossibility. Twenty'ish minutes later, it had made not a single iota of progress. There was still 100.1% wasted space, that progress bar kept creeping to the right only for it to reset a few pixels' of movement later, and at this point all those negative Steam / forum reviews — that I had dismissed earlier as the rantings of noobs or people with weak PC setups — suddenly sounded a lot more like the truth. I tweaked the UI, retested, with the same ridiculous results. I restarted the software, tweaked, retested and was greeted by the same idiotic results. I went through the imported mesh (again) in Blender to make sure I wasn't at fault, re-exported the FBX anyway, retested, and nope full-priced IPT still thought that not only was the UV space in the FBX empty but that I had also, somehow, taken emptiness to a whole new level of impossibility. So, yes, people — I gave the £49.99 version of IPT 25 minutes of my time, and that is all it deserves, especially considering that the DEMO version CONSISTENTLY solved the imported mesh moreorless PERFECTLY (80.83%) in 11 minutes EVERY SINGLE TIME. And, for anyone thinking I should have tweaked this or that or something else — in the demo, you load in your model, click the 'Start Packing' button, and it just works; you [i]can[/i] tweak the hell out of everything, but you can, if you so desire, just click a button, and the demo software works. It just friggin' works. But, no, not the version that costs money; that'd be just too friggin' easy, wouldn't it, [PB]Snoelk? Who's / what's [PB]Snoelk? This is the developer who introduced IPT to the world on the PolyCount forums ([url=http://polycount.com/discussion/145328/uv-packer-ipackthat]Forum Link[/url]). So, from one coder to another: Snoelk, fix your code, mate. It's knackered. Worst case scenario, just revert the release code to the demo code and give us all something that works. Or, enable the save button in the demo and return the event code (assuming you removed it). Job done. Everyone's a winner. Until then, it's refunds all-round, though I'll happily re-purchase this software after you've taken a few minutes to fix it. Until it's fixed (please, fix the software!), just download the demo version, use it to create a super UV layout, and then copy this by hand. Yes, it will be a major pain (especially if you've got lots of tiny islands), but IPT has created the best arrangement of the islands for you; all you've got to do is copy / rotate / scale. And, thankfully, this story has a happy ending: it took Steam a mere 1 hour, 23 minutes to agree to a refund after my refund request (thank you, Steam).

Some of my friends say that I have Stockholm syndrome. Why? With 4500+ unwraps in the past year, I might have started to feel empathy, sympathy, and even positive feelings towards unwrapping. Its so bad actually that I am at the point where I even defend unwrapping as an art form. As for IPackThat: I can watch it go for hours, just watching the algorithms combine those adorable UV Islands and knowing this awesome piece of software can do as good a job as me, and in most cases... Even better. It is a relief knowing I can now let my UV-based captors go, knowing they are in good hands :)

Looks like Demo version and Full have different algorithms for package. With same settings and same mesh Demo completed pack with 10% waste space but full version of program did a just ~40% after 1 hour work. As for me it's look like a scam. Also this soft have no support at all.