Texel density & overlays

Texel density is TexelPack's signature feature: every surface gets a fair share of texture resolution, and you can see the result before you bake.

What is texel density?

Texel density is how many texture pixels (texels) cover a given amount of real-world 3D surface — usually expressed in pixels per meter. When density is inconsistent, some surfaces look crisp while others look blurry, even though they share the same texture.

Uniform texel density

Enable Normalize texel density in the advanced panel and TexelPack scales each island proportionally to the real 3D surface area of its object — object scale included — normalizing the whole selection to a common density. A big crate and a small prop each end up with the resolution they deserve.

Works across an entire multi-object selection in one pass.
Uses world-space area (the object's matrix_world is taken into account), so non-uniformly scaled objects are handled correctly.
Set your target density (default 1024 px/m) to drive both normalization and the overlay.

Read & match density per island (Get / Set)

For hands-on control, the Texel Density category has Get and Set:

Get reads the texel density of the active island straight into the Target Density field — sample a hero asset and reuse its density everywhere.
Set scales every selected island around its own center until it matches the target density (px/m).

It's the manual companion to uniform normalization: dial an exact value, or copy one island's density onto the rest.

Texel density overlay

Toggle Show density map to color-code every face in the 3D viewport against your target density:

Blue — density too low (texture wasted on this surface) Cyan — slightly low Green — on target Yellow — slightly high Red — too high (over-textured, atlas wasted)

UV distortion overlay

Toggle Show distortion to reveal where UVs stretch or compress relative to the 3D mesh — areas that will smear or pinch your textures:

Blue — UV compression Green — faithful (no distortion) Red — UV stretching

ℹ️

The density and distortion overlays are mutually exclusive — turning one on turns the other off — so the viewport always shows a single, unambiguous reading.

Checker map

Toggle a checker texture (UV Grid or Color Grid) on your objects to eyeball density and distortion right on the model. Enabling it switches the viewport to show the texture, and turning it off restores your materials and shading. Full details in Island tools.

Honest statistics

TexelPack's reported numbers reflect reality, not approximations:

Efficiency is measured on real island geometry (the actual packed shape), not bounding boxes — so the figure isn't inflated.
Overlap detection is geometric (convex-hull based), so it doesn't flag false positives from boxes that overlap while the real shapes don't.
The texel density range (min / average / max) after packing is shown in the Last run panel and included in the copyable report.