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TexTools

The TexTools addon is an extensive set of tools in one addon for working with UV’s and Textures. The popular addon is developed by renderhjs and SavMartin ported it over to Blender 2.8. It has size tools, UV Layout tools, UV selection tools and Texture baking. The list of feature is so big that I can only describe it briefly in this article.

Size Tools

Here you set the size for the texture for baking. You can set the padding as well and there are presets for common sizes. This is like a general settings panel for baking. Meaning: In case you wonder why the TexTools addon bakes such small textures, look up here.

UV Layout

In this panel you can find an extensive set for working with the UV layout. There are tools like crop, fill, align, rotate, selection and more. This panel counts 24 buttons so if you need to do a lot of UV unwrapping, definitely take a look at the TexTool addon.

Baking

This panel offers quite exciting feature; there are 16 different texture you can bake. There are: AO, AO Legacy, Bevel Mask, Cavity, Curvature, Diffuse, Dust, Element ID, Material ID, Object normal Object bevel, Tangent normal, Tangent Bevel, Paint base, Position, Face Selection and Wireframe. So that is a quite extensive list of options. What I noticed is that it bakes with CPU. In case you know how to bake with GPU, let me kow.

Color ID

With this you can define colors to be used globally. It is like a global color palette. So you can first think about your colors or steal them from somewhere else. If I may give a tip; download some nice screenshot’s from one of Tim Burton’s movies. After that we use there colors and make our scene and model, we can easily swap the color palette. With one click of a button you change the whole scene. Not that alone, you can also convert the colors to vertext colors or pack them in a Texture Atlas. Probably there is much more you can do with it.

Mesh Texture

This panel has interesting features as well. One is called Create UV Mesh which creates a new Mesh from the UV and gives is a shapekey. With the shapekey you can morph your the copied UV (flat) to Mesh (shape). Other features are creating a pattern and wrap that around a mesh.

Where to download the TexTools addon?

Download here the TexTools addon hat is ported to Blender 2.80 on Github. Installing the addon goes like any other addon with the exception that you have to right click the .zip file (TexTools.zip) on github. Then save it and in Blender you go to Edit > Preferences > Addons > Install.