What is Flatiron?

Flatiron is a unique render-to-texture plug-in which is capable of baking full scenes or selections of objects into a single UV Map with only few simple clicks.

It is a fast, simple and yet configurable automatic unwrapping and baking solution that greatly speeds up the process of baking complex scenes.

What is new in Flatiron 1.50?

FlatIron 1.50 adds many improvements and new features. You can now bake whole scenes with countless objects in a single pass at once, speeding up your workflow tremendously.

• Single Pass Rendering for whole scenes or object selections.
• Support for unwrapping and baking into multiple texture maps.
• Hard surface unwrapping based on mesh angles.

Flatiron is ideally suited for:

Game developers who need to add a maximum of visual quality to their games while keeping hardware requirements at a minimum. Bake shadow maps or ambient occlusion for complete rooms or even whole levels at once and combine multiple objects on a single uv map.

Architechts and product designers visualizing their creations in minimal amounts of render time. Bake the illumiation for the complete background scenery into a single map instead of recalculating its visual details repetitively. This allows you to concentrate the render time on the things that matter the most: Your products or architecture.

Designers creating real-time visuals for mobile devices or similar platforms with very limited texture memory. Bake a single map that is shared by multiple objects and can contain a whole scene with minimal wasted texture space.

Advantages of using Flatiron

• Unwrap and bake multiple objects into a single texture map without having to manually arrange UV charts or compose rendered maps in image editing software.
• Automatically unwrap objects in a way that utilizes a large amount of the available texture map space.
• Minimize texture surface stretching. This keeps pixels on the object surface in a square shape and avoids visual quality reducing distortions.
• Keep a uniform pixel density on mesh surfaces – even across multiple objects. This avoids the effect of some areas on the mesh having a very sharp and detailed texture while others appear blurred.
• The uniform size and shape of pixels makes sure that objects have no distracting visible seams in areas where different UV charts meet.
• Create maps that contain textures for multiple objects at once, keeping actually required texture memory low.
• Unwrap all the objects in a scene and bake them in a single render pass, leading to finished high quality texture maps in record time.