Active Texture Types
A texture in UV Texture Repacker has a channel — a label that says what kind of data the texture carries (Albedo, Normal, Roughness, Metallic, Height…). The channel determines:
- Which atlas image the texture goes into. Every channel produces its own packed atlas (
atlas_Albedo.png,atlas_Normal.png, …). - Whether the texture gets re-shaded when shells are rotated (only tangent-space normal channels do — see Concepts).
- The colour of the pill that shows in the outliner.
The Active Texture Types list controls which channels are available in the current project. It limits both:
- The dropdown choices on the per-row channel type dropdown list.
- The filename auto-assign rules — only active channels can be guessed from filenames.
Click the Active Texture Types button in the outliner header (next to the Scene label). The button shows a small [count] badge with the number of currently active channels.
- Available — every channel the app knows about that is not currently active.
- Active — channels active in this project.
-
Move controls —
>adds a selected Available channel to Active;<removes a selected Active channel.
You can also:
- Double-click a channel to move it across.
- Drag and drop a channel from one column to the other.
- Shift- or Ctrl-click for multi-select before clicking the move arrow or dragging and dropping.
Footer buttons:
- Confirm — apply the changes and close.
-
Reset — restore Active to the default
[Albedo, Normal]pair (does not close). - Close — discard all edits and close.
Closing the dialog by clicking outside it or by pressing the X is the same as Close — the changes are discarded. You must click Confirm to commit.
The app ships with a fixed catalogue of canonical channel names. The most common ones:
- Albedo/ Base Color
- Diffuse
- Normal(tangent-space)
- Roughness
- Glossiness
- Specular Level
- Specular Color
- Metallic
- Height
- Ambient Occlusion
- Opacity
- Emissive
- Curvature
- World Space Normal
- Object Space Normal
- Bent Normal
- Displacement
- Cavity
- Convex
- Anisotropy
- Anisotropy Angle
- Vector Displacement
- Sheen
- Fuzz
- Bump
- Clear Coat
- Transmission
- SSS
- IOR
- Thickness
- Flow
- ID
- Lightnap
- Mask
- custom0 through custom9 — user-defined slots.
The full list is visible in the Available column.
The default Active list at app launch is Albedo and Normal. You can change this default for new projects in Preferences → Scene → Default active types.
custom0 through custom9 are placeholder slots you can rename in Preferences → Channel match rules. A common use is "ORM" (Occlusion / Roughness / Metallic packed into a single texture) — rename custom0 to ORM and use it like any other channel.
The rename is purely visual on your machine. Project files (.muvp) save the slot key (custom0), not the renamed label, so a project shared with someone who uses different rename labels still loads correctly. They will see your "ORM" textures listed under their custom0 (or whatever they have renamed it to), with the same colour swatch.
If you remove a channel from the Active list while textures in your project are still using it, the dialog will not let you proceed without telling the app what to do with those orphan textures.
When at least one orphan exists, the Active column shrinks to make room for a Replacement drop zone with a red border:
You have three choices:
- Drag a channel from Available — that channel becomes Active and all the orphan textures are reassigned to it. Useful when you renamed your "Roughness" workflow to "Smoothness", for example.
- Drag a channel from Active — no list change, but all orphan textures are reassigned to that already-active channel. Useful for merging.
- Confirm without picking — the orphan textures are removed from their meshes.
If you have multiple orphans, the dialog walks you through them one at a time. The next one slides in as soon as you resolve the current one.
Click Close at any time to discard everything and start over.
- The Active list is committed.
- Per-row channel type dropdown lists now offer only the active channels.
- Filename auto-assign on newly added textures uses only the active channels.
- Existing texture rows whose channel is no longer in the active list (and that you did not give a replacement) are removed.
Add channels to Active when:
- Your project uses a channel beyond the default Albedo / Normal pair.
- You want filename auto-assign to recognise that channel when you drop new textures in.
- You plan to pack an atlas for that channel.
There is no real cost to having more channels active. The dropdown gets a bit longer, and the auto-assigner has more rules to consider. The pack itself only writes atlases for channels that have at least one assigned texture.
- Channel Types — the filename → channel rules and how to customise them.
- Outliner — assigning channels per row via the channel type dropdown list.
- Preferences — setting the default Active list, renaming custom channels, regex overrides.