RizomUV 2027 Introduces Faster Unfolding, Live Updates & Full UI Customization

Rizom-Lab has released RizomUV 2027, describing the new version as the most significant release in the history of its standalone UV mapping software.

Launched on October 8, RizomUV 2027 introduces a fully customizable workspace, faster unfolding, real-time UV recalculation, scene-level management tools, improved texture-budget controls, and a substantially expanded automation layer.

The release is intended to address the increasingly complex demands placed on UV workflows. Contemporary game, real-time, web, and visual effects pipelines regularly involve larger scenes, denser assets, automated processing, and stricter delivery requirements. RizomUV 2027 consequently places equal emphasis on giving individual artists greater control and helping studios integrate UV processing into larger production pipelines.

A Fully Customizable Workspace

One of the update’s most visible changes is the redesigned workspace. Every panel can now be moved, docked, detached, collapsed, or displayed as a floating window. Artists working with multiple monitors can place panels across different displays, while complete layouts can be saved as presets for different projects or tasks.

Artists can also build their own toolbars by selecting individual controls, commands, and settings from throughout the application. These controls can be reordered to match a personal workflow, while toolbar configurations can be exported and shared between workstations. This potentially allows studios to provide artists with standardized layouts designed around particular production tasks.

The new Ctrl+K search function offers another way to navigate the expanded interface. Artists can enter the name of a tool, setting, or panel, after which RizomUV locates it and highlights its position inside the interface. Rizom-Lab has also rebuilt the application’s offline documentation and added richer tooltips to make less frequently used functions easier to discover.

Faster Unfolding and Live UV Updates

Performance is another central focus of RizomUV 2027. The updated application processes multiple islands in parallel across a scene while using a revised solver to process each individual island.

According to Rizom-Lab, the new Optimize algorithm can provide a fivefold performance increase when working with large UV islands. The application is also designed to remain responsive while processing detailed assets or scenes containing hundreds of islands.

A new Live Update system provides artists with immediate feedback when adjusting their UVs. When Live Update is enabled, adding or removing an edge constraint automatically recalculates the affected island. Artists no longer need to repeatedly apply an operation to review the result of each change, creating a more direct workflow for testing seams and correcting problematic areas.

The new Align Borders workflow can meanwhile align island borders with the U and V axes during Unfold or Optimize operations. Irregular borders are straightened automatically, helping artists create cleaner islands and potentially fit them more efficiently within the available texture space.

New contextual shortcuts allow artists to unflatten, unfold, or optimize the island beneath the cursor without first navigating through additional menus.

Scene-Level UV Management

RizomUV 2027 introduces a Scene Outliner for managing objects, materials, and polygon groups imported through OBJ and FBX files.

Artists can isolate a particular material in the 2D and 3D viewports, restore the complete scene with one action, select the border edges of polygon groups, and distribute selected elements into different tiles or groups.

The feature is intended to make RizomUV more practical when handling complete production scenes rather than treating a project exclusively as a collection of individual UV islands. This could be particularly useful for environment artists working with modular kits, kitbashed environments, multi-material props, and other scenes containing large numbers of interconnected assets.

Large FBX scenes can also be loaded partially, allowing artists to select only the objects they need instead of importing the complete scene.

Expanded Tools for Texture Budgets

RizomUV 2027 also introduces several tools intended to give artists more deliberate control over texel density and texture-memory allocation.

The application’s Density and Protect maps can now be generated from ambient occlusion information. This allows recessed or less visible surfaces to receive a lower texel density while exposed areas are allocated more texture space.

Density information can influence both unfolding and the base scale used during packing. Artists can also paint density adjustments directly onto a model, with the affected UVs updating while the brush is being used. Every brush can now operate directly in the 3D viewport as a volumetric stroke.

Per-polygon Color IDs provide another connection to downstream texturing workflows. Artists can assign ID colors from within RizomUV and use them as selection masks in other texturing applications. UV snapshots can additionally display polygons using their assigned texel-density colors, providing a quick visual audit of how the available texture budget has been distributed.

Smarter Edge Selection and a Clearer Viewport

Edge-selection tools have been improved to reduce repetitive manual selection, particularly when working with complex hard-surface assets.

Edge-loop and parallel selections can now continue through seams, while the rebuilt shortest-path selection system is faster, direction-aware, and includes a straightness control. Artists can also select border edges directly through materials and polygon groups displayed in the Scene Outliner.

Viewport changes include customizable anti-aliased edges, packing-padding previews around islands, and visual warnings when an island crosses a tile boundary. Hovering over a seam can preview its corresponding paired edge, while the primitive beneath the cursor is highlighted before the artist selects it.

RizomUV 2027 is already available on Windows, macOS, and Linux.

The macOS edition includes native, notarized versions for Apple Silicon and Intel-based Macs, while the Linux release is provided as a portable AppImage supporting several enterprise and desktop distributions across X11 and Wayland sessions.