Seams are the decision. Everything after them is arithmetic.
That split is why UV unwrapping has stayed a desk job long after the rest of the asset pipeline moved onto the farm. Where you cut a shoulder, whether the seam hides under a strap or runs down the outside of the arm, how much of the sheet a face deserves against a boot — those are judgements about what a texture artist will have to paint and what the camera will ever get close to. Unfolding the island you cut, flattening it with as little distortion as the geometry allows, rotating and packing it to a texel density: sums.
Rizom-Lab shipped RizomUV 2027 on 8 October. The sums no longer need a window open.
Headless, and the two things that make it count
The new headless mode runs RizomUV’s tools without putting anything on screen — the scripting surface, no interface, aimed at batch jobs, automated builds and render-farm work. It reports through console output and exit codes.
Two other changes in the same release decide whether that is usable, and both landed with it.
Python is now the default scripting language. RizomUV has been scriptable for years, in Lua, and Lua is a perfectly good language that almost nothing else in a 3D pipeline speaks. Maya is Python. Houdini is Python. Blender is Python. The tools your pipeline team already maintains, the farm submitters, the asset validators, the thing that walks a publish directory and complains — Python. Lua meant RizomUV automation sat in its own corner, written once by whoever learned it for this one application, and rewritten from scratch when that person left. That is the kind of friction that keeps a tool off the farm for a decade after it was technically capable of being there.
RizomUVLink now works on every platform rather than Windows only. Farms are Linux. A headless mode that ran on Windows alone would be a demo you show at a trade stand, and 2027 ships on Windows, macOS on both Apple Silicon and Intel, and Linux as an AppImage.
Exit codes are the difference between a batch step and a liability. A tool that unwraps four hundred props overnight and reports nothing when island seventeen folds back on itself has moved the day rather than saved it, onto whoever opens the atlas in Substance and wonders why the trim is smeared.
What it does not automate
None of this decides where your seams go, and Rizom-Lab is not claiming it does.
So the job you can build is the second half: take a mesh that already carries its cuts — authored by hand, inherited from a previous version of the asset, or arriving from a generator — then unfold, optimize, pack and write out, to a texel density and an atlas size the job declares rather than an artist remembers. On a team where three people each hold a different idea of what 10.24 px/cm means, a density the job states in writing is worth having.
It also puts a floor under the machine-generated end of the pipeline. Tripo’s P2.0 made the case that sane UV layouts all assume four-sided faces, which is why generated geometry has in practice meant geometry somebody rebuilds before it goes anywhere. A generator that emits quads and a UV tool that unwraps them without a human present are two halves of the same bet.
Align Borders earns its place in the packer
Align Borders straightens island borders along the U and V axes during an Unfold or an Optimize, rather than as a separate cleanup afterwards.
Anybody who has packed a sheet by hand knows why that matters. A packer fed organic blobs leaves gutters between them that no texture can use, and on a 4K atlas those gutters are real money — resolution you paid for and cannot paint on. Straight borders pack tighter. They also behave when a texture artist works in 2D: a straight edge in UV space is a straight edge in Photoshop, which is the difference between painting a seam along a panel line and chasing it around a curve.
Doing it during the unfold rather than after is the part that reads as production experience. Straightening a border afterwards fights the distortion the unfold already baked in.
The desk side
Live Update recalculates the affected island the moment you add or remove an edge constraint. The old loop was constrain, apply, look, undo, try a different edge — four actions to answer one question. Now the answer arrives with the question.
The rest of it is ergonomics, and ergonomics is most of a working day: panels that dock, float, collapse or move to a second monitor, complete layouts saved as presets with custom toolbars, and a Ctrl+K search across tools and settings. RizomUV has a lot of settings. Many of them live two panels deep behind names you have to already know.
The number
Islands can be processed in parallel now, and a new Optimize algorithm is claimed to be up to five times faster on large islands.
As of 9 October that figure is Rizom-Lab’s, repeated by the coverage and measured independently by nobody. Both “up to” and “on large islands” are carrying weight in it. Parallel island processing is the more believable half and the easier one to reason about: islands unfold independently of each other, so throwing cores at a mesh with two hundred of them scales in a way a single large island never will. A character with four islands will see less of that than a hard-surface kit with three hundred.
Scene scale, and the part to verify
The Scene Outliner now spans objects, materials and polygon groups, large FBX scenes can be partially loaded, and there are texture-budget controls for deciding what a scene’s sheets are allowed to cost.
Those three belong together, and they are the ones to test before you trust an unattended pack. A budget control is only as good as what happens when the budget is exceeded: a job that silently drops everything to half density to make the atlas fit has made an art decision on your behalf at three in the morning. Maxon’s MCP server shipped disabled, local-only, with a local audit log for the same class of reason. Once a tool acts on a scene with nobody watching, what it reports afterwards matters as much as what it can do.
The feature list here comes from the coverage and Rizom-Lab’s own announcement rather than release notes read end to end, so treat the specifics as the vendor’s description until you have the build in front of you. RizomUV 2027 is out now on all three platforms.