TexTools 1.6

UV LAYOUT

• Stitch added, an accelerator to the vanilla UV Stitch operator which preserves the position of the original selection and can sew multiple edges from multiple islands and objects at once.
• Align World improvements: added Axis option to gain control on the tool when the global orientation of the object is hard to auto-detect, and selection sensitivity, so now the tool aligns the whole island based in the determined orientation of the partial selection of it. This two new features would help to get a good result in some complex scenarios, with collaboration of the user. The previous behaviour can be replicated by selecting the whole island before using the tool and by leaving Auto selected as the Axis option.
• Improved UX: disabled popups in Align World and Relax.
• Revision of several operators so that only a few act on the island when it's not entirely selected.
• Straight fixed: selection no longer detaching from the rest of the island.
• Randomize "Int mode" added for random integer displacements of selected UVs.
• Select Flipped improved using the same approach as the MagicUV add-on.
• Improved Select Outline based on Blender UV Edge selection current capabilities.
• Added Texel Density Unit Scale in preferences: allows to adjust the system unit scale to a custom unit by a multiplier for the texel density, so it is shown and managed in that custom unit (e.g., pixels per centimeter when the system unit is meters)

BAKING

• Add UDIM tile baking support, taking benefit of the baking UDIMs support added in Blender 3.2.
• Reordered bake modes, so that the correct channel on the new Principled BSDF v2 of Blender 4.0 is chosen in line with the active bake mode.
• Corrected wrong image naming when baking over an existing texture.
• Added new "Multi" option into an also new "Force" list, to force baking a texture for each selected object, avoiding automatic object pairing; the "Single Texture" option is now under the "Force" enum as well.
• Better avoid circular dependency when baking over a saved image used in the material node tree, solving the multi-user escalation and allowing the newly baked image to be saved over the old.
• Fixed custom bake modes rendering black in macOS and Linux (thanks to @dmax3d for helping to fix this)
• ACES Support: added options in the Color Space dropdowns of the TexTools add-on settings and the bake panel.
• Disabled denoising during baking as the noise there is often minimal and the bakes were taking much longer than expected in most cases.
• Enhanced Explode feature. Basically, it will be more reliable now.
• Don't limit the Bevel radius too much in Bevel Mask, Normal Tangent Bevel and Normal Object Bevel baking modes (by @SavMartin)
• New option in the add-on preferences to decide whether to auto-detect objects with subdiv or bevel modifiers as a highpoly pair for baking when multi objects are selected (credits to @MustangEnthusiast51)
• Some errors prompted in the console after some type of bakes are to be expected and can't be avoided in any case, either an erase of users is forced or an image with no real users is removed. This seems to be a Blender specific issue.

CHECKER MAPS & TEXTURE PREVIEW

• Rewrite: These two tools finally work in a safe way, introducing a kind of Material overrides thanks to the use of Geometry Nodes; previously, due to the overwrite of the original materials, the risk of unintentionally losing data was high. The added Geometry Nodes Modifiers are by default disabled in renders, otherwise, texture baking would be affected by them.
• Added texture_preview_cleanup and checker_map_cleanup operators for cleaning data linked to the Preview Texture and Checker Maps tools: Geometry Nodes Modifiers, Materials and Textures will be purged from the selected Objects (or in all the Blendfile if the Alt key is pressed while clicking their buttons or menu entries)
• Checker Map: Added support to work on all selected objects.

MESH UV TOOLS

• Create Pattern: fixed error when trying to create the "Hexagon" and "Triangle" shapes.

GENERAL

• Version compatibility: Select Bounds, Stitch, Relax, Create UV Mesh, Trim and Wrap will only be present in the menus and the add-on panel for Blender versions where '.select_edge' is part of the API (Blender 3.2 and later). Checker Map, Preview Texture and their Cleanup tools are compatible with Blender 3.0 and later, being disabled for previous versions.
• UV Channel Select, Add, Remove (new) and Swap now works on all selected objects, not only in the active one.
• Fixed TexTools activation error in Blender 4.0 caused by trying to import the removed FaceMap type (by @bookyakuno)
• Fixed context issues in Baking, Edge Peel, Pattern Create, UV Resize and other tools: use the new temp_override for changing context when executing an operator.
• Added a workaround to several operators to retain the selection from UV loops to UV edges and faces.
• Fixed detection of the active Vertex Colors layer in some Baking and Color ID modes, fixing Element ID bake overwriting existing Vertex Colors, Color ID assignments failing and other inconsistencies.
• Excluded instance objects from calculations: increases most tools performance in proportion to the number of excluded instances, and makes sorting operations behave better (by @Oxicid)
• Point to the IDs of the Principled BSDF nodes, rather than discover them by their names, which may have been edited manually or by a translation.
• Use an exact context for operators: fixed context errors when having the Image Editor and the UV Editor opened in the same workspace.
• Improved multi_object_loop function flow. Most tools should behave better when performed over a single selected object which is not the active one.
• Safer data removal, especially fixing baking temporary images removal: when trying to delete data helpers used in any script, avoid pointing directly to Blender data which may have been re-allocated. Scripts with intensive memory usage like Bake should be expected to re-allocate data in memory.
• Clarified descriptions on all operators.
• Code deduplication on Island detection functions.
• Other code style tweaks.

META

• Some operators have been updated to newer versions of the Blender Python API. Now, the minimum version of Blender which is fully supported is 3.2, but most tools work for versions as old as 2.80. This should be expected to change in the (far) future towards dropping support of older versions in order to take benefit from the faster access to the new data structures of Blender 4.0 that the latest API provides.
• From now on, corrective releases should happen more often for all people to be informed in time of important changes to the add-on.
• @SavMartin and I agreed on a repository transfer. He ported the original TexTools so that it were supported in Blender 2.80 at the time, made some tweaks to the code and helped others like me to take responsibility maintaining and improving the add-on. He will remain as a much needed collaborator. Thank you for everything you've done so far.
• Credits to the people mentioned above who helped with development and thanks to every person who reported issues in the past year.