UV layouts that know how your mesh moves.

How it works

• Analyze Deformation Strain — pose the armature or dial a shape key, click once, and every edge gets a strain value: how much longer or shorter it is than at rest.
• Suggest Seams — finds the boundary between high- and low-strain regions and marks seams there, so the cut always forms a clean closed loop instead of a scatter of disconnected edges.
• Unwrap & Pack by Strain — unwraps using those seams, then scales each UV island in proportion to how much its region actually stretched, before packing everything back into 0–1 UV space.

Before / after

Same seam count, same mesh. A plain angle-based unwrap (left) gives every island roughly equal space. StrainUV's strain-weighted pack (right) gives the high-strain band measurably more room, because that's where the texture actually needs the resolution.

Who it's for

Character artists and riggers in Blender prepping meshes for texture painting — anyone who currently poses a character to an extreme and eyeballs where to add seams and extra texel density by hand.

Requirements

• Blender 4.0 or newer (tested on 5.2).
• A deformed state to compare against — an armature pose or a shape key. No pose, no strain data.
• Topology-preserving deformation — Armature and Shape Key modifiers work; disable generative modifiers (Subdivision, Mirror, Array) before analyzing, since they change the vertex count between rest and posed mesh.