Quote:

[...]and simply place them side by side[...]

tell this a computer! unfortunately doing stuff like that sounds easier than it is. the placing of the uv-islands gets done by a box packing algorithm. this kind of is like writing an ai for playing tetris (just harder since tetris has much nicer pieces). ...getting the best possible uv-islands (which has to be done before the packing) isn't that easy either.

maybe this problem would be great for genetic algorithms like larrylaffer works with but i have no clue about them...