uv-clean-atlas — legible UV atlases for hard-surface game meshes

Turn a hard-surface mesh (vehicle body, prop, weapon furniture) into a UV atlas a human can read like a livery template: each island is a recognizable panel, nothing overlaps, texel density is uniform, and moderate stretch is accepted as the price of legibility. Validated 2026-07-16 on the LFQuad Banshee body — both a clean 10.5k-quad retopo (54 islands / 30 panels, straightened outlines, exact-zero overlap) and a raw 36.9k-tri decimated rip (65 islands, straightening auto-rolled-back, exact-zero overlap), where 16 previous methods had produced 500–2000 islands.

Re-unwrapping a model that already ships, or an atlas that must serve more than one visual LOD, is a different job — the constraint is "UV and nothing else", the LOD chain and the material assignment are fixed, and the advice below about few large islands stops being available. Read references/multi-lod-shared-atlas.md first: it carries the measured seam trade-off, why a LOD transfer cannot work below a granularity ratio, the shared-sheet layout that replaces it, and how to align and judge the bake.

Paint organic (statue / coat / one-shell character, 2026-09-02): do not run the view-chart + SLIM command below. Photograph (G12). Read references/g12-paint-photograph.md first.