clb.demon.fi

In a previous entry, I described a simple heuristic that can be used to pack rectangles into a bin. Around the time I was writing that post, I needed to write an academic study on a topic of choice, and since I already had gathered some ideas of how it is possible to pack better, choosing this topic gave an easy start. In this article I'll summarize my results and show how to indeed perform better.

If you're working with custom font rendering or lightmapping for a 3D application, you might have run into a problem where you want to use a single big texture surface as an atlas for allocating several smaller rectangular image areas. This is a recurring topic at GameDev, so I'm posting here a small piece of C++ code as an example to show how to perform this kind of allocation.