I've tried just about every combination of settings on the UV layout node to keep everything from overlapping, including like shapes, but I always get messages from Unreal saying that my uv's are 30-40% overlapping,giving my serious artifacts on my light map. I always change the index to the Unreal auto generated 2nd channel of uv's that is supposed to spread them out more, but this doesn't help, neither does adding more padding or checking the do not stack non-groups option.

I'll attach my HIP file for anyone who doesn't mind going through it. I will be eternally grateful. The leaves are fine. It's the uv's of the branches that cause problems.

it's because they overlap even before the layout

your uv's are point attribute which makes it impossible to split at seams, therefore your tubes are not completely unwrapped into rectangles, but one collumn wraps all the way back to connect to the first collumn

make sure your uv's are properly unwrapped as vertex uv's then it should be fine

Oh my goodness thank you so much! this might be a dumb question, but is there an attribute like @ptnum and @numpt for vertices?

Oh sorry, finally got the right key words googled! For anyone else, it's @vtxnum and @numvtx


Also for anyone experiencing a similar problem, try the uv smooth node. It was part of my solution. No special settings.