texture sheet maker for 3D models

Ged

Is there a texture sheet generator for 3D models? Basically I want to find or get one of my workmates to create an app that I can put a collection of models with unique non tiling uvs into and it then merges all those models together and packs their uvs fairly neatly onto one texture sheet and then separates out all your models again so that you can use them as individual game assets. If this exists already it could save sooo much time! Like a sprite sheet generator for 2d images but for 3d models.

Ged

Oh I found something kinda like what I want but its just for 3dsmax A stand alone application would be ideal for me, like xnormal but just for packing objects into one sheet.
http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/texture-atlas-generator

Ged

So an app like this doesnt exist? or do you guys have in house plugins for max/maya etc that do stuff like this?

Fwap

I was about to mention the one you posted before, but alas you obviously need a stand alone.

What about this: http://www.nvidia.com/object/texture_atlas_tools.html ?

Also i think some game engines can compile them, not too sure though. Maybe look into that and see if you can export it out of the engine?

osman

I wrote a script that does this...but unfortunately it's for Unity. So if by some crazy coincidence you're working in Unity, I could share it with you.

Ged

I am actually working in unity! Maybe it will work? I could give it a try if you are prepared to let me?

osman

Sure I'm at work now so I don't have access to my files but once I get home I'll send it to you.

You might have to do a little bit of tweaking( you or your programmer) to make it do exactly what you want. This is what it currently does:

At runtime, you feed it an array of objects and it will batch them into 1 material. so it takes all of their textures and combines it into 1 texture and adjusts the uv1 channel. It then generates new uv2s so that it does not break your lightmaps. So its purely written to reduce drawcalls at runtime.

If you want to store the result, you will have to tweak the code a little to run it in edit-mode and save the output. This should be fairly easy.

I decided to just do it at runtime because this leaves me the freedom of just dropping in whatever assets I want in my scene, bakelights however I want and when I run the game, it will combine what it needs to combine

Ged

Wow that sounds pretty close to what we are looking to try. Thanks I look forward to trying it out sometime tomorrow when I'm back at work.