Unwrapping and Texturing large projects

spectre1130

Hi, so I have a thread going in the pimping/previews forum, and had a few technical Q's to ask some more seasoned veterans of the game. My project is going to have a lot of nuts and bolts all over it, and so far, I've just been using instances for all the copies. But when I go to unwrap the parent, all the uv's will be the same for them, resulting in all the same textures for each one if I leave them overlapped. For such small pieces, how many unique textures/unwraps would you do?? Also, for larger pieces mirrored from one side to the other I have the same question. Would you separate the overlapped pieces and give them unique texture space and textures????

How do you judge when speed and ease of workflow versus a better final texture result are going to balance themselves out??? Hope this makes sense and thanks for looking. I have not done all the bolts and rivet work yet, so this is a question in advance of doing so.

http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=109385

trebor777

well, the good thing is that you only unwrap one of the duplicates, then where you put it on the texture space will allow more or less variation
So you could have 5 or 6 overlapping here, 5 others overlapping there, etc... still using the same texture (cause it makes no sense to have 1 texture per bolt or for all the bolts, they are so tiny, that you'd be wasting memory space) They will be sharing the main texture for the whole thing.
For large stuff, you might want to split in several textures, like a character can be made of 4-5 textures or just 1, really depends on your workflow.
In any case, you share those textures between all the geometry making it. head, hair strands & hat on 1, arms, torso, legs on another, boots & accessories on another one as well etc...

spectre1130

That was my thoughts to begin with trebor. Thanks for the input.