UV mapping when multiple similar objects

Thaurdol

Hello,

I'm working on my skills to create small props for a scene and I plan to add as many items into the scene as possible. This scene being an old smithy I've been working on adding tools.

Now I started to question myself as I'm on my 3rd hammer should I have created one UV with all my tools in one map or every tool in their own UV map as I have done until now.

I plan to add all kinds of tools of course, not only hammers. I just wonder now if in the industry they prefer to have all the tools in one map or separate maps. The realtime render from Max in this post only has two hammers, third one I haven't started texturing yet.

http://img845.imageshack.us/img845/2664/inqz.jpg

Thank you in advance

Noors

I'd say it depends but for a small scene, it won't make a big difference.

If your objects are static, you might want to attach them together, make 1 material, and a texture atlas, to limitate the draw calls.
What you really want to avoid is having 1 object with multiples materials on it.
Dont attach objects that are far from each other (another room) as all the mesh is loaded into memory even if you see only a part of it.
Same goes for the texture. You don't want a big texture to be loaded only for a little object on it.

If you need to physically separate tools so the user can manipulate them for instance, it doesn't really matters "engine wise", if you make 1 material and 1 texture per tool as draw calls number would be the same. Do what makes your life easier.

Thaurdol

Thanks, this info is just what I needed to make the rest of my scene