Texturing complex meshes/multi-tile texturing

Giankharlo

Hello Guys , I'm gonna need please some advice in a texturing work I'm doing right now , I'm basically dealing with a robot modeled in maya with a considerable number of pieces , this model will be integrated into a real footage for a short film ,so what I'm planning to do (since I didn't get any directive other than Texture it !) is layout the uvs in different patches/ tiles , jump to mari and create different maps to show as much details as possible in the mesh as it was done for the transforming robot production pipeline (DT course), but this workflow only will work if they are planning to render and animate it the mech inside maya, is there any other workflow when dealing with meshes with hundreds of pieces, gears, bolts , joints and complex geometries such as robots lets say pacific rim , real steel , robocop , how do they deal with these situations i Just mention above ???
Anyone please with some experience in films could drop me a line ???????

Thanks in advance guys , any help will be really appreciated!!

onionhead_o

Theres 2 ways:
- separate the uv tiles by Material, straight forward but not very flexible. If you decided down the line you want to switch material on a certain piece, you gona have to re group those uvs on another tile.
- separate by relation/proximity (ie everything on the leg including cables and joints are group into one uv tile. This method requires painting a lot of mask to separate the material on different parts.

I suggest to have one Main shader that holds all other materials. If you are using Vray, You can use a VrayBlendMtl as your main and setup the other materials under it and use mask to drive where the material are placed on the model.

The main advantage for this method is that you dont have to select the objects one by one meticulously to apply material. With this you can select the whole robot and just apply the Main Robot Shader.
Main Shader
>Rough Metal
>Chrome
>Glass
...etc

Also one thing to keep in mind is mirror uv tiles where objects are symmetrical, so you can save time not having to completely repaint similar part. Then add some details on the texture later to offset the look, so its not identical.

Hope this helps.

Currently, Im also working on a Model with lots of pieces