How Do You Preserve UV's When Creating LOD's in 3ds Max

Jack M.

If I were making a gun in 3ds max, how would I go about maintaining the UV's for the next more optimized mesh? Is there a way in which I can preserve the UV islands in so I don't have to unwrap each LOD and try to match them up in so the textures work with each LOD? Or is there no particular shotcuts with creating LOD's UV's?

monster

I just use the ProOptimizer modifier to make LODs. Works very well, and it preserves UVs.

Jack M.

Awesome, I'll give it a shot.

poopipe

The best advice is to plan your LOD when laying out the uvs for the higher res meshes.
I usually recommend people build one of their lower lods first and lay UVs out based on that
(Can be handy for getting clean bakes of surface detail too)

Max is very good at preserving UVs when editing meshes manually but you do have to be careful to maintain the integrity of hull boundaries - manipulating edges is pretty safe, its collapsing verts that tends to cause the most issues.

I like prooptimise but it struggles with multi part objects that have inconsistent tri density (eg a panel with pipes on it)