Any way of combining multiple materials that are on a single mesh into one?

kreativ

So I selected a few faces in my model and assigned different materials to them in maya. Actually, its same material just different color. So for my shiny robot, it has some part in red blinn, some in silver blinn, etc. So, in maya I have 2-3 materials per mesh. I wanna just bake the materials into one texture cos it wont be wise to have multiple materials for a single mesh, especially if developing for mobile. Any suggestions on how to achieve this?

A transfer map transferring diffuse info from one copy to another?

EarthQuake

Transfer map, yeah.

kreativ

So i guess theres no easier way. My model is pretty complex and has spikes and stuff and transfer maps use require reworking a lot in photoshop. (Even if I tweak the pink bubble wrap thats u get with transfer maps.) Also, it was never meant to be UV'ed cos I figured two materials wouldnt be a problem. But I am trying to target much older devices like iphone 4 and trying to eek out every last performance. I was hoping for a solution like with ambient occlusion where surface shader and texture bake sets dont require another model, and are pretty accurate.

Eric Chadwick

If it's just solid colors, maybe you could try using vertex color instead.

monster

To go along with Eric,

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RY3uzEQjwDU[/ame]

Popeye9

Not sure but this might work for you.

http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=131731

kreativ

Thanks eric and monster, for the vertex color suggestion. I had read about it but I hadnt actually used vertex coloring ever. Just usual texturing workflow.

Pls do bare with me when I ask basic questions sometimes since I am still learning and probably will never stop.

kreativ

I read online whilst doing more research that "Vertex color is cheap (maybe not so much on mobile though) because it’s a per-vertex information. That’s also its main drawback : the vertex color ‘resolution’, if I may say so, is limited by the actual tessellation of the object. With a dense mesh, you can have vertex color fitting closely to small details but with large polygons you may end up with only gradients which may betray the triangular nature of your 3D scene. " articles dates back to aug, 2013 but i am targetting iphone 4s atleast


From your experience guys, how heavy is vertex color on mobile? My models are 5k polygons (10k tris) and average scene polycount totals around 15k-20, but all are skinned meshes and animated, and the scenes will have just one directional light, no shadows.

I intend to profile once I have finished the level, but asking here cos u may already have experience in this.