Texture Atlassing/Packing advice.

zogthedoomed_UK

I'm looking for a pointer towards a suitable texture atlassing tool ..

Our engine will randomize the textures of a character by moving its UVs to one of the 4 quarters of an atlas texture. So as an example, the red characters texture might be in the top left, blue character in top right, green character in the bottom left and the yellow character in the bottom right.

Hope that makes sense . . essentially the four 256x256 textures are arranged on a 512x512 atlas.

If I only had one of these to do for each of the 88 characters then maybe I could do it by hand, but I've colour, spec, gloss and normal plus potentially an additional colour .. and then theres possible DLC that doubles the character count and you can see that it adds up to a lot of hand edited files.

So the question is can anyone point me in the direction of a tool that will help speed this up?

I've looked at Texture Packer which provides a kind of half way sollution with its ability to pack normal maps with the same layout but its not enough.

I'm using Substance Painter to output the individual textures and I'm wondering if Substance Designer is a viable route?

Thanks for any help,

Pat

m4dcow

One of allegorithmics's recent youtube videos is about using a node called atlas maker to make texture atlases. Its a little different from what you are trying to do, but if your graphs already setup for your character colours you could create a node or preset that you plug your graphs into that will put your textures in the right quadrants and export from there.

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xwv4vPvVju4[/ame]

zogthedoomed_UK

Thanks for the reply. Yes I caught that right after posting and it seems ideal with a few tweaks. I've been in touch with Wes to see when that node will be making an appearance but had no reply yet. Don't know if its worth me spending days of time creating my own (I know Painter quite well but I've only had LIVE for a couple of days so don't have a clue about Designer yet) if they're going to be giving a version out next week.

zogthedoomed_UK

OK. My Bad. Wes hasn't replied but I should of looked further .. that atlassing tool for Substance Designer has already been released.

https://forum.allegorithmic.com/index.php?topic=5840.0

Edit: He did reply shortly after with all the details.