Texture Atlas Tools for production?

solar

Texture Atlases are extremely common now, yet there don't seem to be too many tools around to facilitate creating them in a non-destructive flexible manner. Getting the atlases created is fine (usually using texture packer) but I was also looking for an automated way of matching UVs. Ideally assets can remain editable taking up the 0-1 UV space so iterative updates are fast and easy. Then the atlas/uvs would get updated automatically.  I was wondering what tools or workflows people are using?
A solid Unity solution would be ideal, but I'm more just curious as to what good solutions exist at all. Are most companies just building in-house custom tools for this job?

Eric Chadwick

The last things I've seen were Easy Atlas and Map To Atlas. But I haven't been looking lately. Have you searched the Asset Store?
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Texture_Atlas#Packing_Tools

Throbberwocky

Hi there,

I'm gonna try to revive that thread.

I ask myself the exact same question at the moment. What tools and workflows professionals use in their pipeline for atlassing.

I would be most interested in a standalone solution completely independant of any software or engine.
But if this is asked too much, I would prefer a decent solution for Unity and/or Unreal.
If there is a solution for Blender it would also be appreciated to know.

During my research I found the following solutions:

• NVIDIA Texture Atlas Tools: This is pretty much what I am looking for since it is standalone but it is deprecated and not developed any further.
• Mesh Baker (Unity Plugin): This one seems to be capable of atlassing textures, but has an impressive price - too high for not being able to test it before buying. Does anybody have experience with this one?

Well, that's it actually ... do I miss this one dedicated professional solution for this pretty much standard but time consuming technique?

Best,
tom 8)

Eric Chadwick

One reason these are not being developed further is artists have an easy workflow for creating atlased models from the start.

It's a pretty simple process, create an atlas, UV your model parts to it, then duplicate those parts to make larger models. It's called modularity, look it up, we have some good links on the wiki.

If you're looking to automate re-atlasing existing meshes, that's a fairly unusual case, ususlly caused by inexperienced developers who aren't planning properly.

It's also fairly trivial these days to pack assets together into shared atlases... just mash them side by side, one after another, until you fill up the new powers-of-two sheet. Then apply simple uv transforms.

These threads are old, because the problems are largely solved already.

Throbberwocky

Thanks for answering!

i cannot really agree though.

Of course the process of atlassing is not rocket sience and I guess pretty much everybody can do it manually with nowerday software.
But that does not mean that there is no need for automation. Especially the easy but very repetitive tasks usually are automated.
I personally would count atlassing to these tasks.

Especially when talking about "shared" atlasses (which in my case are the majority).
I did not experience that perfectly planned project yet. So shared atlasses usually change over time. And it is annoying as hell to do that manually especially if the project is hitting a certain level of complexity. But as the OP assumes, problably most big studios are creating custom inhouse tools to do these jobs.

But maybe I am missing something.
Could be a cool project actually to push my Python skills

Best,
tom 8)

renderhjs

There is simplygon that was aquired last year by Microsoft
https://www.simplygon.com/
They have engine integrations for Unreal and Unity as well as a SDK to integrate it into your own engine or pipeline. The technology itself is great, the pricing philosophy is a bit of a mixed bag for me.



It might appear first most as a polygon cruncher but they have texture packing, reduction etc. as well included.

Microsoft purchased the company to boost their Azure cloud platform and reach new customers with frequent & mini payments. Essentially with the "Free" version you pay for every model / atlas conversion on the cloud. Only the Offline version unties you from the Cloud lock in but it will cost you $25k+
https://azuremarketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/apps/simplygon.simplygon?tab=Overview

I have written Texture Atlas generators for 3D assets in Unity myself before (don't get the asset, its outdated and not supported anymore). Its never a clean process if you need to preserve bone animations or or custom data as these tools have to tap into your UV data to update the texture coordinates.

In unity some parts of the engine even do this automatically e.g. marking gameObjects as static & they share similar materials their textures get backed. See also: https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/DrawCallBatching.html

If you have two identical Materials which differ only in Texture, you can combine those Textures into a single big Texture. This process is often called Texture atlasing (see the Wikipedia page on Texture atlases for more information). Once Textures are in the same atlas, you can use a single Material instead.