Duplicate mesh, baking, and UV map space

PattyWhacker

Hello everyone. I have questions in regards to duplicate meshes, baking, and uv mapping. I'm wondering how you would approach this situation. Let's say, for an example, I'm working on feathers for a model and I'm copying the mesh multiple times to form a wing on a flying creature. How would you handle the baking process? How would you arrange the low poly meshes of the feathers to the high poly mesh? Will I need to tediously apply low poly meshes over each and every high poly mesh and then bake? I'd also like to save on UV space and have one single feather occupying the space of the UV map instead of say 20 feathers occupying that space. How would you deal with this situation? If you have any ideas, please share them. I'd greatly appreciate it. Thank you. Please note that I'm not actually working on flying creature at this moment, I'm just using this hypothetical situation to get my question across. 

BagelHero

Make a bunch of separate feathers (make sure you look up how many you'll need; there's a few different types); don't bother putting them on the hipoly, just make them separate objects. Then, bake them down onto planes that are UV'd into your texture sheet accordingly. Then copy THOSE low poly cards around like is the usual technique for hair, instead of the sculpted feathers themselves.

For the high poly, just sculpt the "base" of the wing, sort of the bulk center bit.

I think that'd be the more efficient and functional method of doing this...! That way you only have 5-7 feathers on your sheet.

Hope this can help at all; similar techniques are used with HP foliage (I'm sure you couldn't imagine someone hand sculpting all the thousands of leaves on a tree), so looking up techniques for that might help you wrap your head around it more!