Need advice regarding mech texturing and rigging
polycounter lvl 7
So I've been doing 3D work for the last couple of months but mostly sticking to modelling props and rooms rather than characters. A friend and I started working on a small side project involving mechs and I decided to try my luck designing, modelling, rigging, texturing and animating one of the mechs. However now that I've finished modelling it and making sure that the pieces, joints and everything work as intended, I don't know how to continue.
First off, should I combine all the pieces that make up the mech into one mesh? I worked on every part separately and I'm unsure if I should leave them disconnected for easy skin weight painting or combine them. Seeing as it's a mech and the pieces are meant to be rigid, how would I go about creating a skeleton for a set of meshes instead of just one mesh?
If I were to bind all these meshes to one skeleton somehow, would it still be possible to have all the meshes share one UV map once the rigging is finished? I can't imagine creating one texture map for each piece would be efficient.
I'll leave a couple of pictures of the mech here for reference.
Thanks in advance!
First off, should I combine all the pieces that make up the mech into one mesh? I worked on every part separately and I'm unsure if I should leave them disconnected for easy skin weight painting or combine them. Seeing as it's a mech and the pieces are meant to be rigid, how would I go about creating a skeleton for a set of meshes instead of just one mesh?
If I were to bind all these meshes to one skeleton somehow, would it still be possible to have all the meshes share one UV map once the rigging is finished? I can't imagine creating one texture map for each piece would be efficient.
I'll leave a couple of pictures of the mech here for reference.
Thanks in advance!