How are complex models UV unwrapped and materials applied?

MarkRowell

I dont mean the actual process but rather, for an object such as the one below, are individual parts kept seperate but UV unwrapped keeping in mind the UV locations of the other parts, then a single texture made, put into one material then that one material applied to every part? This is actually more of seeking clarification not a question.

Bartalon

You can do either method depending on your needs.  I think for this asset the stand, camera, and lens are each different materials with their own unique UV maps.

An example where you would make a bunch of different models but UV map them to the same 0-1 space would be food or something.  Each piece of food would be its own model so you can move them around independently, but to save draw calls you would just map them all to one big "Food" material.  Another example would be something with transparency, like a car.  The vehicle might be set to one material while the windshields and other transparent portions are set to another.

There's also texture atlasing where you UV map assets individually then combine them into sets of 4 later.  So four 1024 maps could be combined into one 2048 atlas.  There are other ways of creating an atlas, just check out the wiki link below.

http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Texture_atlas