Best practices for model with interactive screens/displays?

Rekov

I know a little about the art side of things, and practically nothing about coding side. I've been working on a model that has screens and displays that ideally would display actual information in a game.

Mostly, I am looking for advice on breaking up the UV and textures. Should I have each "screen" be its own UV and its own set of textures? Does this hold true for lights (via emission map) that turn on and off?

Or is this stuff all going to be so specific to a given project that I shouldn't worry about it when I'm just making models for fun?

throttlekitty

Screens like that are typically handled via some render target, so yes, you would want each to fill their own 0-1 space. Fallout 4 is a good example, they have several stacked meshes IIRC: A static one on the bottom for when the display is off, one for the actual display, and a couple more on top flaring out for a glow effect.

It's usually a good practice to break meshes and materials up, especially if transparency or emission is involved. Say if you only had a couple light-up buttons on the same texture sheet as the metal case, you wouldn't want to add a glow map to the whole thing just for those two buttons. Much better to have the metal texture, and a small button texture. In your case, you may want two or three materials; buttons (glow) and console, the additional switches and buttons could be on their own or part of the buttons material. Oh, and the display screens on their own of course.

Rekov

Thanks @throttlekitty, that's really good advice, and exactly the kind of feedback I was hoping to get.

So would it make sense to have all of the different buttons on the same material, and then depending one what color I need the button to be at any given time, I could just swap out meshes or something like that for one with the other color. Forgive me if my terminology is a little unclear. I'm still fairly new at this.

EDIT: Here is what I'm really asking, I guess: If I want a button to change the color of its glow, would it be easier to swap out the mesh for another mesh that is UV unwrapped to a different part of the same texture, or to change the material to another one with the same UV layout but just different colors?

Anyways, this is the kind of result I'm going for:

throttlekitty

For animating, there's a number of options. I think the most straightforward but uses the most materials would be to have each button as its own object using a generic white glow map (or a series of these with different text labels on each). Then on trigger, animate the color of the glow via the shader.

Another option, instead of swapping meshes (which is also valid), is to animate the UV, but this depends on the game engine. So say you have two halves to the texture, lit and unlit. Here, the trigger event would offset the appropriate UV shell by 0.5 to move from one side to the other.