Different approaches to painting different objects sharing the same map?

Krato

I'm curious if anyone has any alternate suggestions to this workflow. I have several objects (shown below) that are all part of a house structure. I want them all to share the same map (which they do). However, I feel like this workflow is a bit messy with all the layers and folders. Are there any alternative approaches to this? If I make all the individual objects their own materials they would no longer be part of the same map, so that wouldnt work. 

Any improvements or is this the way it's done?

Deegnoot

Well, the idea of separating them into different objects isn't a bad idea. Your scenes will end up less complex but it's an additional step in your process and you gotta deal with some texture bleeding.

You could, instead, look at setting up a texture atlas and do edge/global damage and dirt in separate masking maps which you can then pack together to save disk space. This does mean you have to determine every material before finalizing your modeling step.

Krato

Deegnoot said:

Well, the idea of separating them into different objects isn't a bad idea. Your scenes will end up less complex but it's an additional step in your process and you gotta deal with some texture bleeding.

You could, instead, look at setting up a texture atlas and do edge/global damage and dirt in separate masking maps which you can then pack together to save disk space. This does mean you have to determine every material before finalizing your modeling step.

Thank you! I looked up resources related to texture bleeding, they are below. If I separated all the objects wouldn't that result in having a lot more maps and textures in the game? The way it is now, and correct me if i am wrong, having all these objects joined together and painted here, then separating them in blender (so I can move them around independently eventually in engine), and then finally importing to Unity and having them call back to the atlas seems more efficient than having a unique texture map per each object. This is my understanding currently, I don't know if it's right since I've only been doing this for about a month. If it's wrong or I am forgetting something please let me know!  

Painter has an export feature (dilation) for giving padding to the maps. 
https://support.allegorithmic.com/documentation/display/SPDOC/Padding

What Padding and texture bleeding is.
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Edge_padding

I'm not completely sure what you meant regarding the second suggestion. It does sound advanced though. 

Deegnoot

@Krato you are right. You'll end up with a lot more textures but you can, eventually, merge them together in Photoshop, for example.

Creating a texture atlas is not as exotic as it sounds though, haha. Here's a YouTube video from Allegorithmic themselves explaining it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xwv4vPvVju4

Krato

@Deegnoot Fair enough, I've thought about the photoshop process before. Seems like an extra step I'll try to avoid.  Also, everything is more or less exotic to me at this point lol.  

Thanks for the video, I just watched it and I will watch the following ones as well. 

Deegnoot

@Krato okay man. Good luck!