Maya 2016 - Baking Textures From Multiple Objects Into One Image

Njord

Hi there,

I am working on a house dedicated for games. The whole model is consisted of multiple objects (windows, roof, walls, door, eaves etc.). Every object has its own texture (1024x1024), however I need to somehow combine all of them and create one piece of texture (1024x1024) with all these textures consisted in it. Like this: https://ricgameart.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/uv-mapping1.jpg 

Is there any way of doing this? What would happen in the game engine, if I left it as multiple textures?

It is very important for me, as it is part of a job test. Thank you all very much and I will appreciate any help.

Matt

Obscura

If you leave the textures separated, for the engine, it will be as much draw calls, as much textures you have. To clear this out a little bit, here is some info about when would you want this , and when you wouldn't. As I said its like a draw call per material so it sound logical that you should reduce the amount of materials if possible, but if its for a modern console / pc game, you probably want to keep them as separated still, because of multiple reasons: 

- Easy reuse of any materials across the whole scene.
- Smaller texture sizes (tiling textures).
- Tiling textures also allows procedural blending with another material layers.
- Amount of tiling can be set in the material or by adjusting the UV scale.

So in these modern days, you would likely leave them as separated, if it was made for some high end hardware device.
For lower end stuff like mobile, you would still want to minimize the spent resources, so you would probably combine textures. If there are a lot of similar houses in the scene, I would still leave the house textures separated for the sake of easy reuse, but you know, do whatever they asked you to do.

To bake the textures from one object to an another (from one uv to an another) you just need to duplicate the mesh, change the uvs, apply the original textures to the original mesh, and then project the textures from the first one to the second one, just like you would do normally. If you also have a normal map, that needs to be baked slightly differently from how would you bake a normal. Add it to the original mesh as it is its normal map - so assigned into the normal slot of the material. And bake normal map from the original mesh.

Njord

They actually did not specify, how the textures were supposed to be created... However, the house should fit into Euro Truck Simulator 2, which (I think) is quite simple game, so one texture would be better. Thank you very much anyways.