UV Layout and Textures for Unreal

TrevorEugeneArt

Hi all,

I have a quick question regarding a character I'm wanting to put into Unreal engine to make a game. I'm going to do realistic textures for the base, and then hand paint shadows and highlights in a exaggerated style on top of that for all the details. So the model will be predominantly smooth, and all the details will just be painted. 

In the game the character will have a main hand weapon, and a throwing weapon in off-hand. Is it alright to place all of these on the same UV layout and texture map? 

I've still got a lot to learn for after the model is made, such as rigging, animating, and then creating a game in Unreal (which I will be making with mainly blueprints). So I'm just not sure how the textures work when one of the items will leave the players hand and fly across the map. Does this affect it at all being on the same texture map, or will it work just fine as long as the texel density works?

I have attached a picture of the model below. I do plan on overlapping the UV's for the areas that can afford it, just didn't think about it when UV'ing ><

Thanks,
Trevor

Eric Chadwick

This might help with your layout questions
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Texture_Coordinates#UV_Tutorials_.26_Threads

Weapons generally use their own dedicated textures. This gives you more flexibility in adding more weapons, and with other characters using the same weapons.

You don't want to have to load any textures you don't have to, so for example if the weapon is in that character's texture, but another character is using the weapon and the original character is nowhere to be seen, then you don't want to load the texture for the original character, only the texture for the weapon.

Lots of variables here, but that should give you an idea of how to think through the optimization.

TrevorEugeneArt

Thanks for the great info and link Eric! I will definitely check those out later today! One quick follow up question if you don't mind.

With your given info above, should I put any mesh that can be changed on a separate texture map? So if you can change your glasses in the game, those should not live on the hero texture map?

Thanks,
Trevor

Eric Chadwick

Generally, yes. Though if you plan really well, and can pack everything into one texture, that's generally better.

If the glasses have transparency though, better to make it a smaller unique texture. Having an alpha channel can be expensive with some texture compression methods. Double the texture size vs. a RGB alone texture.

Eric Chadwick

This page might also be of interest to you
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/SkankerzeroModularCharacterSystem

TrevorEugeneArt

Thanks for your help Eric! I've checked out a couple of the different pages so far, still have more to go though! For the glasses I didn't do any lenses since it's just a hand painted texture. Here's what I came up with for this guy. I think I'm going to redo the pencil to get some more detail in the model, and then repaint it over. Pretty happy with the results so far though. For the weapons I'm just going to do them in sets, so if you change from the pencil you are also changing the book as well.