Is it practical to use more than 1 texture for an FPS weapon?

Interface

So basically I'm currently unwrapping a rifle that I've been working on for a bit, and there are many, many pieces, and I'm starting to run out of space a bit and I don't want to give these parts that need lots of detail very little room to work with. And I was wondering if I should use more than 1 texture. So for example, 1 texture for the stock, then the receiver/main body, then barrel, sights, you get the idea. I'm incredibly new to texturing, as I never really get too far into it. The most I've done before was a base albedo map and maybe a roughness map. Thanks to anyone who takes their time to help me out and I do plan on uploading this asset up on Turbosquid, mainly for use in UE4. But I wanna get a firm grasp on the textures before I even think of putting this asset anywhere.

Bek

Sure.

More specifically you're talking about two different things. One is the amount of textures (base colour, roughness, normal, metalness, ao...) you'd use, which depends on your goals. Typically this would mean all those mentioned maps for a PBR setup like UE4; but maybe you're doing a hand-painted workflow and only need base colour. So, you need to know what you're making something for and what the standards for that are. If you're super new, check out basic tutorials or projects on artstation in the styles you like.


The other is how to break up your model into uv sheets / material id's. If you're going to have modular setup where lots of parts are shared it might make sense to keep them separate (which increases drawcalls). If you know exactly how they'll be used you'd arrange it to keep drawcalls to the minimum. If you're intending to sell stuff on the store, you need to know what what the buyers want.

If you're still new to texturing; don't worry about it, just make stuff and don't expect to make $ on the store immediately, just make art, get crits, improve, repeat. If you put things on smaller sheets you can always combine them later with a little effort, like 2 square UV's into one 2:1, 4 squares into 1 larger square and so on.

Alex_J

There is a lot of free weapon models you can find on places like turbosquid (most are crap, but some are surprisingly good). I'd collect all the freebies you can. Then, if you've got UE4, you can download the Squad modding kit and get access to all of their weapons as well. 

Then, you can look at all these different models and see how they have been organized into different material id's, etc. Very useful resources -- all free!