I'm working on a project that shares certain meshes between assets. Everything has to be in a unique texture map though. I've decided to used the bottom left quadrant of the UV space for these meshes and I've been having some issues getting it go to go smoothly. If anyone has any suggestions that'd be great - I can't be the first person to do things this way.
Things I've tried to automate the process:
NIghtshadeUV in Maya - Does a good job with basic stuff. At the start I was using the scripts option to layout in different quadrants but this led to uneven texture density and inefficient UV space usage.
RizomUV
This is the closest I've gotten to something working and it could be that I'm not using it correctly. At first I was sort of faking it by using UDIM to setting the UV tile to .5. This let me lay out things in the 3 remaining quadrants but was very inefficient
I then faked it a different way but just using a square to fill out that section of the UV map but laying out doesn't quite work right. Wither I have the 'autofit' option turned on and it rescales the square even it's it's locked. Or I turn it off and the UV are places outside of the normal UV space.
Here's a screen shot showing what I'm trying to do and the issue I'm having with RizomUV.
So the square region in the bottom left is where the common meshes go. The square remains the same size but....
It goes over the grid - not amount of selecting/grouping/pinning etc seems to stop this.
I have a thread of their forums asking for further information but it's been a while with no response.
The UDIM trick works okay on this asset but some of the longer ones I have Would result in like 80% of the space being wasted.
Thanks for taking a look!
Replies
With autofit off lock the square and us pack or pack translate depending on what you want. Scale down all the islands so they are within the UV tile. This will over lap with the square but that's okay. Get packing and rescaling until everything looks good and inside the UV tile. At this point it might be a bit smaller but the fit tool should scale it up without touching the locked square this time.