Unwrapping a lot of exact same elements

Peppek1993

Hey guys, I've done a quick, simple binder for my future scene and thinking ahead a bit I'm wondering if it's possible to only unwrap one of the rings on the actual 1x1 map and just have it copy to all the rings?


So when I texture the binder, the rings all look the exact same anyway, is it necessary for each ring to fill up space on my maps or?

oglu

yes do the uvs before. 

Peppek1993

Not quite sure if you understand what I mean or if I understand what you mean.

Peppek1993

I want to know if it's possible to only have ONE of those rings on my map since they're all gonna end up looking the same anyway and I don't want to clutter my map with 30 rings unnecesarily

Skionos

It's not necessary to have each ring with unique UV. It's a waste of space.  

You can unwrap only one ring and then copy it to the correct position. Copies will be sharing the UV position of the original one. Also, you can mirror UV's of copied ones to next UDIM slot, but I was never sure what is a difference between mirroring and sharing the same UV position between identical objects.  

Peppek1993

So what you're saying is I can basically unwrap one ring, copy the unwrapped ring around to match my model and then when I unwrap rest of the model and pack everything together I will just have one ring unwrapped on my actual map?

And all the rings will get the texture info from that one ring that I unwrapped?

musashidan

Now you're picking up what oglu was putting down

Exactly.

Skionos

Well yes. But I think that it is easier to unwrap the whole model first with only one ring. And after that copy objects that supposed to share same UV position. 

Peppek1993

I'm not quite sure I understand the workflow then. What I've been doing so far and what worked for me is I unwrapped every piece of my model, collapsed everything together, unwrapped the collapsed piece, rescaled and packed it everything and then went in to texture it.

Now that doesn't seem to work for what I need here. Because after I collapse everything (including ALL the rings) they just all appear on my texture map.

Sorry if it seems like really basic stuff but I don't know how to grasp this


If any of you would be so kind to explain it step by step I would be very grateful

Peppek1993

Okay nevermind, think I finally got it.

What I did was collapse everything together and pack it BEFORE copying rings So on my UV space I had one ring but then copied the rings to a separate objects and exported everything together and now it works perfectly.

Thanks a lot guys, very useful lesson and will help me a lot with future projects

cheers!

Noors

Assuming you are in Max, you can also copy/paste uv on faces selections in the unwrap editor, if the faces have the exact same vertex ordering (basically when they used to be copies) it will work. You can also copy paste the unwrap modifier between object copies.

Help sometimes, but yeah usually, unfold before duplicating, or use instances.