Best practice for modular weapon UV/Textures

BeardedMike

Hello everyone! I apologize if this question has been asked before, I searched and couldn't find an exact answer.

I'm working on a small FPS game project un Unreal and am getting ready to start on some of the firearm assets. I plant to socket a lot of the weapon parts because as a future feature is want to players to be able to add accessories and swap out various components. What I'm trying to figure out is the best practice for setting up UVs and textures for weapons with replaceable parts? For instance, if a rifle has parts I plan to be swappable should the base rifle and each of those parts be split up to have their own textures, or would something like creating an overall atlas of modular parts be better?
Again this is something I don't plan on implementing into my game until much later on, just trying to wrap my head around the modularity aspect to save myself some future work. Thanks!!

Kanni3d

I believe having an overall atlas for all the modular weapon parts, for example, a specific rifle platform, would suffice. I think it comes down to how many different parts are replaceable/swappable per weapon? Too many, and the atlas can only hold so much detail at 4k resolution, requiring more atlases.

The "universal" stuff that is swappable, like attachments, grips, optics, etc can stay on their own unique texture set, since they'll inherently have smaller texture maps, and will be a bit more performant (having an optic atlased with a rifle would potentially sacrifice texture quality/resolution if that optic is never referenced/called, may be safer to just have a seperate material/uv set for these)

BeardedMike

Kanni3d said:

I believe having an overall atlas for all the modular weapon parts, for example, a specific rifle platform, would suffice. I think it comes down to how many different parts are replaceable/swappable per weapon? Too many, and the atlas can only hold so much detail at 4k resolution, requiring more atlases.

The "universal" stuff that is swappable, like attachments, grips, optics, etc can stay on their own unique texture set, since they'll inherently have smaller texture maps, and will be a bit more performant (having an optic atlased with a rifle would potentially sacrifice texture quality/resolution if that optic is never referenced/called, may be safer to just have a seperate material/uv set for these)

Thanks for your reply! I think this is the route I'm going to go after doing a few tests in Unreal. Basically create a base weapon with a small atlas of parts if they are specific to that platform only, everything else is split out to its own texture set. I'm not planning to go too crazy with the customization aspect, probably have 3-4 configurable parts on each weapon. The nice thing is on the asset creation side it will be a time saver to reuse parts like magazines, stocks, etc. that many different weapons use in common.