Is it good practice to combine the UV's of small props in a scene?

Lucky_ghost

I'm somewhat new, and I apologize if this is a stupid question. I have a lot of small props in a scene I'm working on, and I want to know if it's good practice to combine the UV maps for things like that. I also don't know if I'm phrasing my question right. 
I want to know if it's best to keep them separate, or if it's seen as bad to combine them. 

poopipe

It depends

But

Usually If they're likely to be used together you want to combine them onto a single texture page. 

There are caveats

kio

If this is just for fun, id just put each thing onto its own sheet and call it a day. 

Obviously you can also group related things. At the end of the day it's about what makes it easy to work on it, and not care too much about optimizing things..

Why complicate things unnecessarily

Alex_J

In general I think the only thing we can really say is a best practice is that you should not do anything destructive if you cannot clearly demonstrate why it is needed, and even if you have a good explanation why, assume that in the future you'll learn something new which may necessitate changes, so keep version available which will make do-overs as painless as possible.

ZacD

Personal opinion, combing different props into one texture atlas should be somewhat automated and done at the end, like HLODs in UE.

But, there's some situations where you could use a trim sheet to create a bunch of props quickly from one texture, and that's efficient in both performance and time. 

But there's also situations like a vending machine, don't break up the textures of all the items in the vending machine, treat it like one asset. 

gnoop

I recall we always did it  couple decades ago  . For hierarchical lods purpose.  Everything  that was supposed to group into single object in distance  should be stuffed in same texture page at all cost.   So sometimes perfectly  same things had  to have  its own texture space in different textures .     My bet it's still perhaps a right approach for mobile games but I haven't worked for mobile for  decades alredy.  

      Now it's  just impossible  with current texel size   but I still do it to just not  wasting  texture space when it's sound.