Texturign question/advice (Maya)

4d4d

Every time I start texturing something huge and very detailed I always run into questions of how to approach it. I just Googled this image to use as an example. So let's say I have it all modeled and UV unwrapped. I want to render it from various angles at 3500 pixel by 3000 pixel size. This will include close up shots of various areas too. The textures would be very detailed.

My problem is how do I approach the UV space ie. how many charts to use and how to group the various unwrapped parts?

What I mean is....... let's assume that there are 4 main surfaces/materials/finishes on the entire model.

Metal finish- Silver + black parts on the car and yellow parts on the truck.
Rubber finish- The tyres.
Plastic part- The grey bumper areas.
Glass parts- Well the glass parts.

Do I create say a 6000X6000 chart for one metal shader containing all the metal parts and in the texture do the colour separation between yellow, silver and black metal ?

OR

Do I create a smaller chart for yellow parts another one for silver parts and then another one for black metal parts.

Do you separate your charts by colour, shader/finish or quantity of parts?

So basically how would your break down the UV charts for the attached image and what sized charts would you use based on the info I gave you?

sprunghunt

If you're not going to put it into a game engine then batches don't matter so much and you don't need to make texture charts.

So you can just use different shaders for each surface type.

Eric Chadwick

I would storyboard out which shots I would need. Then I would texture to the detail needed to achieve those shots at the resolution needed, plus a bit more resolution. Always better to go a bit higher.

4d4d

Thanks.