Unwrapping and Instances

mats effect

Hey guys,

Really confused at the moment and hope you can help me out. I am in the process of unwrapping the tank and have for example about 8 wheels. In Max they are all an instance of each other so I only had to unwrap one. However when its all attached in the UV map I have 8 copy's of that wheel. Is that correct?

It's clearly a waste of space for a lot of objects like these to have several copy's of them in the UV. I assume I can't just put them on top of each other too because it will screw with the normal map?

Thanks guys

Matt

mats effect

Actually a friend has pointed out I only need one copy of each object and can copy the rest over when its all done. So that should work I hope.

Bad Spleen

You can have the UV's over each other, it won't mess with the normals. It would only be a problem if you mirror the geometry.

Mark Dygert

Yep typically when you instance things you either bake just the one instance or you place all the duplicates outside of the renderable 0-1 UV space but still land on a exact tile one space over.




A quick way to do that in 3dsmax is to, click #1, and in #2 type 1.0, hit enter and toggle off #1. This will move whatever you have selected over one unit/tile to the right.

sprunghunt

Mark Dygert wrote: »

Yep typically when you instance things you either bake just the one instance or you place all the duplicates outside of the renderable 0-1 UV space but still land on a exact tile one space over.

I have noticed that you no longer have to do this in max 2010 and above. The normals now seem to bake just fine if they're stacked on top of each other.

This is using the Render To Texture in max for your normals though. If you use something external like Xnormal you might still have to do this.

mats effect

Cheers for the info guys. What I have done is deleted a lot of the objects that are duplicates and not really need their own UV space for each one and will clone them back in once the texture etc is all done.