Overlapping UV

TicoTaco

I am constructing a rock wall with two different brick models. I have the wall setup, with the two bricks uv mapped. I added all the lower res meshes into a single object. Now I added a UV modifier to get both bricks into one map. I have about 13 bricks in the wall, and getting UV space for all of the will really lower the resolution. I was wondering, is there anyway to get a ambient occlusion bake for every brick somehow? I tried last night, and right before I loaded UDK I realized it wasn't going to look right because every brick shared the same AO map.

Working in Max. Thanks.

Here is a picture of my UV with the faces selected, I hope you guys can see what I mean, and what I am asking about.

poopipe

Cantt see the pic but...

If you want a unique AO for every brick you'll need a second uv channel and you'll need to bake to that

EarthQuake

Generally for a brick wall you're going to use a tiling texture, and/or a solid mesh, not uniquely modeled bricks.

TicoTaco

Damn sorry about that. I am not familiar with second uv channels and how they work, could you point me in the right direction of a decent tutorial?

And thankyou for the reply Earthquake, I wasn't very clear, sorry. I am creating kind of a rune type wall model with stone slabs type thing. Unreal did it with their Foliage Map example.

I know this isn't very optimized for a game, and I am doing it more as a training type thing. I see what you mean by it usually being done with just a solid mesh.



With this, model here, and the two unwrapped bricks in one UV map, I was looking for getting a AO bake that would compliment ever brick separate. When I tried doing an AO with the above UV, I think you can assume what most of the bricks looked like :P

WarrenM

In that case, every brick is going to have to have it's own unique space in the UV map for it's islands. If they overlap like that, then they're all going to share the same AO bake.

TicoTaco

Yah, this was the problem, I was just wondering if there was any way around doing this, or do developers completely skip making a AO map for models with overlapping UVs?

Thanks again for the help guys.

Bal

You could make a second UV set, with a smaller texture just for overall ambient occlusion. Or in UDK you turn on ambient occlusion in the lighting options and see how that looks, it won't be as precise, but it could be enough, especially combined with some subtle SSAO.