Howto bake with overlapping UV's

a-k-m

Hello,

How do you guys and girls proceed when baking AO and Normalmaps for an object with overlapping UV's?

Until now I always put all the overlapping UV's out of the 0-1 Space (is it called like this?!), bake then the NM and AO and afterwards I put all the UV's manually back to its place. But this sucks, isn't very precise and takes a loooot of time (I always need to zoom in a lot to make sure the UVs are matching).

Pleas take a look at the picture for a clearer imagination of how I proceed.



Hope someone can show me an easier but mainly more time saver way.

Thanks for help!

m4dcow

Offset the overlapping maps by 1 unit, so have everything overlapping in 0-1 space, so it is in U1-2 V0-1. Because the texture tiles it is essentially at the exact same texture location, just one tile over.


I'm sure Max has scripts to snap UV shells together, but in the future you can think about that when you are laying out your initial UVs. Fo an object like that you could just delete 2 of the legs and radially instance 2 more around so they will have the same UVs and then Offset by 1 unit in UV space for baking.

unstoppablex

the easiest way is to delete any similar elements that will share the same UV unwrap. Unwrap everything making sure there is only one of each uv island, then after put an edit poly on top of the unwrap modifier and copy those elements across your mesh, building the rest of the mesh. after that is done, put an unwrap modifier on top. you'll notice that now anything that is that similar element is now resting perfectly ontop of each UV island. Now move each duplicate uv island off 0-1 and you're ready for your bake. PS, you don't have to move them back to 0-1 UV after bake, they can stay off grid and work perfectly fine in any game engine.

also, to perfectly move UV islands off the grid, at the very bottom-left of your unwrap window, there is a white button that looks like a cross-air. click it, and type 1 in U: and press enter. make sure you are in element mode so it moves the whole uv island off grid.

a-k-m

yess, thanks!

the solution is so easy and timesaving!