Excellent practice. You trade blurry unique textures for higher pixel density. Just don't leave them overlapping when baking your normal maps. Temporarily move the overlapping UVs outside of 0-1 UV space before baking.
EDIT:
While we're on the subject. Stretching UVs outside of 0-1 space "tiling" can be good too. Depending on the game engine mirroring UVs can be a good practice as well.
Why do you say temporarily move the overlapping UV's out of the 0-1 UV space? Is there a difference leaving them out of the 0-1 UV space after a bake as a finished asset? I don't move mine back, haven't seen a reason to.
You can leave them outside after the bake, it's not really a problem. Some engines will encounter accuracy issues if you have your UVs spread out way past 0-1. I don't think moving them one unit over and leaving them there would cause any issues.
I create a copy of the model I'm going to bake, move the overlapping UVs over on the copy and then bake using that one, leaving the UVs within 0-1 on the original. Doesn't really make a difference, just works better for me.
Same here. When I used to bake normal maps the scripts I used automated quite a bit of the process. The models that got baked always had the exact same name and non-overlapping UVs so I didn't have to fiddle with much in xNormal.
The models I exported to the actual game usually retained their overlapping UVs just because there was no point to not overlapping them.
Its not really worth making copies or moving the uvs back, making copies is a pain when you need to make changes to the model or something, delete copy, make change, make copy, move uvs again, yada yada. Just move the uvs and forget about it, it works fine.
The only time I ever move them back is if I'm editing my uv layout. Assigning the "mirrored" uvs to a separate material id makes it really fast to select and move/move back.
I noticed UDK doesn't handle UVs outside of 0-1 well. the texture will display correctly in game however if you view your UVs in udk it looks like they forced into 0-1, and now looks like a mess. anyone else notice this?
I noticed UDK doesn't handle UVs outside of 0-1 well. the texture will display correctly in game however if you view your UVs in udk it looks like they forced into 0-1, and now looks like a mess. anyone else notice this?
I'm pretty sure epic did this as well, as some of their models have UV's as you mentioned, all garbled up. But, in game, they look fine, which is all that matters anyways.
makes little difference, since you will never really need to edit the uv's that get garbled like that, and it still displays as expected in the engine.
i almost never bother to move overlaps back the the 0 to 1 space after bakes, and never had issues with, udk, unity or source engine.
Replies
EDIT:
While we're on the subject. Stretching UVs outside of 0-1 space "tiling" can be good too. Depending on the game engine mirroring UVs can be a good practice as well.
The models I exported to the actual game usually retained their overlapping UVs just because there was no point to not overlapping them.
The only time I ever move them back is if I'm editing my uv layout. Assigning the "mirrored" uvs to a separate material id makes it really fast to select and move/move back.
I'm pretty sure epic did this as well, as some of their models have UV's as you mentioned, all garbled up. But, in game, they look fine, which is all that matters anyways.
i almost never bother to move overlaps back the the 0 to 1 space after bakes, and never had issues with, udk, unity or source engine.