[3ds Max] Some more annoying/rookie Unwrap questions...
polycounter lvl 7
Hi,
1. I'm working on a large model made up of 300 individual
objects (a ship). Do I have to do as some tut's suggest and attach them
all together before unwrapping, or can I unwrap them individually, then attach and put them all on the same texture sheet
afterwards?
2. My high poly is around 16 million polys, will that be a problem
for Substance Painter to handle when baking the normal (is there some sort of limit or does it all boil down to your machine's RAM)?
3. After much debate I'm going with the texture atlas method
for this model (everything on one sheet). What size should I/can I make it? (its going
in UE4 for an FPS/exploration hybrid). Is there such a thing as 16k/32k
maps & if so does using them cause any performance issues in-game?
-thanks in advance for the on-going help!
Replies
Personally I attach it all together and break it apart if I need to afterward. If pivot points are important (usually for animation or ease of modeling) then I snap dummies to the objects before I combine them. You might want to check scriptspot.com I know there are a few "create dummies at all objects" scripts floating around. They also have scripts that break apart the elements into their own objects.
2) That really depends on your system and the size of the maps you are outputting. Substance won't output anything over 8K and there are some hoops you have to jump through to get that. I've feed substance meshes that dense before and rendered 4k maps and not had a problem. IF you run into problems you should look at optimizing the high poly, depending on where it is coming from there are usually a few ways to make sure you don't have an excess amount of verts.
3) Something is wrong if you're above 4k. 16k and 32k maps will certainly cause performance issues, if you think you need them you need to use separate maps or think about using tiling textures, or overlapping UV's.
The dummies are just place holders for the pivots. When you attach the turret to the boat it will lose it's pivot. The dummy is there for when you detach the turret and want to set it back to it's original location. Depending on your ex/import plugin, it usually has an option to convert dummies to bones. laying out the bones before you join the meshes might work too, and then just leave it all joined.
The point is, the objects pivot is sometimes worth backing up for later.
As for the textures, you are correct in thinking that an object that size will be a challenge to maintain the texel density, but increasing the resolution isn't the only trick you have available to you, a lot can be done with tiling textures and not all of it needs to be unique pixels.
A lot of the rigging and ropes can share a simple rope tile texture.
The lifeboats can share textures and you only really need to texture one side and mirror to the other.
The hull and decking can use tiling textures, so can many of the metal walls.
Depending on the engine you are using there are a lot of material tricks that you can do to break up repeating patterns and add in unique material details, using decals, mesh decals and vertex color/paint as a mask.
Here is a fairly decent example that will probably give you a few ideas.
https://free3d.com/3d-model/lcac-27-82860.html
As Mark mentioned, making good use of tiling textures and overlapping UVs will go a long way. Consider using tiling textures in conjunction with vertex paint texture blending, plus decals to break up the "tiled" look over large surfaces.
The quality of the ship looks fairly good, but I would not suggest trying to get away with unique UVs for much of it at all, unless it is only going to be viewable from a distance.
But if there's a chance it can become a hero asset the advice these other guys gave is better.