I just got a bit confused myself: - Are "material id" assigned by sub mesh, uv island, smoothing group or some other mesh property? Can you just pick any polygon and assign them a "material id", but not cause it to become a submesh? - What does it mean to have "multiple materials on the same model"? Does it imply the model…
@BIGTIMEMASTER in your 'blurry face' example you wouldn't create 2 separate materials as they are both the same material, you would split the material into extra uv channels.
With game assets, 1 material on a 3D object equals 1 UV set. Yes, you can have multiple materials on a single object/mesh or on separate objects/meshes, and you can assign a different material to each polygon... but it's not practical. Generally you choose a group of polygons representing a certain part of your object,…
Let me try to summarize your answer, do tell if I am mistaken: - Material ID / Material assignment isn't limited to any "group" of polygons, I can assign them at will, and still keep them as a single mesh, without any sub mesh. - But each polygon should have only 1 material id. (I just tried Blender and it seems to work…
@FourtyNights I guess we need to establish what a material is first: In my mind: 1 material = 1 shader variant + some inputs. You can use as many Polygon / UV / Texture as you like, as long as the hardware/engine support it (eg. number of interpolators). So to me: multiple materials = multiple shaders + sets of…
yeah you can assign materials for a single polygon or an entire mesh. You usually break them up based on what resolution you need your textures. So maybe you have a human character. You first assign one material for the entire body including the face. And then for that material you make 2k textures. But then you realize…
@FourtyNights no worries, I was just thinking out loud. In practice I do know what I should be doing. The whole reason for my thread was I encountered a strange tool that force mesh to split into sub mesh by material assignment, so I got confused. Other tools like Blender doesn't do this. And I guess "Material ID" is…
Some older file formats will force the models to be split on material seams. .3ds for example. Because the format itself can only store 1 material per vertex (1 vertex normal per vertex, 1 UV coordinate per, etc.) This might be what you ran into.
@musashidan Okay, that's something I've never heard of as a workflow. Gotta ping you someday when I come up with a character project soon to see how it works in practice. :D I've always just used separate materials on a single UV channel and that's it, so this is completely new to me. @bitinn I'm not sure what you're…
That's what I thought initially, but then I tried Blender and compare results (both files are cubes, with hard edges): The blender export simply assign material to faces. while the tool I was using, created groups for each material. The end result: Unity decides to import the model as 2 sub mesh. And I was left thinking:…