Right but i was aiming the comment more at the fact that you dont need to merge the verticies or do UVs after you make the pieces, just make your single lego piece, texture it, the instance it throughout the scene.
I did not watch the whole video - do you intend to use FluidNinja and especially this demonstration for a game? Or is it mere playing around at this point? Asking because this tech demo alone could probably inspire/spawn a few game mechanics. Anyway, cool experiment.
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One issue can be that vertices that are at the same position will be merged by the UV process, so that may impact the UVs negatively. Other than that, since each piece of geometry is unwrapped separately before being packed, having more pieces shouldn't impact the quality of the unwrap.
The only thing you should lose is dielectric reflectance values - assuming you haven't cheated the system You can put these values into the specular level channel and feed that to unreal to make up the difference Fwiw. There is no truth in the specular > metalness idea - merely in the implementations
Sorry, but this time I dont really understand, what you want to say with this. If you could try to explain it else, maybe I could understand it better, and I could say something :/ You mean how to merge the frames together? Or what? :D
Ah, thanks Jerc for clearing it up. I realized that if I make a normal map from the height map I get the light information I need. Don't know why I didn't think of that. It's kinda obvious. I feel stupid now =)
I made the wall on my crappy laptop which can't handle as much polygons as I would like, I sculpted one stone and then baked all sides to a plane and merged it all together in photoshop so there isn't a high poly version really.
You don't necessarily need to merge all your subtools, you can make a polypaint map for each (with guv for instance), then just export those as separate OBJs for your bake, and add each polypaint map to it's appropriate model in xNormal before baking.
If you're using a modular setup for the ceiling tiles you might need to merge/weld them as well, lighting an interior with the direct dominant can be difficult at times. Make sure your meshes are double sided too, if that's the case! good luck, looking great :)