Hey I have a quick question about your screen shot if you don't mind:). I noticed that you have some gray pixels that form a grid on your screen shot and I was wondering what that was.
The checker is not showing how much distortion there is. I recommend using a preview texture with a finer grid, and circles, and letters, and a fine per-pixel grid... for example: http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/TextureCoordinates#UV_Map_Grids This is my current fav:
Tried out lightmass. Of course, lighting is more accurate, I have tried Amazon Lumberyard but the AO looks pixelated and very rough. I am guessing you have tried VXGI? What was your opinion of it?
Rust is one of the few situations where you probably want a grey value for your metalness (unless it's very heavy rust), because you'll have a mixture of rusted and non-rusted metal on a sub-pixel scale.
I've read about pixel based sorting, but I've never seen it. I (h) Guedun, but that method will only work with black hair, where the intersections are not obvious. It would look horrible with white ir blonde hair.
Thanks Stoy! I had a few hours of manual packing thanks to all of my bits of internal parts that I wanted to be at a much lower pixel density, but I think my UVW is pretty close to done:
http://www.hourences.com/book/tutorialsvertex.htm Both unreal and source use vertex lighting on there environment meshes, except unreal as the option of using lightmaps whereas source doesn't. Im certain Marmoset uses per-pixel shading.
I was wondering, what does it means that the edge is too tight? Is it too shallow with a couple very close 90 degree turns, or like an edge extrusion inward that is maybe 1 or 2 pixels thick on the normal map?
Unwraps should be packed together as close as humanly possible because pixels don't bleed with compression. Burn your AO at 100 multiply into your textures for the most realistic effects. References are only for realistic work. /sarcasm