How to painlessly combine multible Textures and UV meshes to an Atlas ?

Unity Engine
1

Hey guys,

I need to build lots of texture atlas graphics for my current project.
Currently I am using a mixture of Photoshop and Blender to stitch it all together.
However, that is painfully dull work.

My Workflow for these Objects (Rocks):

  • model the hipoly in zBrush, then make a lowpoly

  • unwrap the lowpoly model in Blender

  • export an .obj of the lowpoly to Substance Painter 2

  • bake the hipoly to the lowpoly in Substance Painter

  • export the finished textures from substance painter

  • I then import the generated textur into Blender, so I can see where not to put the UV stuff of my next model

  • repeat

  • I then end up with 30-40 texture files which I need to stitch together in Photoshop.

So essentially If I want to make an edit to my Texture material in Substance Painter:
I need to export all textures again and make the altas again!

There got to be a better way, please please please.

Ideal solution something which allows for me to bake the models individually, but shares the same output material? I really do like Substance Painter for texturing though, but it does not work with multible objects.

Help please!

2

Disclaimer! I have not used these assets, so be sure to read up one these tools before purchasing…

The simplest approach I can think of is using a batching tool off the asset store. It will take all of you individual assets and combine them. I’ve seen plenty that handled meshes, but many also provide texture atlas generation. But in theory this lets you skip all the manual work that you’ve been doing and automates in Unity. Hope this help!

Pro Draw Call Optimizer (Also has a free version)
Mesh Baker
LTexturePacker

1 Like
3

I’ve only used Mesh Baker (works pretty well), but I see there’s also:
Super Level Optimizer

4

Thank you all for the suggestions!

Mesh Baker sounds cool!
Do you know if it is possible to export the new meshes and textures?
Because I would need them outside unity, since I can not ship these plugin with my package.

5

Textures for sure. There’s a “Bake into prefab” option that I believe also creates mesh assets, so that should be possible I think.

6

Thank you!

I just found out that it is actually possible to use multible meshes in substance painter, if they are part of the same fbx file. So I just have to assign the same material to every mesh in blender and export that. Not shure how that works with baking, but I think with Substance Painter 2.1 Multible-Mesh Baking is now possible. I will have to test that later!

7

Simple lod is free and has an easy method just make sure to select an object that holds all the textures then bake the atlases and then you have to swap the old textures out with the new atlas