I’m trying to decide how best to configure a Maya/Unity Pipeline. If I’m building a fairly complex environment in Maya that has multiple, overlapping color textures blended with other grayscale textures PLUS lightmaps with separate UVs, what is the best method for transporting it into Unity?
Maya 2008 has FINALLY fixed the layered texture problem in hardware shading by correctly displaying any layered textures or multiple UV sets. The method of assigning textures to multiple UV sets via the UV Linking Window and viewing them with layered texture nodes is now the standard way Autodesk recommends the data be handled. But how do I get that data to Unity?
Even a small level could have dozens of layered textures nodes. Finding all of those files in Unity by hand and wiring them up correctly could kill an evening. And then if I rearrange things in Maya would it be easier to just start over? yikes!
Ive been doing a fair bit of pushing this envelope in Maya for rendering purposes.
Unity will support up to 2 uv sets. You must use the lightmapping shader group to use the second set.
So consider Diffuse textures on 1st uv set, Lightmapped shadows on the 2nd. IMO, forget anything else.
Of course you could bake the colour into either set along with the shadows, provided your uvs dont overlap. Maya can do some really cool layering stuff. However unity is a realtime engine, so its probably plenty enough work just to have shadowmapping on a second set.
I recommend ignoring Mayas desire to put things in specific places, and save all you nodes via maya in your unity project folder. Unity should pick things up from there, but you will need to assign unity lightmap shaders.
HTH
AC
thanks for the reply. You HAVE given this some thought.
I wonder, with Unity 2’s new terrain rendering functionality which obviously is using grayscale textures (that you paint on the fly) to blend repeated textures together, if there will be a way to import files built with a similar structure.