Hello,
I’m curious to how you guys are doing the UV-texture pipeline these days. Do you manually arrange the UV of all objects in the scene into one single uv map in your 3d software, painting that in photoshop and bring them all into unity? Do you use texture atlas tool? If so, could you share us your workflow. Just wondering because manual arrangement of UV of all objects in the scene is probably THE most laborious process in entire art pipeline, not to mention if there is an object that needs to be added later once all the textures are painted, then that would mean rearranging all the UV and textures again. It just seems this workflow doesn’t offer any flexibility. So I was just wondering if there are any tool to cut corners. Thanks in advance.
Personally, I don’t use any texture atlas tools but I do map my environment to one 1024x1024 image map and assign all my model UVs to it. On my first game, I even have player and enemy models assigned to the map too, but on my current project, I have liberally assigned player and enemies their own shader/map.
I try to reuse as many textures that I can get away with so I do my best to make each texture look as good as possible. As I create new models, I add those UVs to the texture space and see how it looks using previously painted areas on the map. If it feels out of place or “cheap”, I switch over to photoshop, highlight an unpainted area and start painting and finally assign the UVs to that new area.
While it does take time to arrange the UVs, most of the time is trying to create a model with the most visual impact while trying to keep the poly count low. I also strive to get the most out of my map by using overlapping UVs. I then build to the iPhone and sometimes I discover that some of the detail i meticulously painted got lost anyway and so I adjust my techniques accordingly.
Anyway, for me, building assets and then making them become “reality” is the fun part for me in game development. While there are techniques to work more efficiently, in the end, good quality assets just take time.
Thanks for sharing your pipeline skygunner. Glad to hear I’m not the only one tweaking UV in the middle of the night. 