UV mapping of common surfaces?

[ThePriest909]

New to UV mapping so... another noob question by me.

Let's assume that we have a basic cube model. And we need (for some reason.. that's performance vs graphic detail reason) to apply a common copy of a single square texture on each one of its 6 surfaces.
Making the question a bit more clear..... Not spreading its surfaces on a square texture but having each one of them using the exact same texture.

One way to do it I suppose would be to overlap all his 6 surfaces on a common space. Is there any other way of doing it without having to deal with overlapping UVs?

I'm not a native english speaker so sorry if my question isn't clear enough.
Thanks.

[obihb]

Nope, that's pretty much it.

If you want the ability to use another image on another face you can use id's then as well. But if not, make them same id to be more efficient.

[mslaf]

Is there any other way of doing it without having to deal with overlapping UVs?

There is visually and there isn't technically.

- You can always go beyond the image space - ie. when using multiple generic textures on a single object and/or mixing them with some unique one.

- All coordinates beyond the image bound will be normalized to 0-1 space in the shader pipeline.

[ThePriest909]

Thanks for the info!
I first noticed this technic three years ago while I was still modding for "The elder scrolls IV".
I noticed that when I was applying a specific texture on a specific surface of a mesh already created by game's developers it was popping up on some other specific surfaces of the mesh as well. I never really found out how they did it back then because of the .nif format they used.
That way they achieved having better texture analysis in game, since the model wasn't spreading and sharing a single texture's pixels but actually the texture came to copy itself in full length several times on the mesh.