Combine in one texture

[Nmzik]

Hello!I have a model of the city with building(on some buildings 16 materials).What can you advise for me?Texture atlas?How to do it??And then i need manually move my uv map?Or maybe another options??
Thank you

[darthviper107]

It depends--you're going to want to reduce the amount of materials as much as possible. For a building it'll probably be complicated--you most likely have some tiled textures like bricks or whatever which you wouldn't be able to tile if you combined it with other textures into one texture.

Plus I would imagine that 16 textures reduced to one would require a pretty large texture map and you wouldn't be able to maintain the quality.

[Nmzik]

It depends--you're going to want to reduce the amount of materials as much as possible. For a building it'll probably be complicated--you most likely have some tiled textures like bricks or whatever which you wouldn't be able to tile if you combined it with other textures into one texture.

Plus I would imagine that 16 textures reduced to one would require a pretty large texture map and you wouldn't be able to maintain the quality.

Thank you for your answer
I want to reduce draw calls.
Can i connect(collapse) all my textures together in photoshop?But what about model?i need to manually move my uv map?Its very long
What will you do instead of me?

[JessieG]

You would either have to duplicate the buildings and layout the UVs on the duplicates to not overlap then bake the textures from the originals on to the new ones. It'll probably be low quality and your lightmaps will probably look awful.

What you SHOULD do is separate those buildings into different meshes, ideally with parts you can duplicate many times. It's never a good idea to make an entire building as one mesh unless it's a far off background building that the player will never get close to.

[Nmzik]

You would either have to duplicate the buildings and layout the UVs on the duplicates to not overlap then bake the textures from the originals on to the new ones. It'll probably be low quality and your lightmaps will probably look awful.

What you SHOULD do is separate those buildings into different meshes, ideally with parts you can duplicate many times. It's never a good idea to make an entire building as one mesh unless it's a far off background building that the player will never get close to.

Hello JessieG!Ok I understood but why I need to separate into different meshed??What will be affect,differences?

[JessieG]

If you have a large building as 1 piece, the whole thing needs to be rendered even if you only see a small part of it. Multiple pieces allow the engine to render only what's visible. Also, making a building as one whole piece means you need to try to pack all of the UVs into the 0-1 space without overlapping for your lightmap Uvs. This will make your pixel density small for the entire building resulting in HORRIBLE shadow problems when you build the lights unless you bump the lightmap res up to an insanely high number which is bad for performance.

Using one piece that you duplicate a bunch of times also saves on resources. It's possible to make it one mesh, sure but you may struggle to get it to look nice and perform well.

[Graylord]

Making something in pieces will also let you mix and match parts as you like. One set could give nearly endless combinations, which will save you tons of time compared to making each combination.

[JessieG]

Making something in pieces will also let you mix and match parts as you like. One set could give nearly endless combinations, which will save you tons of time compared to making each combination.

Another good point. It also keeps the art style consistent throughout.