Using Efficient UV Layouts to Shorten Work

UVs are, more often then not, something you cope with rather than welcome into your workflow. But they aren’t always the spawn of Satan. If you use UV overlapping, it can save you a lot of time texturing repetitive areas like the windows of a building. If these areas all have the same topology (number and layout of faces), you can save yourself a lot of work. Here is a quick video showing how you can extract areas of similar topology into distinct units that can then share one set of unwrapped UVs:

The video shows a quick-and-dirty unwrap so don’t think I’m that sloppy in general. I’m using my Facer MEL script palette for the UV transfer portion. Once you’re done, combine the separated mesh and then you can just drop one window graphic into the texture and have them all share that:

If you are working on a mobile game, this kind of high-efficiency texturing is needed to reduce load times and bandwidth.

If you need more variety for your windows, or want to later bake a separate occlusion dirt map that uses unique UVs for the windows, take a look at my tutorial here. This way, you can combine the quick work of a tiled texture with the variety of a hand-tweaked dirt map by using two UV sets and a multiply/divide node.

Sorry about the low post count lately. Been very busy finishing a magazine, writing articles for Ars Technica and I’m finishing an e-book that I’ll be announcing and publishing soon.

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