Hello!
1) Bring all your textures into a single 4096x4096 or 8192x8192 (etc.) image in Photoshop or? (Laying them out to fit as big as possible while leaving as little empty space as possible)
2) In material editor make a copy of your material with a different name (is temporary anyways) then put your new giant single texture in the diffuse slot of every sub-material. (or just make a multi-material that has the same number and clone the first material with the big texture in diffuse to do it quickly)
3) assign the new material to the object, it will look crazy but not for long!
4) assign an 'UNWRAP UVW' to the mesh in modifier stack. Open the UVW Editor, (button near top of Unwrap modifier), in the UV Editor window: look at bottom right, a drop-down that lets you select Material ID's!!!
Look at upper right, a drop-down that lets you select (or even load) what image (the ATLAS) you want in the background of this edit window! Look at up and lower Left...! Common controls like Select, Move, Rotate and Scale! hhmm,. You get it? 🙂
5) Select a Material ID that has a known shape, like the Head.. You should see the Head Mesh Flattened out and (it's UV's basically) looking like the familiar shape its TEXTURE is,. SO, making sure your BIG IMAGE (ATLAS) is in the background, Select the Head (you can choose Vertices or Faces etc even in this window!) in the UV Edit Window, then WITH ALL, OF ONLY, THE HEADS VERTICES OR FACES SELECTED, MOVE, and SCALE (AND OR EVEN ROTATE!) until it is aligned with its proper texture, that you made in Photoshop! yOU CAN USE zoom wheel ON MOUSE TO ZOOM N, MAYBE EVEN 'ctrl +' AND THERE ARE zoom extants AND zoom selection SELECTION TOOLS FOR THAT MATTER! 🙂
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You see?? IT IS SO POWERFUL!! YOU HAVE UTTER AND TOTAL CONTROL! IT IS SO EASY ONCE YOU KNOW HOW!
Then do material id,.. until they are all in the 'right' place relative to the ATLAS you made.
THEN WHEN DONE, add an EDIT MESH modifier, select all the faces, go into the Edit Mesh modifier and change all the faces to Material ID 1.
6) Make a third material, that has only one slot (not multi-material) and put your atlas in the Diffuse,. Apply to mesh. DONE!
What I do, is keep my ATLAS Work in a Photoshop PSD FIle, then I have the DIFFUSE as a guide when I do my Normal maps, my Specularity (or Metallness and Roughness) and Bump and Self-Illumination/Light emission maps!
Any GRAYSCALE Maps, can be assigned to the RBG or ALPHA Channel as a... (oh sorry that is a little to far into game theory and UE4 stuff,. I don't want top confuse you!)
Cool, huh?? I am making the ultimate VR game using Max, this technique.. UNREAL Engine, check it out announcement soon! youtube.com/NextWorldVR
If this helped you, BUY ME A COFFEE! 🙂(or ten pounds of coffee LOL) - Direct paypal donation link:
https://t.co/EiBlRnwAGX?amp=1
