I’m making a character for animation production and I’m wondering what the best way to unwrap all the parts is. Should the whole character’s UVs be in the same set or should I use multiple sets for all the different parts? I’ve seen tutorials where the whole character’s UVs are laid out in one grid, but surely the texture resolution would have to be very high for it to look any good?
I hope I’m making sense, any advice would be greatly appreciated!
not uv sets… you need UDIMs…
for a cinematic char i would aim for a texel density of one 4k map for an area like the back of a jacket…
the whole jacket would have 4 UDIM… one for the back… one front… each arm plus small strips…
if you dont have super closeups you could go with one 4k… but for the entire char it should be about 20 UDIMs…
the face needs more resolution for closeups…
UV sets and UDIM/tiled textures have different purposes. UV sets are useful if you need multiple UVs for the same part of a mesh. For example, you may want different UVs for diffuse and for bump, or if you’re rigging UVs and want to be able to affect UVs for one texture without affecting others.
UV sets are very useful, but also a bit on the buggy side (eg. layeredTexture tends to break them, which is really unfortunate), so I avoid them unless I have a specific need for them.
maybe something to think aobut is to seperate the UDIMs by material and not objects…
sometimes its easier to manage the materials if you have them sepereated also in the uvs…
one example is here in the making of SMITE… at 5:18
Thank you very much for your feedback! I do have another question though.
As far as I know, UDIMs share a material. So for each material, you’ll have a UDIM consisting of multiple blocks in the grid.
However, in the video, they seem to be able to compile all the character’s textures into one UDIM. But surely that must mean that they textures share the same material, which doesn’t make any sense to me.
(I noticed that the V axis in the UDIM consists of the different materials, so perhaps each with each vertical block you can use another material? I’m not sure)
Do you know if there is a way to put all your textures into one UDIM?
you load multiple textures in one go… the maya file node is abel to read them all in one go… you can use mutiple shaders and shift the uvs or use only one material and override the parameters like roughness with the texture… the skinshader would be a seperate material but all other could be done wih the same materia if you wish… its up to you…