Texture atlas

Texture Atlas

When many separate textures are packed together into a single texture, this is called a texture atlas. Other common names for this are decal sheet, packed texture.

• 10-09-2011 An exercise in modular textures - Scifi lab UDK - by Tor 'Snefer' Frick, an exercise in extreme texture atlasing, packing multiple maps into the four channels of a texture file.
• 12-20-2010 UV tiling tricks within 0 to 1 space from the Polycount forum
• 12-17-2010 Modular Building Workflow - ($) a 3dmotive tutorial by Tyler Wanlass, covers planning and workflow for modular buildings using Photoshop, 3ds Max, and UDK.
• 11-08-2010 Work-flow for large texture atlases from the Polycount forum
• 06-27-2010 Working with Modular Sets - by Philip 'PhilipK' Klevestav, how to design and texture modular sci-fi wall panels.
• 03-25-2010 Visually Appealing Building Guide - by Christopher Albeluhn, an excellent breakdown of how to create visual interest with game buildings. Additional tutorials here.
• 06-26-2008 Mod Facade Challenge - by Joe 'EarthQuake' Wilson, breaking up a building into modular pieces and designing the texture sheet.
• 11-08-2006 Creating tiling textures in 3dsmax - by Chris 'cholden' Holden
• 01-26-2006 Practical Texture Atlases on Gamasutra by Ivan-Assen Ivanov
• 12-20-2005 Thirding - Utilizing your texture space for environment work - by Ben 'poopinmymouth' Mathis
• has info about designing modular textures and assets.
• TextureCoordinates talks about planning your UV layout.
• LightMap has information about packing UVs.

Gutters

When a game model is textured using a single texture sheet, the texture will have typically have UV'd areas (UV shells) and blank areas between them (gutters).

The width of the gutter needs to be wide enough to accommodate how much EdgePadding you need. This varies depending on how large the texture is and the texture filtering type used by the game renderer.

Packing Tools

• Decent UV Packing Script/Tool? thread on the Polycount forum.
• Headus UVLayout ($)
• UV Master script for ZBrush
• TexTools script for 3ds Max
• Xrayunwrap ($) script for 3ds Max
• Texture Atlas Generator script for 3ds Max (creates an atlas by slicing up the mesh)
• Normalize UVs Maxscript for 3ds Max
• Texture Atlas Tools by Nvidia

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