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.

• has examples of texture atlases, and atlas planning methods.
• Work-flow for large texture atlases from the Polycount forum
• UV tiling tricks within 0 to 1 space from the Polycount forum
• Practical Texture Atlases on Gamasutra by Ivan-Assen Ivanov
• See also TextureCoordinates and LightMap.

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

---