thinInstance multiple materials

@Dshah_H, I think that @Evgeni_Popov is right in that fixing the UVs at the mesh source is the most optimal solution. If you want to map your atlased texture to a part of your mesh, there are a couple of things you should do. This is agnostic of any DCC tool, so you can do this in any of them.

To keep the UV sets clean and easy to work with I would create a separate UV set so that you don’t have textures colliding in your UV space. On that second UV set, you will map your panel in one of two ways depending on the format of your texture. If you are using a non-square texture for your atlas, you will map your UVs to the full 0-1 space which will distort the texture, but when applied to the mesh which is the correct proportion, the mesh will correct any stretching in UV space:


Assume this is your texture and each iteration in the atlas is at the proportion of the panel in your mesh. You would then lay out your UVs for the panel like this:


With the grid being the entire 0-1 of UV space and the blue line being your UV edges for the panel.

If you needed to create a square texture, you will end up changing the proportion of the artwork that needs to be applied to the panel. To prevent any distortion of the artwork, you will need to create the texture with extra padding on each side so that slicing the panel proportion out of the center will yield no distortion:

Assume each square in this atlas needs the type to not be distorted, but we have extra padding in the background color to act as a “bleed” for the texture. The UVs then retain the proportion of the original panel so that you eliminate any distortion to the art:

You can see that in this case the blue line of the UV edge cuts out the center of the texture tile and will eliminate any unneeded pixels to retain the correct proportion to the mesh panel.

Obviously the non-square texture is more optimal since we aren’t carrying around the extra pixels that are unnecessary for the mesh proportions leading to a smaller download while still being able to use the same offsets in UV space for the atlas to work.

I hope this clears up a bit about how you would UV for that panel to tile, but feel free to ping me back if anything is unclear.

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