Our game levels are pieced together by designers in our level editor using discreet assets that have their own mesh and texture data.
We need to do some texture atlasing and geometry merging to reduce draw calls.
I’m hoping to reverse build the levels in 3DS Max and merge / atlas things there.
I’m pretty confident I can loop over the meshes in a scene and combine them in mxs,
but the texture atlasing is a wheel I’d rather not re-invent
So I’m looking for tools or scripts to help.
Are there any industry standard tools for this?
I use my TransformUVWs script… Lets you percicely move rotate and scale uvs.
http://www.polyleaf.com/rapeljefiles/MattRapelje_TransformUVWs.zip
There are other tools out there that I have not used…
eh ? whats wrong with the standard UVW Xform modifier ?
I like to do all my UV editing in the UV Editor inside the Unwrap Modifier. Which is where the above tool works…
theres some old stuff from Nvidia herethat can collect the texture into a single atlas map. Though the whole atlas creation from within max is a non-trivial solution, as it really depends on how the artist have created the assets, if all the individual maps are already page maps in their own right not so tricky, any tiling and you’ll run into issues. Also are the artist using multi-materials ? as some of the tools you would like to use don’t like being constrained by material ID, I had to alter the UVW xform modifier to work on just a single ID, for my own tool (the core routine is here). I would post a link to the whole thing but it’s not a generic tool as it’s dependencies are bit spider web like (custom plugins & script extensions).
If you haven’t got time to or just don’t want to write something specific for your needs, I tried out this atlas script and it was good, nothing to do with me just found it on script spot
http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/texture-atlas-generator
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