headus 3D tools

[MChez]

Basic question I imagine for most users, but new to me...

I'm used to laying out one UV set for one merged object with past projects. The one I'm working on now, I have the luxury of being able to have several high res images applied to one model, but I've never done this before, and never with UV layout.

Currently, I've modeled the mesh in XSI and it consists of several individual objects/meshes. I would like to have separatetextures maps for the upper body, lower body, head and accessories. Since the obj format can only carry over one set of UV's, what's the best way to approach this challenge?

My assumption is to select the appropriate meshes into groups, and send each unmerged group individually into UV layout. Do the UV work, export back and either manually move the UV clusters on to each object in XSI or GATOR the UV's over if I can sort that out piece for piece. I'd then Complete for each section (upper body, lower body, accessories, head) and finally make it a model prior to rigging.

Would this work? Is there a more streamlined way?

Thanks in advance!

[headus]

I think the easiest way to apply multiple maps to one object is via the use of UV tiles. You place all shells for the fist map in the 0 to 1 square, then all shells for the second map in the next square over, and so on.

If you have the Pro version, you could put all the shells you want together into separate boxes, then pack everything to minimize the empty space. Let say you're planning on using 4 maps, then fill 4 boxes with shells and in the Pack tool, set the Tile setting to 4 x 1 before clicking "Pack All".

Once you've loaded that mesh back into your modeling application, you should be able to assign a different map to each UV tile. Either that, or you can select the shells in each tile and assign different materials/shaders to that group.

I found this forum posting that goes through the steps in XSI ...

http://www.xsibase.com/forum/index.php?board=12;action=display;threadid=42755

Phil

[MChez]

Thanks for the fast reply Phil. I'll give that a try.