Lightmaps and multiple UV sets

[andrewG]

Here's the tutorial, I created that shows how I used multiple UV sets to put two different textures on one mesh. I used this so I could have a repeating tillable grass texture and one texture for the shadow information.

If you have any questions or something is unclear please let me know, so i can make the tutorial better.

enjoy

[andrewG]

part 2.

[SpiralFace]

If I may, I just want to ask in actual level design how practicle is this technique as a way of breaking up the monotany? Do most game engines support extra UV sets?

[dabu]

The hawk engine did, we could get as many as 4 sets of uvs on a single face, and have blending options in between them to boot.

Its pretty common to get 2 passes per face in most engines these days, and many will support multiple uv sets, or so Im told.

[rburke]

check out some of the posts in the games environments class. A few of us where using multiple uv sets in order to bake ao pass info to secondary uv sets which would be mixed with the textures within maya. Its actually a very efficient work flow and is supported by any current gen engine.

[Amad]

Good tutorial, Ryan. This whole area was great to learn about during this last project!

One thing to mention, when working on multiple UV sets in Maya, 9 out of 10 problems that arise (and they do arise) can come from rebuilding the shader that controls the current set of textures applied to an object. So if you get blackouts, streaks or just visual errors that don't make any logical sense, just rebuild the shader and follow the tutorial again.

[David McMahon]

Ryan also pointed us to Mental Mill, which does some pretty nice stuff. I mention it again here because they are presenting at GDC, Wednesday and Thursday I think, and anyone who loves working with multiple uv sets is probably interested. Their downloadable version is currently free, but they start charging next month when it officially comes out with the latest version of 3dsmax.

Dave

[David McMahon]

Here is something the MM people sent me:

"Thank you for your interest in mental mill and pointing us to your blog. It sounds like you have already made great progress using our tool.

We will be at the GDC in the NVIDIA Expo Suite #656, West Hall 1st Floor, where we will be launching mental mill. Please come by and visit us.

mental mill Standard Edition will be available for sale on the mental images website in April 2009.

mental mill Artist Edition will be bundled with Autodesk's 3ds Max release in April. They will also be showing our product at the GDC in the Autodesk exhibitor booth 5045.

Neil Hazzard from Autodesk will be talking about the integration of MetaSL (the language that mental mill shaders are written in) on Thursday:
https://www.cmpevents.com/GD09/a.asp?option=C&V=11&SessID=9407

[ Thursday (March 26, 2009) 3:00pm — 4:00pm
Location (room): Room 2002, West Hall]

On Friday Blue Castle Games will present how they used mental mill on Dead Rising 2:
https://www.cmpevents.com/GD09/a.asp?option=C&V=11&SessID=9358

[Friday (March 27, 2009) 12:00pm — 1:00pm
Location (room): Room 2011, West Hall]

There is a raffle for an NVIDIA card and a mental mill Standard Edition license, so be sure to encourage all of your friends and colleagues to come to this too!

We currently have one video tutorial on our website:
http://www.mentalimages.com/products/mental-mill/documents.html
We plan more videos to coincide with our product release in April. Stay tuned!"

Dave

[A_GAME]

Thanks for taking the time to make this, Andrew. I had no idea how to create layered shaders or that one mesh could have multiple UV sets! U rock

[matthewparis]

Daniel tipped me off to this thread, awesome technique! Using it on my room now.

One thing you might want to specify is that if your doing, a floor for instance, you need to extract the floors faces and make it it's own mesh. Sharing connected faces and uvs with say the wall, gave me trouble getting it to work.