A quick chat about creating Mid-poly 3d models. Looking for Blender 3d resources? Check out my website for links to assets, addons, discord, and more. www.pzthree.com/
Nice video. Currently learning about Trimmsheets and its amazing. Could you tell me when you would use a UV Atlas? I have only heard about it once and the second time was in your last video, what is it used for and why would you want to use it? Thanks in advance!
Typically you would atlas a UV because one great way to optimize game assets is to have as many assets as possible all using one texture map and thus one material. For example, let's say you have several models: a ketchup, mustard, relish, salt, pepper, plate, fork. You could give them each their own material, but these objects are small and could all occupy space on one big texture. In the game engine, this means only one texture being sampled and often batching them together, fewer draw calls, and so on. Things like this allow major speedups. It's not always possible to atlas things though. Large objects demand their own space if only to maintain texel density as desired. For decals, especially small decals, you should always atlas them for the same exact reasons.
There's also texture arrays, where you have an array of equally sized textures in the shader, and then for each vertex you need to store an index, which is the index of the texture that the face is using. Probably some pros and cons to consider there.
