To be quick, I have a robot model that contains multiple different objects that are each linked to a different bone.
My question is this: How would you best texture a “model” which is actually a huge number (40+) of different objects all linked to a skeleton? Thank you!
It does not really matter if different objects belong to one armature as far as texturing goes.
You could consider painting each part separately and later bake individual textures into one image tho. Or, make use of addons making image atlas where all parts get joined initially, then separated.
Being an old noob do you have a video suggestion which will allow me to ‘see’ the process you speak of?
Have no pointers to videos covering subject precisely unfortunately, however…
Imagine you have a human-like armature: head, torso, 2 hands, 2 legs, 6 bones in total. You can attach Cubes to the individual bones by Parenting so that one bone drives one cube object.
Now, there is no secret how cube can be unwrapped and textured, methinks. If you do texture ‘full body’ in the example above you end up with at least 4 texture images: head, torso, one hand and one leg- you reuse same hand and leg images for the left and right, ofc.
Imagine you combine all 4 images into one big image using photo editing software. You can place UV unwraps for Cubes on this big image and make changes in texture settings for each cube so that instead of using separate images big one is used.
That’s it in a short.
Texture Atlas addon is advertised and briefly described last time in G.Alexandrov’s YT channel here afaik.
Blender’s wiki page for addon - https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.6/Py/Scripts/UV/TextureAtlas