Suggestion for Game Developement Fund

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
1

Hey guys,
this is a project suggestion for the game developement fund.
In the game industry it is very common to have multiple objects in one uv layout. Be it for saving space or creating lightmaps or other stuff. I think there are lots of cases where you need it!
Unfortunately blender lacks that functionality, at least this is my last status that I know. Wouldn’t this be an awesome feature
to add? I also heard of some studios which are using blender in the game creation pipeline and are missing this feature desparately.
I once have written a lightbaker addon which creates a lightmap for all selected objects. This merged all objects together unwrapped them and then separated the objects again and restored all important data again. This way I could have one uv layout for multiple objects.
The texture atlas which is in the blender addons repo actually is based on my work back then.

So what do you think? Since we have a game developement fund which is for game related stuff. Wouldn’t this be an appropriate project to do?

Has someone of you guys missed this feature already? Maybe we can get a discussion going and hear some developer thoughts on that.

2

Yeah agree, it would be neat for game assets. I saw that atlas addon and liked it.

I think on the blender podcast a while back ago, campbell addressed that he wanted to tackle multiple object in edit mesh at the same time when he have code holiday from bug fixing and can work on stuff that interest him.

for me that feature in blender, would automatically have to enable UV unwrapping several objects in edit mesh mode and the ability to have many or only a single UV Map.

I mean would that be the workflow? if you didn’t know any tricks like the Atlas addon, just to select multiple objects and unwrap to a new single uvmap.

maybe the funding could go to campbell to have a code holiday and do this, I guess the multiple edit mesh aspect is more tricky since noone has fixed it yet.


In the UV/Image Editor a neat option would be to display Name, as you can do in 3d viewport for objects. So either object name, or Mesh name would be visible in the UV Editor when unwrapping several objects into one Uv Map

3

I’m a game developer, and I miss this a LOT.

4

What’s wrong with unwrapping meshes into different UV maps (stack), joining meshes(objects), bringing all UVs into UV #1 (deleting all other UVs in the stack) and having an atlas ?

5

The problem with that is that you have to seperate the meshes again. This can be quite tedious depending on the meshes, because most of the time you have all your game-assets on the point of origin.

6

Spread them through scene layers :wink:

But really, how many assets are you going to have on an atlas? Not too many unless it’s such models like coins, apples, bottles, rocks, etc. environmental clutter.

Don’t get me wrong, it would be nice to edit several objects at once, without joining them.

7

This is currently nr.1 requested feature for gamedev - you can check it out here - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AuS_F0ZKX-zTdGxKOEMtRmI2Tno4UUlPZzVfNXB6RHc#gid=0

Also the best place to discuss possible implementation is the gamedev mailing list.

8

At my company (Okam) we use Blender to make games, and this is definitely and without a doubt the most requested feature by the artists too.

9

I think in this case, anyone who takes up development of this should go ahead and allow for multiple objects at once in editmode as well (providing it’s not a hacked method like joining objects). This would go hand in hand with having UV maps from more than one object in the UV editor. The result would be a nice workflow acceleration even if you’re not working with games.

10

I have been looking at using the UV atlas addon in my own work,
But have not picked it up yet, but another thing, what about making a “material sheet” that has a bunch of uv atlas texture faces,

and reusing uv textures while making assets? (this face = this uv map section etc?)

11

cage baking would be very helpful for game assets

12

you mean for BI , right ? Because cycles has cage baking now.

13

yeah, for BI :slight_smile:

14

In the game industry it is very common to have multiple objects in one uv layout. Be it for saving space or creating lightmaps or other stuff. I think there are lots of cases where you need it!
Unfortunately blender lacks that functionality, at least this is my last status that I know. Wouldn’t this be an awesome feature
to add? I also heard of some studios which are using blender in the game creation pipeline and are missing this feature desparately.

Take a look on BakeTool, it have it own Atlas UV Pack function, that was exacly why we add this function in BakeTool since we use it a lot here.

Atlas Mode Bake in 2m 45seg / Pack UV Space in 3m 30seg

I would like to see a Blender Development Found investing in Custom (and Editable) Normals, PBR viewport shader and in a initial roadmap for the future interactive mode of BGE