Hi everyone, I am a programmer and have no experience in 3D modeling. We have an outside company that is creating 3D models for use in our engine. What I need to know is whether a model (specifically, an airplane) can be textured over it''s entire surface using just one material, one texture map, and one set of texture coordinates. I would like to believe that this is possible, because it would cut the number of rendering passes down to just one pass to render the model. However, the company doing our content creation says that it is not possible to give the airplane model much detail without using multiple materials and multiple texture maps. Like I said, I know nothing about this, but I want to make sure that I am knowledgeable enough to be able to require "one material and one texture map per model". If anyone can enlighten me in regards to this, that would be great. Also, if it IS possible, but requires some magic dust to do correctly, I would very much appreciate any links to sites that describe the procedure. That way, I''m not just dictating requirements to the content creation company, but I can provide useful information to help them accomplish this. Thanks a lot for taking the time to read this. JG

It is a technique some call skinning and some call UV unwrapping. Basically you put all the detail that you are going to use into one texture and then you map certain parts of the texture to certain parts of the model. It is a very good technique as it does what you are thinking, reduce amount of texture state changes. I am surprised that a professional modeling company is not familiar with it, but it could be that they specialize in non-realtime rendering and have never had to think about the issues of realtime rendering of a model. It is true that you can get much more detail by using several materials, but for a game you sacrifice a little detail to maintain a realtime experience. That said, I don''t see why you can''t get very nice results from the skinning method I mentioned before.

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Original post by Anonymous Poster
It is a technique some call skinning and some call UV unwrapping. Basically you put all the detail that you are going to use into one texture and then you map certain parts of the texture to certain parts of the model. It is a very good technique as it does what you are thinking, reduce amount of texture state changes. I am surprised that a professional modeling company is not familiar with it, but it could be that they specialize in non-realtime rendering and have never had to think about the issues of realtime rendering of a model. It is true that you can get much more detail by using several materials, but for a game you sacrifice a little detail to maintain a realtime experience. That said, I don''t see why you can''t get very nice results from the skinning method I mentioned before.

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Thank you for the reply. Indeed, the company doing the content creation has a background primarily in broadcast medium. Hopefully, they can adapt this skinning technique into their content creation methodology and produce assets that satisfy our requirements for a realtime renderer. Thank you for giving me the information I needed to know that I''m not way off base in my requests from them.

JG

the landscape guys love multitexturing,
if texture bandwith in a whole is reduced ("compression"
two passes might be faster,
benchmark!