Character takes up too much UV space/materials

Development Character & Animation
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1

I know that this has been asked before but I couldnt find any other information that was up to date and relevant to my case…

I have made a character that will be used in a school game project. The character is quite large (area wise) and is currently taking up around 4 uv tiles or in other words 4 materials inside the engine. The game is a FPS where you play as two characters constantly switching back and fourth between them. So this means that this characters arms, hands, crane and tank treads will be seen up close in the FPS view. And when we switch characters the other character will be able to walk up to him very close etc. (The human is just for scale reference).

unreal1.JPG
unreal1.JPG1716×1041 273 KB

unreal2.JPG
unreal2.JPG1969×588 318 KB

(Here’s a quick test auto pack to somewhat visualize the space they take up… 10.24 texel density for 2k map)

We have decided to go for a texel density of 10.24 with 2k textures for both characters. I was planning on having both arms and tank threads unique at first, but If they were my character would sit at around 5-6 uv-tiles/materials. I have read that it’s quite common for main characters to have 2-3 materials and such, but those forum threads were quite old so I don’t know where the situation stands right now.

Is it way too much to have 4 materials for a single character like this one? Should I aim for a lower texeldensity? what can I do in a situation like this?

Thanks in advance!

2

4 materials is fine, if you think of a typical character these days you’d have one for the head, one for the hair, one for the torso, one for the legs, one for eyes maybe, etc. So it can stack up as it is, 4 isn’t too much.

3

Alright. that’s good to know. I was turning my head inside out trying to figure out how to solve this.Thanks.

I know this very much depends from case to case, and that it might be hard for you or anyone to answer this… But what would be considered too many unique materials in unreal for a character such as this one? If I now were to make both of the arms and the treads unique the robot would land on around 5-6 tiles. would that also be regarded as fine?

  • The specs for the system we are making the game for is as follows; RTX 2070, 32gb ram and an i7
  • 1920x1080 at minimum of 30 fps (but we aim for around 60 at the least)