First time posting here. I am currently working on Blender to create some modular weapons so that you can pick different pieces and create a custom weapon. I am wondering if it makes sense to pack the UVs of multiple meshes in a single texture or have separate textures for each mesh. Does it make any significant difference in performance and size of the final game?
The reason I am asking is because the each mesh will be used independently of the others that it might share the same texture image with.
If you expect the various meshes to be loaded at the same time (having all those weapons visible in a barrel for example), then it could be cheaper to have one texture asset for them, since you will only load the asset once.
If you only expect to have them one at a time, then separating the textures might be better.
“Does it make any significant difference in performance and size of the final game?”
This would depend on the size of your texture, how many objects you plan to use it for, etc.
Optimization in general would also depend on the size of your project. For smaller projects, you don’t really need to do proper in-depth optimization, since the content won’t be that heavy, whereas in big AAA-sized ones, you’d likely want to squeeze every drop you can.