Small props and variations help

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1

Hi everyone, I’m currently working on an environment where I need to have some kind of shelf with bottles like this one:

As you can see there are many elements and I would like to integrate this in an optimized way with several variations but I don’t want to have too many materials per bottle.

I have several solutions but I would like your opinion:

  1. Model a single bottle and apply an atlas texture for my variations. (I might have a lot of small bottle mesh)

  2. Model the shelf and bottles and make only one mesh (I know it’s better to have a single mesh than a lot of small ones but I’m afraid it doesn’t look so good in terms of texel density and I’d be limited later if I want to change the position of some elements)

  3. Use a material for the bottle and another material with a kind of atlas of my labels with correctly mapped uvs (this solution looks good to me but it’s the same, I might have a lot of small bottle mesh)

obviously I’m sure there are other solutions but I didn’t really find anything that would allow me to do this in an optimized way.

if you have any suggestions I would be happy to read them.

Thank you in advance.

2

I would have the shelf object as it’s own item.

I would models several bottles. There’s a square one, different round ones, etc… But you could probably get by with 3 and rescale a couple. I would have one texture for all of them. That’ll keep batch count down. They’ll all be seen together anyway.

I would have each available as a separate model, so one could be on the sink, in a bedroom…
Then depending on project you could make a ‘shelf bottles’ model where you make an arrangement of them so you only have one model (but you could put a solo bottle in there the player could highlight/grab)
You could make 3 arrangements of bottles so if the player goes in 10 bathrooms they aren’t all the same… Or you could have one arrangement on top shelf, a different one on bottom shelf.

You can also spread uv’s for a couple caps and bottles around. So once shape bottle could have a few textures or cap colors to mix it up. But all on one sheet for draw calls and ease of use.

Depends on the variations and usage for your project really.