Working with UVs. How do i mask one specific cube on a mesh of merged cubes? Video:

Development Programming & Scripting
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If you merge 2 meshes that have the same material, they can use the same material.
I dont know exactly how that is done in the engine, but it seems the material is being instanced.
So it seems there are 2 options when merging meshes:

1- Merge mesh and merge materials: Will make a texture atlas with a new UV. Awesome.
2- Dont merge material. Will not merge materials, but will reuse the material for both meshes being merged. So you end up with only 1 material if you are merging meshes with the same material. For example:
Say you are merging 10 trees into 1 mesh and the trees all have the same material.
When you merge them you end up with 1 material of 1 tree that is “instancing” in all the mesh. This is useful because you dont want to make a texture atlas of 4000x4000 for the whole mesh of trees. If that makes sense.

Now the issue is, if you merge a bunch of trees with the same material. How can you mask the material if it is “instancing” the material of 1 tree to all the mesh?

Here i made a video explaining it:

But i dont understand still how can i select one of the cubes? Do i still need a texture of all the cubes? Like thats going to be insanely large the moment i have a lot of cubes…?

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In UE you have Material slots inside static meshes and skeletal meshes.

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It depends wich software are you using as 3D tool…in MAX you can have a single mesh with multiple materials by Material IDs, in blender you can do the same for a single mesh and manipulate different materials on one single object. When you export as FBX and import to UE you will see there are Material slots for that.

And regarding UVs its the same as any 3D app…you can share texture maps and UVs inside your single mesh for different elements (or islands or components or whatever you want to call it :slight_smile:

Best,
Dany

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