Did you know that if you do all of your UVW maps for an object on channel 2:

you can paint a biped, feature-for-feature independently,

Then simply RenderToTexture and bake it all to channel 1 as a single texture so you don't have to waste tagspace on things like multitextured bipeds and stuff?

EDIT: And also, halo only recognizes textures from Channel 1 from what I've seen and tested. So this kind of texturing seems almost nondestructive
Edited by OrangeJuice on Feb 6, 2017 at 12:38 AM

I'm confused;

Painting, Skinning and UVW Maps are all terms used for the process of texturing a 3D model.

Painting and Skinning are also terms used when Rigging a 3D model.

I honestly can't tell which one we're talking about here.

If he's talking about RTT it's obviously texturing and not rigging.

Oh and you are correct OJ Halo only recognises channel 1 as do nearly all other games.

However the workflow which you have uncovered is essentially redundant given that layers and masks are far easy to utilise and require less fiddeling.

For those who are confused here is a simple explanation.

A mesh can have multiple uv channels, i.e a channel for a head a channel for arms and a channel for a bipeds legs.

Now you can texture each channel individually if say you wanted different details for different parts of your biped. How and which parts of your model you would like to texture individually would be up to you.

All that would be required would be to move the associated uvs of the mesh you wish to isolate to a unique channel.

Now to bring everything together again you would then render or bake all of these different channels into one texture sheet and voila.

If you are still confused think in terms of material ID's where in each MAT ID would equate to a uv channel thus allowing you to partition a mesh into individual sections without actually detaching any geometry.

As I said this technique although useful is a total waste of time and effort given you can achieve the same results by using multiple layers/masks to isolate texture information.

Or if you are a substance hipster like me or a quixel fggt like sean a simple colour ID map would suffice.


EDIT.

Oh wait you mean moving multiple material data to different channels?

Well in that case it's not nearly as worthless as I made it sound.

So lets go back to the beginning fams.

Say I have two diffuse maps for one model and I want to combine those maps into one sheet instead of two.

All I would need to do is add one material with my first diffuse map to channel 1 and then input my second diffuse map to channel 2.

Then select my mesh and bake everything down to one channel which would combine the two texture materials I have applied to my two uv channels all into one clean single texture.
Edited by Super Flanker on Feb 6, 2017 at 03:13 PM
Edited by Super Flanker on Feb 6, 2017 at 03:14 PM