multiple textures on one image

i’ve been wanting to revisit an old post (april 10th, 2010) which is still as applicable today as it was then

when i run into an object that needs an imported texture, i tend to think of each texture as one image, but you can place several textures on one image if it makes sense from a file size perspective (both in actual pixel size of the image and kilobytes)

the original post talked about doing shipping containers and this post will reiterate that and also mention that these containers are on the new enerhax.com freebie site

shipping containers, books, coffee cups, toasters, pizza boxes, shoe boxes, and product boxes are good candidates for this approach. there are advantages for small items like books (or like a shipping container which can look beat up and use a lower quality texture) to use multiple textures on one image file – it saves on file size and on the number of files in your inventory

for example, a book has a front cover, back cover, spine, and closed pages and you could easily fit on one 256 pixel image and retain decent quality

for this post (and the old), i placed the textures of a shipping container on one file – the top & bottom, the two sides, the door, and the end. this one it is an odd size because at 256 it really broke down but it is smaller than a 512. the container textures are right around 50 kilobytes which is small considering each is really four textures

the old post talks about the base image in terms of percentage and the images below show the actual settings in the edit dialogue (plus making a container with an open door that you can enter – like the one in a rocket graveyard in Enclave Harbour to play hide and seek in) =)

it’s easy to do and something to keep in your bag of tricks as an efficient way to organize inventory items for those items where this approach makes sense

if you have a need for dimensionally accurate shipping containers, get them as freebies including the textures (the door sections are stretched out for sake of the tutorial)

hiding spot behind 55 gallon drums inside the green container! (no peeking on the mini-map) =)