How to set up Trim sheets?

Hello and thanks for reading my post.

I am just starting out on my game development journey and thus far, my focus has been on learning the 3D art side of things. I have created some characters and associated props. I am now turning my attention to environment creation. One piece of advise that I received early on was to master the creation and use of Trim sheets. I have watched a few very good tutorials and read over some information. The information that I have looked over so far has covered what Trim sheets are, why they are used, and how to make them.

What has never been covered is how to import the Trim sheet and separate, modular meshes into a game engine and set it up. This is important for me because I am having a hard time wrapping my head around how the separate meshes all use the Trim sheet. Again, having done some work with characters and props where each mesh has its own individual set of texture maps makes a lot of sense to me.

So, my ask is, are there any videos that I can watch, or tutorials that I could read, or just instructions, that go into getting the trim sheet and separate meshes into Unity and setting everything up?

Thanks!

 

Hi, Stephen, did you find any information about using trim sheets in unity? Can you share it to me ?)

 

Not Unity, but I saw this case study from a real game: https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1022324/The-Ultimate-Trim-Texturing-Techniques
The key elements of using trim sheets are mesh topology and UV coordinates' layout. The topology should allow unwrapping any part of the mesh into rectangular strip, so some extra polygons may be needed. And then different objects use different parts of the same trim sheet by having their UV layout mapped to the specific parts of this sheet. (Material can also be the same, as long as UVs are unique for each object) Once you get the properly structured and unwrapped meshes, the usage in Unity shouldnt be any different than anywhere else. But unwrapping for such purpose is a big time sink. The devs from the article even wrote their own UV mapping plugin for 3ds Max to do that efficiently.
Another trick they used is to color objects with Vertex Colors instead of a "real" albedo map, and multiplying these VC with special detail masking texture to create color variation. In Unity, you'll need to write custom shader for that, as built-in shades do not display VC