Texture atlas

We consulted AI on how to efficiently manage multiple assets—such as banner images for a previous article, as well as paintings and frames for display within the facility—during both development and runtime. Texture arrays and texture atlases emerged as candidates, and we ultimately decided to proceed with the latter.

In fact, we had already adopted a texture atlas approach for elements like puzzle pieces. However, the method used to switch texture offsets—subtly altering the object’s scale and detecting that change within the shader—lacked versatility. This time, we had the AI ​​write a Unity editor script to embed texture indices into the mesh’s UV2 channel; this allowed me to create multiple indexed meshes and switch offsets using that data.

For this iteration, we recreated the models for some of the picture frames and similar items to align with this method.