3.0 WIP: Combined Materials! (and more)

something ive honestly wanted to do for a long time but was afraid to mess with texture edits people had made do to the UVs being shifted around, i figured with 2.1 being complete and having ideas that need more material slots, now was as good of a time as ever to finally do it.

The same materials and groups are there as always, and are split into folders to keep them organized, but all the primary textures are now combined into one Super texture.

This of course does have some downsides, such as:

-All previous alternate parts will have to be updated to the new UV placement

-Editing textures is probably a good bit more complicated for someone first learning to get around (i will make an updated guide to hopefully help with this)

-height maps will have to be edited to give the correct look

-how the materials are handled in unity will have to be completely redone

BUT. In the end i think it will be worth it. It will clean up the files (which ill be the first to admit are a real mess at the moment), All primary materials now support height and specular maps out of the box now, and most importantly there are many more material slots opened up while keeping the model in the medium avatar rating on VRChat! (plus its just better optimized out of the gate).

There's more in the works too, including a new alternate part to add an analog VU meter to the chest plate and...

Stickers!

a fun idea that my gf came up with, I've been figuring out a way to make it as simple as possible to have little meshes that shrinkwrap to the phonodroid model for quick customization without having to delve into texture editing. They have their own material (hence why i needed to clear up space with the other ones) which can have "sticker pack" textures made by me or anyone else put on it and simply changing the UV placement will allow for multiple stickers from the same pack anywhere on the model. These stickers support transparency, height, and specular maps to allow for any sort of look someone might want to give them.

The idea doesnt sound like much work, but like i said, what I've been dealing with is how to make it Simple enough that people without too much blender experience can make it work quickly. So far what I've come up with is having a dummy model with a simplified mesh to make placing the shrinkwrapped sticker mesh on it much easier.

(The void areas are the areas where stickers would look weird/broken if put on)

There is still one issue I'm working out and that's how to make weight painting simple enough. unfortunately that aspect is pretty unavoidable 😓

Theres some internal changes i wanna make with 3.0 so its probably still a good ways off so for now the alternate parts are still planned for 2.1 compatibility for me to update to 3.0 UVs later, which means until then stickers will push the avatar above medium unfortunately. I know it's not a huge deal in the end but its a personal goal for me to make all my avatars medium or lower;

Thank you for reading!