Texture Atlas
Multiple assets, one texture
Definition
A texture atlas is a single texture that contains the UV space of many separate objects packed together. Atlasing reduces draw calls (one material, many meshes) and is fundamental to optimising scenes with hundreds of small props — UI elements, modular debris, foliage cards, character accessories.
In production
Pack atlases manually in your UV editor or use UVPackmaster / Substance Sampler's pack tools. Maintaining consistent texel density across packed islands is the main quality challenge, since a background prop and a hero prop sharing one atlas can end up mismatched in resolution if UV islands aren't scaled to a common texel-per-meter ratio (commonly 512-1024 px/m for game environments) before packing. Rectangular packing algorithms like UVPackmaster's "rect packing" mode waste less atlas space than the default polygon-fit packer, which matters when an atlas is shared across dozens of debris meshes on a mobile budget. A frequent mistake is atlasing objects that need independent tiling or scrolling UVs (like a conveyor belt texture) into a shared, non-repeating atlas — once packed, those islands can no longer tile without bleeding into neighboring islands, so tiling surfaces are usually kept on their own trim sheet or tiling material instead of the prop atlas.
