Working with Texture Atlases

I’ve been slowly building out a dedicated shanty kitbash library for a personal project. The idea is to combine a collection of procedural geometry node tools for fast blocking with smaller, low-poly props and textures for the kind of set dressing that makes a scene feel lived in.

In both cases, one of the biggest hits to performance comes from excessive textures, so I’ve been using shared atlas sheets as much as possible. You’d be surprised at how low-res a texture can be and still look great. Normally I’d lean on Textures.com or my own catalog of scans, but recently I’ve been using AI more intensively. Partly because I love being able to art-direct exactly what I need, but also because once the textures are baked down, I can share them much more freely. Ultimately, I just want to make cool shit for a living and share as much of it as possible without restrictions.

For the photo textures, Nano Banana Pro has been pretty consistent. I’ll curate and format those generations into atlases using Figma, packing as many options into a single sheet as possible. From there, I use a handful of modeling tricks to build out the physical props. When it comes to making models from flat textures, nobody comes close to @IanHubert2 , and honestly, most of my techniques evolved straight from his tutorials.

I’ve also developed a bunch of hacky workarounds for adding depth to things like corrugated metal or hanging fabric. Unless I’m planning on a macro close-up, I’m pretty shameless with how I fake dimension and detail to save on performance.

Like most of what I make, these are tools I built to solve my own production bottlenecks and creative block, but I've cleaned up the Geometry Node tools and my favorite atlas libraries for Patrons this month, alongside a full video walkthrough.

Download the asset library and watch the tutorial on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/goodgood3d

Видео Working with Texture Atlases канала GoodGood