abstrax wrote:Since UDIMs seem to be all the rage lately: What exactly is the benefit of UDIMs over normal texturing? From what I can see, the mesh UV map is distributed over multiple UV [1,1] squares and each square is then assigned a different physical texture. Usually, each UV square seems to cover one part of the mesh that is more or less separate from the rest of the mesh. So why not just split the mesh into multiple objects and map each object to the regular UV square?
The benefit of UDIM (and other multi-UVtiles convention) is to have higher resolution for textures only on needed part of an object without finishing with one giant texture file,
this also benefit worflow and organisation, for example it's easier to have only one UberMaterial per object.
Spliting the object wouldn't be handy, for example for a character it's way easier to keep it as one mesh, in the modeling tool, the sculpting/texturing tool, and the animation/skining tool,
and anyway you would end with one material per mesh chunks, so it would be hard to edit all materials at the same time.
The UDIM hype also comes from Mari/Modo/Nuke pushing for this workflow, but there's also the conventions used by Mudbox and Zbrush.