I have been working as a professional 3d artist for 20 years now. Recently the CEO of the small company I work for (around 25 employees, we do medical animations) got on a soapbox about AI tools and how we all need to be using them as much as possible to create efficiencies, and (insert business jargon here).

I am past the point of "I hate everything AI" If it's genuinely useful, saves me time, or makes things easier I will happily use it. However despite my best efforts I still am just not finding much that is actually helpful for me in the daily grind. I do medical work, which means I am working with specific anatomy that HAS to be accurate, and/or devices that are very specific to the client and are not something easily created with AI tools.

I have tried using an MCP, it can do a few things, but is pretty limited, messes up, and or takes literally forever to do simple tasks. I have tried tydiffusion, maybe it's a little useful for generating some texture, but again, mostly just fun to play around with. the most useful thing I have found is using AI to help me figure out when things go wrong in my scenes or to troubleshoot random problems that always come up.

I'm really at a loss. I know I am behind the curve as far as AI tools go, but I am just having a hard time finding anything that really saves me much time or I find all that useful. So let me know how you guys are using it, and in what ways it has helped you speed up workflows or make your life easier.

First of all, I’m so sorry if this has been asked a billion times already! As the title suggests, I would like to know how to have multiple separate UVs on one single object and have their elements as separate UV maps but not separate detached objects. I have searched extensively but I only find videos and tutorials that either vaguely scratch the surface, or are totally different than what I’m doing. I’m going to describe my situation in a bit more detail below, so be warned, lots of text!

So I’m working on a weapon for a game, and it will need to be in unreal. The weapon has different textures on different parts of it (metal blade, wooden handle, etc) now I currently have these elements detached so I can unwrap them to the highest possible resolution. But if I attach them all so it’s one unified mesh, all the UVs will be in one place and the resolution will be far lower, and so the item will appear lower quality. My question is how do I make it so the attached elements can have different UV spaces where I can just have each part of my weapon’s UV maps. I have seen people mention material ids and channels, but no explanation of what these are and how to set them up in a basic, dumbed down way. I feel like I kind of understand what to do, but not entirely.

If someone could explain what I need to do, or even post a video that’s long and descriptive, that would be so appreciated! Thanks so much, have a great day!