Multiple UV of same mesh

Question

I have a seemingly simple issue, but I cant find a search term for Google that yields an answer to my question. I have a shape (in this example, just a grid). I have a square texture and I want to duplicate that mesh on the UV map four times. The reason for this is I want to use tiling in the shader to shift around to the different quadrants of the texture to change the properties of the mesh (color or different text for example). I am not sure how I need to unwrap this mesh (the grid is just an example/placeholder for a more complex object) so it is on the UV four times. Maybe I am not looking in the right place? Maybe I should just unwrap normally and the tiling part of texture work is actually done in substance painter? Trying to search for tiling though just brings of lots of results on doing repeating textures which is not what I am trying to do here.

Answer 1

A UV map is just a flat version of the mesh. It is intended to hold information of how a 2D image maps to a 3D surface. You cannot have duplicates of the same face in multiple sections of the same UV map. However, you can have multiple UV maps for each object. Each UV map can represent a different way of translating how a 2D image would appear on the 3D surface.

Anyway, as far as I know, you just need to create one UV map for Substance Painter, and it will take care of the rest. I don't think what you want is to tile material, you want to layer them.

There is a good free add-on for Blender that will allow you to layer materials called MatLayer. This is the YouTube video that explains how to use it, and you can get it from this GitHub page.