The image shows on the left side the original with a texture size of 2048, on the right i set up the texture size to 2048 too.
Even if i try higher resolutions, more or less additional maps accordingly the materials i´ve or baking the vertex color into, the result is every time a much lower quality texture
When you merge there is an option to Merge Materials. Merging materials also merges the texture maps. A 2k texture will fit 4 merged objects by laying out the textures in a 512 grid, 8 objects at 256px grid etc. to fit into the 2k map.
You can view this yourself by looking at the new textures in your content-browser. They will be aligned in a grid-like I have described.
EDIT: AFAIK To avoid this, you must combine your mesh outside of unreal and manually refit the UV’s so you have one 2k texture for your whole object, otherwise you have to deal with the loss of quality as your texture is compressed to fit into the grid.
Proper English and sentence structure would allow other users like me to follow up more easily. It’s hard to understand if and how the issue was solved.
Im going trough the same issue at the moment and i read this post but but i don’t understand how it was solved… Can we have a short explanation please? Trying to find answers since 3 days but no luck.
Take the merge actor function from UE4 and the tradeoff it brings (quality loss)
Merge the meshes in blender, map the UV´s and align the materials accordingly
If you want to optimize objects far away, you can checkout the HLOD functionality from UE4 too.
It all depends on what you´re trying to archive / optimize