Multiple animated objects, unwrapping to the same UV Map

Hello blender community!

I am modeling with blender about 9 month now, and i thought about starting with some animation.
To start with some simple animation, i came up with a gate lever, but ran into a problem about UV Mapping ( yes i can uv map a non-animated model )
Lets say my lever contains
a Base, a Handle and a Wheel that spin.
All of them 3 parts are different Objects.
Now i animate the handle and the wheel. The animation works well, but now the actual problem: UV Map…
Each object got his own UV map space, but i don’t want that.
If i join all 3 parts to one object, i cannot animate it anymore, since they are one object. ( No animation in edit mode ( not keyframeable ))
Short: I want to animate the lever that is split into 3 Objects ( since 2 Objects get an animation ), and using only ONE UV Map after unwrapping them.

ANY Help would be appreciated, i could not find anything trough youtube, forum, google … that is kinda frustrating after hours of looking for tutorials and thats why i really rely on the community.

Thanks for taking time reading this

PS: I don’t know if screenshots are necessary, since the problem is very obvious. But tell me if you want some.

You should be able to use the same UV map for multiple objects. Just load the same image for each of the objects.

Thanks for your answer, but i didn’t meant the uv map as image, i mean the space where you position your uv parts before exporting.

Noone understand what the problem is? …

I understand and I think Blender is unable to do this. It’s something that can be done in other packages easily but currently I think it’s a limitation for Blender.

You can’t unwrap multiple objects at once because Blender only allows to enter edit mode on one object at a time. That being said, you can well use the same texture on multiple objects, it’s just that assembling these objects on a single UV map takes some guesswork. What you can do to make things easier is join the objects, unwrap them, and disjoin them later. Shapekeys, vertex colors, etc. fortunately are kept.

Hadrien