Texture aspect ratio

HAWK12HT

Hi all , so this question has been bothering me for quite a while.

dunno how to put it. hmm

ok so lets say you have a M4 rifle model, you make it lets say 512 length and 128 high in UDK units (lets suppose , i know its too big size for a rifle in UDK) you unwrap and texture it in 1024x1024 size. Result look sharp and crispy even if you down size your texture to 512x512.

but now you have to model this awsome huge object that is 4000 udk units in length. you unwrap it fine make a 2048x2048 texture so you can see better details, than downsize it to 1024x1024 size. But than it looks as if its blurry and pixelated , stretched out etc. Above all you have small details you want to add on this giant object through texture but when you downsize texture its gone.

Hope i explain it better to understand .


I know modularity is king in games, but what about objects like space ship of HALO.

cptSwing

I think you would try using tileable textures for the better part of the hull, and spice it up with more geo and local detail on separate textures.

McGreed

Yeah, usually with large objects, you will try to create it will tileable textures and maybe use vertex paint and shader to make it unique. For an example, take a look at this tutorial:
http://eat3d.com/free/vertex_painting

You can do a LOT with shaders, and use the texture channels.

HAWK12HT

hmm tileable texture. Ummm ok but what if i have unwrapped the mesh and painting on UVW. I am making this massive space ship and making modular will mean having 100s of smaller pieces, but i want to do it in one go and according to my estimate i have to make a 4096x4096 texture to see what im drawing actually lol (stuff like small pipes, windows, bolts, hull plates etc)


I want to avoid this problem where a tea cup looks bigger than player hand, if you know what i mean.

passerby

your over-thinking it, also modular dosnt mean you need to import hundreds of pieces into udk, you can build it as one mesh in max or maya, and just have lots of different pieaces share the same UV space, and for large areas doing a lot of mapping to tileable textures and trim sheets.

can bake AO to the vertex colour also so you can still have AO from the gemotry, but also have tielable textures and trimsheets.

also for your halo example, take a look at pictures of the pillar of autumn, like 80% of it is tileable and trimsheets, with some creative texture mapping. Also decals are very useful for large things like ships, so make some decal cards up and float them just above the surface of the mesh and use them for variation and things like text etc.

Angry Beaver

Also don't forget UDK supports multiple U/V channels. So you can give a base repeating texture and then U/V all the details over top and use an alpha on the details to blend it in with the base texture.

Swizzle

You may find this thread interesting: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=87071

Some of the images are broken, but the important one (the texture) is still visible. The folks on Star Trek online take a pretty novel approach to texturing. They construct every texture for every ship the same way. The top half of the texture is just tileable texture that gets applied to the majority of the surfaces of the ships. The bottom half also tiles, though the parts that tile/repeat are smaller. The bottom half is used for trim, phasers, and other small details that take up less room on the model.

I've seen it in action and, while it can occasionally be difficult to work with, it's super handy for getting tiling textures without needing a crapton of drawcalls and extra textures floating around.

The STO engine supports texture tinting as well, so that's something that could be very useful to get some variation if you want to use it. If you wanted tiling textures and tinting for large parts of the texture, you'd want to set up separate UV coordinates for whatever you're working on. One set of coordinates would be tiling, and one would be separated out into the parts you'd want to tint. Then you'd create a tint map for the different parts of the texture you want to tint and you'd apply it to the second set of UV coordinates. Tinting is trivially easy to set up in UDK; you just use the different color channels of the tint map as masks for 3-vectors and multiply that on top of the base texture.

sprunghunt

Also keep in mind that the texture size you should use has to do with the amount of space the object takes up on screen.

If you are making a huge space ship are you really getting close enough to it to need the same texture resolution as a gun?

And if you are getting close are you getting close to the entire ship? or can you just texture parts of it with more resolution and more detail?

McGreed

Also remember that you can make a large detail texture and with closeups, have close-detail texture, such as base colors in the large texture, and when you get closer, the shader combines your detail texture onto the large one. Often used with normal maps.

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNqI-_9-dN8"]UDK Tutorial Part 94:Materials- Detail Texture - YouTube[/ame]

HAWK12HT

Oh wow, Would definately keep the points mentioned here in mind and will try to come up with something cool.
Yes i over think alot , part of my profession :P
Hmm texture dependent on screen space, ok the ship may be used in cinematic like showing it in a distance and coming way close to see bright lit windows.

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBknmWnEr1Y"]Conquest: Frontier Wars Intro - YouTube[/ame]

So to do that in UDK will have to do Detail texture thing.


Thank you for input folks

sprunghunt

HAWK12HT wrote: »

So to do that in UDK will have to do Detail texture thing.


Thank you for input folks

UDK also has this system called Massive LOD. Which lets you set a bunch of smaller objects to be replaced by one large object at distance. So you could have a "close up" set of objects which get replaced by a large spaceship when you are far away.

http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/MassiveLOD.html