Interior Levels and UV's
Hello everyone. I'm working on an interior level. I chose to do the same method that TimeSplitters editor did. This is aimed at people who have experience with the way timesplitters works. Essentially the level is broken into tiles, and each traversal part of the level has a certain number of tiles it takes up, and a number of paths allowing you to go into others assets. That way, assets such as hallways and things can be repeated. I wanted to do my level like this, but UV scaling would be different for a part with a different aspect ratio then another path.
What I did to fix this was to find the aspect ratio, and change the UV repeat tile option based on the highest number in the aspect ratio.
I'll make separate sharers. One for each time it repeats. A 1_repeat_shader, 2_repeat_shader and so on. I think that's all I need to do to make my own TimeSplitters type interior asset library. The problem with this is that if the UV's have to be directly on the edges of 0 to 1 space. if not exactly in the correct space, either stretching will occur, or nasty seams will appear in between assets.
Do you guys have any other tips for working on this kind of stuff? How do YOU model your entire interiors and make UV's fit?
What I did to fix this was to find the aspect ratio, and change the UV repeat tile option based on the highest number in the aspect ratio.
I'll make separate sharers. One for each time it repeats. A 1_repeat_shader, 2_repeat_shader and so on. I think that's all I need to do to make my own TimeSplitters type interior asset library. The problem with this is that if the UV's have to be directly on the edges of 0 to 1 space. if not exactly in the correct space, either stretching will occur, or nasty seams will appear in between assets.
Do you guys have any other tips for working on this kind of stuff? How do YOU model your entire interiors and make UV's fit?
Replies
Never played TimeSplitters and so I don't know the unique approach mentioned here. Maybe you have some link with some info? I just found this:
http://www.gamespot.com/ps2/action/timesplitters3/news.html?sid=6118189
By normalizing the UV's or applying the same Texel ratio to the other models?
Not sure if I can help here at all since it is all a bit vague and I can't read the UV's
You're right that a modular approach is the way to go. But generally Env Artists try to setup their UV mapping such that texture pixels are a fairly-consistent size in the world, like 32 pixels per unit, or somesuch, depending on what your memory limits are.
Some reading here...
http://wiki.polycount.net/CategoryEnvironment#EW
Thank you. I'll be reading all of that as soon as possible
can you do that for games? I was told that they always had to be an exponent of 2 and square in order to be accepted by game engines (256x256,512x512,1024x1024).
Speaking of which, why do they have to be those numbers in particular?
Pow2 is because the hardware works best when it can process and store textures in chunks that are powers of two in size.
They don't have to be square though... 256x64 is just as valid.
This should become less of a guessing game once some parameters have been set down like mesh and mesh variations. They don't have to be final models or anything, just rough representations of volume.