Unique Trim pieces on a Tiling building

csprance

Hey all
I'm trying to figure out how to go about baking and applying a decal on the corner of my wall which is a tiling texture so I can still have a unique destroyed edge on the buildings.

I'm a little unsure how I would go about baking something that's meant to tile along an edge, and maintain a crisp alpha so I can have the 256 tiling brick and the 256 tiling edge pieces which will be used to trim most of my buildings.

I haven't had that aha moment yet so any diagrams or links would be most helpful.

I remember seeing a tutorial somewhere but I can't seem to find it anymore. TO be honest, I'm not sure what I should be searching for because I'm unsure of what you would call this technique.


Thanks.

Here's a picture to clarify what I need to do.



CHris

HAWK12HT

Its called Modularity. Just Search "Modular assets" Polycount have ton loads of info on this matter.

m4dcow

This might help:
http://wiki.polycount.com/ModularMountAndBlade?highlight=%28%5CbCategoryEnvironmentModularity%5Cb%29
In the first image where they display textures, the bottom right images shows a tiling strip like what you have.

I made a texture like that recently:


I just baked these straight on, and then used geometry to bend them round a corner.

csprance

@Hawk: Thank you, but I understand that it's called modularity. I wasn't looking for help finding the search function

I've created plenty of modular pieces and trim pieces. What I was looking for help on is the best way to go about baking and creating the corner trim pieces. (LowPoly Layout, AlphaMap Tips, how should I lay the blocks out so they tile vertically?)

Where I'm having trouble is every time I bake it out I have to go into photoshop and offfset and mask to make everything tile correctly. I'm wondering if there is an easier way to approach this instead of everytime I need to change something I have to rebake and edit 3 different maps to tile (DIF/SPEC/NORM and the DIF Alpha) There has to be a more efficient way.

csprance

@M4dCow: I never even though to bake them straight on. I was worried that I would miss the edge detail on the bricks that wrap around. I suppose it's not super important to have a those tiny details.

I'll be back with some tests.

If anyone has any other suggestions I'm all ears.

Thanks!

csprance

How I did it was jump inside zbrush and lay them out on the canvas then i used the ~ key to make sure everything tiled nicely and applied the NormRGB material and saved out a copy of that and applied a brick matcap.

Works exactly like i needed it too.




For some strange reason Zbrush likes to put about 2 pixels worth of padding up at the top of the images. Annoying but easily fixable. Anyone have any ideas as to why that is happening?

m4dcow

csprance wrote: »

@M4dCow: I never even though to bake them straight on. I was worried that I would miss the edge detail on the bricks that wrap around. I suppose it's not super important to have a those tiny details.

I'll be back with some tests.

If anyone has any other suggestions I'm all ears.

Thanks!

You can miss edge detail, but it seems a bit more versatile as a texture. You can even model in a bit of detail in the low poly to give some sort of silhouette, the mount and blade wiki link that I posted above talks abo-ut that in one of the images. I also added a drop shadow around the bricks, so they look more grounded, though the example I have is bad because it is a bit dark but illustrates the point.

As for zbrush and it's padding issue, I've never figured out those little quirks, I just set my mesh to tile in maya and sculpt individually, the bake out somewhere else. Not the most efficient, but now I can sculpt bricks and rocks pretty quickly and nicely :P

csprance

m4dcow wrote: »

I just set my mesh to tile in maya and sculpt individually, the bake out somewhere else. Not the most efficient, but now I can sculpt bricks and rocks pretty quickly and nicely :P

Set your mesh to tile in maya? What do you mean by that?

The drop shadow is a great idea! Didn't think of that. Especially since I'm using an alpha to mask out the non brick parts, it will blend much better I'd imagine.

I like using the ~ in zbrush but, the only problem is I can't think of a way to render out AO? (

csprance

Just incase anyone is wondering the way to fix the edge pixels in zbrush that just magically appear when you export the document is to render it first.

So...