Environment Texturing

snitchdnb21

Hi there. Im very new to modeling and this forum too. Have been lurking for a while though.

Im currently trying to design a 'damaged' engine/electrical blah room for no purpose at the moment, and have no idea to go about texturing it. Ive read various texturing tutorials but still seem stuck on UVW wrapping on 'whole' objects. Hope this made sense. There is probably tons of mesh mistakes aswell but im learning, feedback would great though.

Basically im asking what would be the correct step for this model?

Really appreciate any help!

Images;

Chase

I'm in the middle of this process as well. There are so many ways to texture its insane. You could unwrap individual pieces and texture them based on their uvs, use tiling textures and throw some decals over to break the repitition. Or maybe you want to have repeated meshes in another boiler room so then you can apply a multi sub object in Max. That way you can apply various textures but like I said that's if you want to reuse the room or certain parts of the room in another way. I'll post a few links to help demonstrate what I mean later tonight. Those are the methods that come to mind for me. Hope that helps ya

snitchdnb21

Chase wrote: »

I'm in the middle of this process as well. There are so many ways to texture its insane. You could unwrap individual pieces and texture them based on their uvs, use tiling textures and throw some escapes over to break the repitition. Or maybe you want to have repeated meshes in another boiler room so then you can apply a multi sub object in Max. That way you can apply various textures but like I said that's if you want to reuse the room or certain parts of the room in another way. I'll post a few links to help demonstrate what I mean later tonight. Those are the methods that come to mind for me. Hope that helps ya

Hey man, thanks for the reply. Those examples/links would be great. I mainly read about tiling textures but still need to figure how to apply. Currently i don't know how to add 'material/texture' to different 'objects' in a soild whole model.

paradoxical-pixel

I would definitely recommend using tileable textures for the floor and walls. On large objects, tileable textures generally allow for a far higher texel resolution than is otherwise possible. You can add variation to a tiled surface by multiplying the tileable texture with a dedicated texture containing colour variation information, or by overlaying decal textures. Another technique is to have several tileable textures that can be blended into one another using alpha masks or vertex colour information.

The best approach for the machinery assets is somewhat project specific. It depends on your overall texture budget, and things like whether or not you'll be doing high-to-low normal map bakes. If the machinery components are high priority assets, I would create dedicated textures by means of high-to-low bakes for normal/ambient-occlusion information, and then tileable 'detail' textures for when the camera is close to the assets. This assumes that the scene is going into a game engine.

If what I've said seems confusing, check out the tutorial links that Chase posts; they're bound to shed some light. Also, check out the Polycount wiki (http://wiki.polycount.com/). There's a whole section on texturing there.

The bottom-line is that there are many, many techniques for texturing that vary per project requirements. If you are doing this purely for learning purposes, and the assets won't be going into an engine, the simplest approach would probably be to tile the walls/floor/ceiling, and then give each machinery asset its own dedicated texture sheet.

Chase

To retrace a few things I posted earlier, you have various ways to go about texturing so I wanted to break them down. The first is unwrapping every element of your scene and texturing the UV shells specifically. For instance you could unwrap one of the 3 pillars you have, save out the UV template for Photoshop, and texture its UVs. Visually, this provides for an individual look. With that in mind, you have to also keep in mind that the more textures you load the more memory is used up, which is why tiling textures is so popular. And to that we go to what Paradox suggested.

You could create tiling textures that easily apply to most of your scene. They're quick and simple to make. The best thing about this method is that you can get a model to look different based on where you put the UVs in the texture. Some things work better using tiling textures like walls and floors where others wouldn't like a gun or something more individualized. There's always a balance. With that comes exporting the materials into the game engine....

If you're using more then one texture you're going to want to use what's called a multi sub object. You don't necessarily have to, but it allows you to view all of your textures and naming conventions at once. It's an organization thing.

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_9gEIaTrF0"]Video 1[/ame]
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiGmbH8nl_A"]Video 2[/ame]
Video 3

Walk through

You have two ways of applying a multi sub object.
1) Before you export you want to attach each individual piece that makes up your model so that it's now one whole mesh. For instance, attach the branches and trunk of a tree together. Next go to the Material Editor, use the material picker and click your model and this will automatically create a multi sub object for you.

2) You could go about it the complete opposite by creating a multi sub object material first, then assign individual material ID's to specific sections of your model by clicking their faces using the polygon selection....like in video 2.... thus the textures would be placed on the model based on their corresponding material ID's. This procedure is a bit confusing to me when it comes to more complicated meshes. Walls, floors, trim, that sort of thing it's easy to think about what the texture will be; however, more complicated pieces just requires more planning so it's probably just me that finds it mildly frustrating.

I hope I'm making sense, but if not I can post pictures of what I mean. I'm more visual myself so I might just do that for the sake of things

Here are videos that goes over the entire texture process. All of the different map types are discussed.....Diffuse, Normal, Spec, Gloss, Ambient Occlusion.

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8oC1HsjOgk&feature=g-vrec"]Video 1[/ame]
Video 2
Video 3

Sage

hmm it looks like that room is a solid mesh. it's not the best way of doing it... anyway for texturing I would figure out which parts of the room can use the same texture, and reuse it.

Make a list of the materials you need.

are the walls concrete, what kind of trims do you need. Can the metal pipes resuse the same metal texture. You can see if all the smaller elements can use one texture. that texture would have different sections that represent the different objects.

snitchdnb21

Thank you both for the great replies.

Very useful will have a read up! :)

NAIMA

In all the environments of games I have looked to , from several games, I saw that the big and large environment parts that are often reused do use tiled textures, like walls, trims, floors , some repeated details etc ... sometimes they mask the transition with alpha planes or shaders if more advenced engines ... while for single specific objects they may have a direct texture , like some clutter could collect several obbjects into one texture , while more important items get their own , with a texture size that varies from small to large depending on the importance of the item in the visibility by the player.

Deadly Nightshade

Tiled textures is king when it comes to indoor environments like this.
What kind of asset is this btw? (camera distancE) Seems like something you would create for a TPS of some kind. Going with a texture atlas could be a choice then.