Advice needed )
Okay, the thing is, I'm studying by myself mostly, so I got a couple of questions for you guys.
I've been trying to understand how exactly u do UV layout for meshes like building for instance. I've got a tower modeled in Maya, then I detailed it in Zbrush and then I used decimation master to create a low-poly version, used Xnormal to get normal map and AO but when I created a texture it started looking not really good. I understand the smaller object is, the better it's going to look. But what do I do with the tower, it's huge and resolution is bad. Can't go any higher than 1024, cuz doing it for games.
This is rendered tower from zbrush
And this is low-poly with textures
What can I do to make it look nicer?
I'm using mostly maya for making UV mapping, because Zbrush UV master does a really weird layout. It's distorted all the time and I get even worse results.
My friend who works in game industry all ready told me to make every brick with the same texture plus every wall with the same texture to increase the quality but how can you transfer high resolution details to it if it's all the same? I'm confused, help would be appreciated.
I've been trying to understand how exactly u do UV layout for meshes like building for instance. I've got a tower modeled in Maya, then I detailed it in Zbrush and then I used decimation master to create a low-poly version, used Xnormal to get normal map and AO but when I created a texture it started looking not really good. I understand the smaller object is, the better it's going to look. But what do I do with the tower, it's huge and resolution is bad. Can't go any higher than 1024, cuz doing it for games.
This is rendered tower from zbrush
And this is low-poly with textures
What can I do to make it look nicer?
I'm using mostly maya for making UV mapping, because Zbrush UV master does a really weird layout. It's distorted all the time and I get even worse results.
My friend who works in game industry all ready told me to make every brick with the same texture plus every wall with the same texture to increase the quality but how can you transfer high resolution details to it if it's all the same? I'm confused, help would be appreciated.
Replies
You can get more texture space on your UVs by using overlap and tiling textures. Did you uniquely unwrap everything? Can you post your UV layout?
http://wiki.polycount.com/CategoryEnvironmentModularity
Some pictures that might help you get your head around this.
http://wiki.polycount.com/ModularMountAndBlade
This is is wireframe + uv mapping. I know it's not perfect, I majorly suck at doing uvs mostly because I hate this process plus I don't really know how.
More info...
http://wiki.polycount.com/EnvironmentSculpting
What if you have big unique model, say this idol, how would u proceed to texture it, considering you can't have normal quality with one 1024 map
You can't avoid blurry pixels, but you can reduce them with several tricks.
1. Increase the size of the texture sheet. But that takes 4x room in memory, which is usually very limited.
2. Reuse parts of the model in UV space. Mirroring, overlapping, etc. Yes this means less uniqueness on the model, but it increases the resolution. You decide
3. Use a detail texture, to mimic close-up high-frequency detail.
4. Hmm, there are other techniques, slipping my mind right now. Maybe someone else can chime in...
Sometimes the unique textures for multiple separate models can be packed together into the same texture file, and this can help the game render faster. This reduces how many "texture fetch"s the game has to do (google it), which can be a slow operation. This is a good idea if those models are seen together frequently in the game, AND if the game stores textures in memory in large chunks. If not, then each unique model should have their own individual textures. More about this here:
http://wiki.polycount.com/CategoryWhitepapers
5. you can erase polys that noone can see (on your latest uv unwrap i see you have unwrapped the bottom side)