Modeling a city in Maya 2012 for Unity - Tips?

bpears

Have any tips for city modeling for unity? How do you generally texture buildings? One big texture? Or break up the brick and window textures?

.Wiki

I created buildings for a Unity game last year. I used one texture for the one building type. So there were tilable parts in the texture for the walls and the roof and unique parts like decorations. With one texturesheet I was able to build multiple buildings.

bpears

thanks for the reply. For this game I was going to have a higher poly building and lower(just a box) for each type. Doing that for LOD. So would it be better to texture windows and things separate in that case? Because once at a distance the game would have to load all new textures. But maybe it would reload textures anyway even if they are the same, since it replaces the model on LOD? Hmmmmm.....

HAWK12HT

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gxdjc2a7Toc"]UDK Modular Tutorial by FahadKM - YouTube[/ame]

hope this gives you an idea. Check Stefan Morell too on Crysis buildings at EPIC forums.

Xzulian

Do you also do the level design? All I can say about that is that whiteboxing the entire city before modelling and texturen would sound like a good idea. And be sure to check out tutorials about tileable texturen, normal maps and specular maps maybe!

bpears

HAWK12HT wrote: »

UDK Modular Tutorial by FahadKM - YouTube

hope this gives you an idea. Check Stefan Morell too on Crysis buildings at EPIC forums.

Not sure this method would work for me, Unity strongly suggests textures to be broken up into smaller single textures in their documentation. Seems like this person is creating a texture sheet with several different textures.

Xzulian wrote: »

Do you also do the level design? All I can say about that is that whiteboxing the entire city before modelling and texturen would sound like a good idea. And be sure to check out tutorials about tileable texturen, normal maps and specular maps maybe!

Yeah, I know how to normal map and spec map. Just trying to think it through. Using LevelOfDetail, I'll need a high and low poly model, the low will just be a box. But how can I get the texture to be the same since I no longer have the geometry to texture the windows and other details separate? Is my only choice to make a giant texture of everything for the low poly? Can this be baked out from the hi poly's textures?

Sorry so many questions... Trying to get everything straight in my head. And yes, I do level design. I do everything.

bpears

In this Unity documentation you can see the LOD. On the screenshots it shows 1 material for the low poly, and 1 material for the hipoly, does that mean they are using one giant texture then?

http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/Manual/LevelOfDetail.html


Wouldnt that contradict Unity recommending to break up textures?

bpears

I gathered that, to get the texture for the low poly, the diffuse can be baked from the high poly.

So one question remains:
If the hipoly's diffuse texture is broken into several textures, and the low poly is one big texture, is performance still saved using LOD since, to the the engine, they are entirely different textures?

bpears

bump

Saf

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxN0cW__UUk"]www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxN0cW__UUk[/ame]

bpears

Not looking for something to generate buildings... Trying to understand best texturing practices for a city with LOD building versions.

bpears

bump

bpears

does no one have experience in this?

HAWK12HT

Hmm not quite sure what you trying to achieve when you said you want Higher poly buildings, either way you can apply the same tech in smaller maps like 256x256 or 512x512. If windows is the issue you can have them separate and apply a reflective shader to them while keeping multiple LODs for buildings.