help with modular scene ?

Count Vader

Hi guys, not sure if this fits better in P&P, sorry if it does. I figured since I'm not really showing any actual art yet and the feedback I want is of a more logistical than artistic nature, it would probably get buried/overlooked in P&P


Anyway, I am doing this modular mini-scene. First one. I have started over like 3 times so far, each time getting frustrated by the concept I pick. I finally settled on one that I think I can see all the way through, but I wanted to get off to the right start so I need some guidance regarding how to set it up to be modular-friendly.









I have highlighted all of the materials that I wanna keep on the same sheet. I have left out the tiling materials (wall and floor) and the unique assets/props which will have their own texture sheets associated with them (locker, fire hydrant, crates, door, ceiling lights, that power box thing, etc)



Does this seem like a good way to set things up? I'm basically copying what I have seen in the various training videos on modular levels.


Some more specific questions I have are:


For the wall, should I make just a clean square painted brick tiling texture and then add all the dirt in via mesh paint, or should I make a large block/swath of brick wall with a bunch of dirt already applied to the texture? Ditto for the floor.


When modeling the structural beams, should I bake down a high poly with soft edges and stuff, and give each plane of each beam its own texture space? Or not bother with an HP and stack the beam uv's to minimize texture space at the cost of not having a normal bake from high poly?


Any advice would be really appreciated since im still a total noob at this modularity thing!

BJA

Not sure if I understand your approach correctly, but does every different color mean a different texture sheet?
Because I would make 1 tileable texture sheet for all the pipes and cables. Also I think you really don't need to make so many new textures for those metal beams. They all look kind of the same anyway.
"Ceiling" and "Corrugated Metal Panels" look almost identical. You could reuse one texture for both of them. Same goes for "Wall Bottom Trim", I don't think anybody will notice if you reuse some texture you already have, or just get completely rid of it.
I would keep the brick texture relatively clean and add all the big dirt stains with decals. Or maybe use vertex blend, really up to you.

If you only want to model that corner piece than there's no need to make a modular set of assets, imo. Just make a unique mesh.

McGreed

Yeah, remember that you can always have few textures, but several materials which changes the texture look by for example blending stuff like rust into it, or changing the colors/saturation ect.
Also take some artistic freedoms, not every bolt plate has to exactly the same as on the concept.

Count Vader

@BJA - All of the stuff that's been highlighted is going on the same sheet, each colour just represents a uniquely allocated strip/space on the texture sheet. The reason why 'corrugated metal panel' and 'ceiling' are different is because even though they're both made of long strips, I see the ceiling as having some kind of fabric/insulation/canvass around a metal frame, and normally I think you need a very clear break between ceiling and floor textures.

As for the beams I noticed a bunch of difference between the different beam 'sets' that I want to preserve. For instance the thick ones have those bolts or inserts or whatever running across that are a slightly different color, whereas the thin ones don't have them.

I can probably combine the pipes into less textures though, I do wanna have unique 'types' of piping as far as texture but 2 is probably enough.

As far as bottom wall trim, maybe I can re-use the concrete floor texture for it.

And even though It's a small scene I do wanna make it adhere to 'modular' rules, since it's an enviroment art portfolio piece.

@McGreed
Yea I could definitely scale down the amount of textures I've planned out, but mostly I wanna use this project to also polish up my texturing and material definition skills. While I intend to make use of vertex painting and stuff, I wanna only use it where necessary, since the results I see from it often tend to look pretty shitty haha

McGreed

I don't know, vertex blending can be really good, as long as you put a bit more into it then just using the default vertex color setup. This tutorial shows some examples, where you can get some sharper definitions between the textures, instead of the fading effect:

http://www.chrisalbeluhn.com/UT3_Vertex_Blend_Variation_Tutorial.html

Count Vader

Hmm, that does look pretty good. I think I have a copy of the 3d motive tutorial on it somewhere too, maybe I'll give that a deeper look as well.