Advice on Creating Exterior Houses
polycounter lvl 11
I've been brain storming and researching for a little while and I'm still a little unclear about how to go about texturing buildings and houses.
I have my high poly and low poly building, and I'm going to add more details in NDo2. Here'es where my issue lies though.
If I were to bake out a normal map, and then add details to it in NDo2, the end would result would be said normal map. However, if I want to use a tiling brick texture, that texture would require its own normal map. How would I combine both normals maps, or is this not the route you're supposed to take when creating things like this. Am I even supposed to bake a normal map from 3ds max?
I read Distings breakdown of his apartment and read through the thread. I was using his wall segment as reference on how I should go about doing this. He simply made a tiling texture and applied it to the wall, with its own normal map. I'm not sure however, if he baked out a normal/AO for just the wall segment itself. I'm also trying to incorporate DDo and NDo2 as much as possible
I have my high poly and low poly building, and I'm going to add more details in NDo2. Here'es where my issue lies though.
If I were to bake out a normal map, and then add details to it in NDo2, the end would result would be said normal map. However, if I want to use a tiling brick texture, that texture would require its own normal map. How would I combine both normals maps, or is this not the route you're supposed to take when creating things like this. Am I even supposed to bake a normal map from 3ds max?
I read Distings breakdown of his apartment and read through the thread. I was using his wall segment as reference on how I should go about doing this. He simply made a tiling texture and applied it to the wall, with its own normal map. I'm not sure however, if he baked out a normal/AO for just the wall segment itself. I'm also trying to incorporate DDo and NDo2 as much as possible
Replies
I would take my uv's to photoshop and make diffuse texture from photo resources and such. Many of these textures can be found for free around the internet. From this diffuse texture I can later create good quality normal map with just normal map filter (plug-in) from inside photoshop. And if I am supposed to create specular map I can create one by adjusting curve settings for the texture.
For me this gives good results every time.
For this building it doesn't seem like they unwrapped the main structure, they just used a multi-sub object material and had tiling textures when needed. The only object they baked out were the trims, doors, and the electric pole. Is this a standard for creating exteriors. I'm just so used to the high-poly to low-poly workflow with assets.
This has 2 advantages:
1. you can have much better resolution texture maps for separate objects (as opposed to having to fit doors, walls, roof, windows... on one UV)
2. You have modularity and can combine different walls/windows around the map
Generally speaking UDK doesn't have as much a problem with geometry as it has with loading materials. So it's usefull to make everything as modular as possible. This can go to extremes, like the guy who does this tutorial:
http://eat3d.com/blog/eat-3d/new-dvd-release-udk-modular-masterclass-efficiently-creating-and-entire-scene-tor-frick
or this:
http://johnvalentiart.com/?custom_type=how-to-udk-scenes-with-ndo2
This is maybe taking it a bit far for a start, but if you keep in mind to re-use the avaialable UV-space and make everything as tilable as possible, it'll be fine. It's really a lot more pre-planning than I imagined too, if you wanna make, let's say, a Tudor style city map with modular materials.
...you can of course make separate objects for walls, etc. But that would only be necessary for the more unique pieces/places.
These are also interesting links:
http://www.chrisalbeluhn.com/Building_Layout_Guideline_Tutorial.html
http://www.thiagoklafke.com/modularenvironments.html
They may not all be about exteriors, bus sooner or later you start wanting more anyway ^^
Okay, on page 2 of Distings Breakdown of the Apartment he explains how he created the high poly wall mesh, then baked it with xNormal. That creates a normal map. Than he found a paper-like texture to be used as the walls normal map, which he then fused with his baked normal to make a single normal map to be plugged into DDo. Where I am confused at is, hwo he was able to use a tiling texture by itself,, plug it into the slot for Diffuse in DDo, and have it line up exactly where he wanted it to on the texture. My case is a little different because, with using a brick texture, the normals have to match with the diffuse. Unless he used the same method as in his DDo AK tutorial, where he placed the wood where he wanted it to go before hand. Does that make more sense?
Doesn't he say he baked from a Highpoly Mesh and then made another normal map (for more details) with Ndo2? (You said he baked the highpoly with XNormal, which sounds confusing)
This tutorial lacks a snapshot of the UVs for the walls. It would be pretty self-explanatory if we had those. Is it maybe possible to write to the guy and ask him to post his uvs and the wallpaper material applied to it? I think this apartment exists as a WIP thread on Polycount, dunnit?
As for Ddo - I don't use it, so I don't know what it does with the tiling. If I were to model these walls, I'd scale them all up (in the UV) to be the same size and have their horizontal vertexes exactly lined up. Then I'd try scaling them to fit onto the tiling texture the best. The different wall parts are all overlapping/on top of each other. I think there is no way someone can just plug in a 1024x1024 texture to any program and have it tile perfectly on every wall. That would require all walls to fill out the full 0-1 UV space.
Would be really nice if people who made tutorials actually made them right. He went through all this work and made a nice breakdown, but without Uvs it's only half-worth it and can be confusing.
As for Distings wall, I'm pretty sure what he meant was he built a high poly wall to bake down his tiling textures and trim texture, but in essence it's still pretty much like that CryEngine house you saw. After you bake down those high poly details you just add surface detail in NDO to add to it. This Mount And Blade article is probably better at teaching how to do exterior houses than me. If you want any more clarification on what I mean, just let me know, I'm not sure if I explained it okay.
http://www.mapcore.org/page/features/_/articles/technical-breakdown-assassins-creed-ii-r24
:P
Good luck on your project Scizz.
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=39&t=444791&page=7&pp=15#post4855106
Where the UVs get really crazy are techniques like Snefer and d1ver use, using multiple UV channels and using each RGBA channel as a unique texture... http://wiki.polycount.com/TextureAtlas
Disting says he created quick highpoly model for the wall, with the upper and lower trim pieces, and baked that out to a tiled normal map. Then he overlaid details with nDo. So a combo of baking (Xnormal) and image manipulation (nDo). We have some tutorials on the wiki about modeling/sculpting tiled textures... http://wiki.polycount.com/EnvironmentSculpting
More info here about blending multiple tiled textures together, like the CryEngine house does.
http://wiki.polycount.com/Multitexture#Modulation_Blending
About the smooth corners, he doesn't show a wireframe but it looks like it's just a bevel there, with smoothed normals. Pretty easy. Just make sure you make the UVs wrap seamlessly across the corner.