Texture size considerations for small building exterior intended for UDK
Hi there. I've come to a point of considering different approaches for texturing a small shack to be used as a game asset in the UDK.
This is the building:
For reference, the door is 1 meters across and just over 2 meters tall. The roof panels are 6 separate objects The walls and door are flat planes that have normal mapped detail of their high poly counterparts
I initially attempted to get all of the UVs on one 1024 texture but this appears to allow too little resolution for each surface for my liking. What is the best approach for this? Considering I intend to have an acceptable level of resolution in game.
Something I have attempted is layering the UVs over the top of each other to conserve texture space, but as, for example, the roof panels are all different sizes, the UVs either don't sit directly over each other smoothly, or if I alter the UVs to do so, texture stretching occurs.
A similar problem occurs for the walls, the High poly walls are 7 separate high poly "panel" objects that have been normal mapped onto a single low poly plane. A potential solution here was to use a normal map from a single high poly panel and "fold" the UVs of the low poly over that single area on the normal map texture space. The problem here is that there aren't verts on the low poly model to account for the positions I would need to fold/cut the low poly UVs to get an accurate placement. So my only option there was to place each UV island separately, this take up too much space for my liking considering everything else that needs to be placed on the texture.
I see a number of possible options to solve this. Firstly I could step back somewhat and remodel parts of the shack. the roof for example, I could model 1 section, UV unwrap that, and then duplicate that unwrapped object as the other 5 roof pannels, shuffling dimensions of the roof a little to allow for 6 same size panels to be used; and then I "could" stack the UVS, using only 1/6 of the space. Applying the same approach to the other components of the model until I have a workable result.
Another solution would be to split the texturing onto more than 1 texture space. In which case, is this considered acceptable in real time rendering situations? What would be considered workable, and at what point does the memory footprint become problematic? The Shack is intended to eventually be amongst quite a filled environment consisting of lots of flora and fauna, and various other elements withing a 'detailed' open world environment.
Any advice on how I should approach this texturing consideration will be greatly appreciated. It's really halted my development on this little project.
Thanks!
This is the building:
For reference, the door is 1 meters across and just over 2 meters tall. The roof panels are 6 separate objects The walls and door are flat planes that have normal mapped detail of their high poly counterparts
I initially attempted to get all of the UVs on one 1024 texture but this appears to allow too little resolution for each surface for my liking. What is the best approach for this? Considering I intend to have an acceptable level of resolution in game.
Something I have attempted is layering the UVs over the top of each other to conserve texture space, but as, for example, the roof panels are all different sizes, the UVs either don't sit directly over each other smoothly, or if I alter the UVs to do so, texture stretching occurs.
A similar problem occurs for the walls, the High poly walls are 7 separate high poly "panel" objects that have been normal mapped onto a single low poly plane. A potential solution here was to use a normal map from a single high poly panel and "fold" the UVs of the low poly over that single area on the normal map texture space. The problem here is that there aren't verts on the low poly model to account for the positions I would need to fold/cut the low poly UVs to get an accurate placement. So my only option there was to place each UV island separately, this take up too much space for my liking considering everything else that needs to be placed on the texture.
I see a number of possible options to solve this. Firstly I could step back somewhat and remodel parts of the shack. the roof for example, I could model 1 section, UV unwrap that, and then duplicate that unwrapped object as the other 5 roof pannels, shuffling dimensions of the roof a little to allow for 6 same size panels to be used; and then I "could" stack the UVS, using only 1/6 of the space. Applying the same approach to the other components of the model until I have a workable result.
Another solution would be to split the texturing onto more than 1 texture space. In which case, is this considered acceptable in real time rendering situations? What would be considered workable, and at what point does the memory footprint become problematic? The Shack is intended to eventually be amongst quite a filled environment consisting of lots of flora and fauna, and various other elements withing a 'detailed' open world environment.
Any advice on how I should approach this texturing consideration will be greatly appreciated. It's really halted my development on this little project.
Thanks!