Truck texture question

NautalusX

How would you texture this truck interior? using a rule of 128px per 16max units.. 4096x4096 should give plenty of texture resolution. with even room to spare for the undercarriage.



But what bothers me is I want blinking red lights on the consoles. And I want florescent lighting that flickers. I also have a section of the truck in the back that needs a chainlink fence.. I plan to use a 1024x1024 on that with a separate material.

How do I make the lighting pulse on the consoles? and I don't want them all to pulse at once.. I want variation. Should I texture the whole console with a separate material? of say 512x512 with two different emissives that switch in the shader?

JoakimMellergard

Either use a the 4k map with lights along with a mask for emissive or as a seperate shader. Depends a little bit on what engine you use I guess. I'd use the first alternative in most cases. The mask doesnt have to be 4k btw.
The pulse effect with variation can be achieved by giving the emissive mask a Sine multiplied by the object's vertices world position. Something like this should work:

emissive = EmissiveMask*(Sine(Time*pulseSpeed)*output.WorldPos*VariationValue)

NautalusX

This is in UDK.

Ok I understand how I would make them pulse. but how would the objects vertices world position work? your saying that this will make a certain section of the mask pulse by object vertices in world space? How do I find the coordinates of the vertices I need? and what if the truck is in motion then wouldn't these change? I'm thinking it'd be better to make a section of the texture mask pulse using uv coords and then adding all the pulses together into the final emissive input in the shader.

im not very experienced but this sounds possible.. though im not sure how to find the uv cords id need to input.

Eric Chadwick

4096x4096 is way overkill for this. There goes the texture budget for the whole level.

Vehicles nowadays use 1024x (or a couple 512 sets) since you'd be using three of them... diffuse, spec, normal. Modular approach will save you tons of texture space.

NautalusX

ok well I get the idea to use so much texture space because I look around and see other people using massive maps on their assets.. this must be just for quality showing off their skills.

Eric Chadwick

Sure. Shows texturing skill, but conversely it shows lack of real-world experience, or at perhaps lack of awareness of the pervasiveness of budgets. Making something look equally awesome with 1/4 the texture resolution is a very useful skill. Making something look awesome with 4x resolution, not as much. Those with a trained eye (read: Art Directors, Lead Artists) know the difference.

Edit... we're just not there yet where the art team can realistically spend that much on a single asset. Wish we were though!

Synaesthesia

Be happy you get that much! I have 800 polygons to work with and a single 1024x diffuse texture for an entire truck.

NautalusX

Thanks I'll rethink my approach and using tiling wherever possible. I still want to author it at 2048 and size down later though..and that must be good cause you have the extra quality there if you need it. You can size it down to whatever the game needs as long as it still holds up.

what about my pulse issue?