Vehicles for Games

Shivner_E

Hello,

I am pretty new to this site, but I have been modeling for over 4 years now. I am new to this site posting wise but not knowing about it wise.
Anyways, I am doing my first vehicle for a game and I was wondering if I put all the uv shells into the same 0-1 space on one material or is it common for game assets such as this to have multiple materials so the shells can be bigger in the 0-1.

Thanks,

Erik S.

Quack!

The more, separate materials you use for an asset the more expensive it gets. So you should only use the least amount of materials as needed.

In general if something is transparent, it needs a separate material, so at the very least a car will have 1 material for the car and 1 for the glass. This can change drastically depending on the game, as I am sure that the latest racing titles like Forza/Driveclub have fairly insane material calls to meet their high fidelity standard.

ZacD

I can't image car games being too restrictive on the amount of draw calls per vehicle, at most you have 16-32 cars racing at a time. Car paint, glass, headlights, chrome, decals, plastic, license plate, plastic, carbon fiber, interior, etc, are probably all their own materials.

Add3r

Its pretty common as the tech progresses, hardware gets more powerful, and budgets for games get larger... To use multiple materials for one vehicle. Really depends on the circumstance (FoV this vehicle is seen/used in, the engine, size, etc).

Comes down to the artist and technical restraints. For portfolio work, use as many resources as needed to accomplish the task and create quality work that will be a knock out, but not wasteful.

Drav

Hey shivna. Normally the car bodywork goes in 0-1 uv space (or sometimes a non square format like 1024x 2048 )then carbon, headlights badges and other detailed stuff goes in one or more separate textures, with much higher pixel density. Then you choose your texture sizes so any logos or liveries on the bodywork will be clean and sharp with good res, and then separately for the detail textures.

The detailed maps can often take advantage of tiling materials, depending on your tech, but the bodywork map usually needs everything to be unique if you want to paint logos or liveries or unique stuff.

In game stuff like damaged scratches and adding dirt are done with a second uv channel.

Cheers!

Shivner_E

Thanks everyone for the info! It helped a lot!