Masking or unique textures?

ghaztehschmexeh

I'm just planning the creation of this building. It'll be the centerpiece of the scene. I am just wondering on the best practice in terms of texturing it. It's pretty unique around the entire building, so the use of modular parts will most likely be quite limited in their usefulness.

As opposed to making a bunch of uniquely textured modular parts, I'm thinking of creating a bunch of materials (brick, stone, wood etc) and masking the materials on the model in UE4. Is this a good idea? What are my options to approach this?

Also what is generally the largest type of asset I want to bake a normal map? So for the stone pillars, would I want to bake them? Or just use a relatively high vert count and use a tiling map? Or perhaps bake and then overlay a tiling material?

Thanks

Quack!

If you are targeting modern games for your budgets, then an asset of this size would warrant multiple-tiling materials and a high vert count. You wouldn't need to bake anything here to get a very high quality result.

Some games may use atlas-ing, some may using masking. Depends on the design principles.

If this is for a portfolio piece, I recommend going with whatever method will allow you to accomplish this with the least amount of resistance.

ghaztehschmexeh

Alright, that's good to know, thanks!

EarthQuake

If you would bake anything here, it would be highpoly meshes used to make normal maps for tiling textures or modular parts. The concrete pillars might use a couple variations that you could duplicate and rearrange/bend/etc.

ghaztehschmexeh

Yeah that makes sense. I guess for unique damage and the like I can use decals or a vertex blended material?

EarthQuake

Yeah, if you use vertex blending (or a mask on a 2nd uv channel) for wear and variation, you should be able to get a lot of use out of relatively simply tiling textures.

ghaztehschmexeh

ooh making unique UVs on another UV channel? That sounds pretty powerful. Are extra UV channels resource intensive? I'm working in unreal so I have lightmap UVs as well. I guess I could use that channel for masking but lightmaps tend to have a lot of wasted space for padding...

Quack!

Having 1 or 2 extra UV channels is common. In a modern game you should be able to get away with that no problem.

It is less about how many UV channels you have and more about how much data is packed into each vert per channel. That is a balance you must strike.

EarthQuake

An extra uv channel basically doubles the vert count, but for this sort of asset your geometry will be relatively simple so vert count shouldn't be a bottleneck with performance.

Joost

EarthQuake wrote: »

An extra uv channel basically doubles the vert count, but for this sort of asset your geometry will be relatively simple so vert count shouldn't be a bottleneck with performance.

Does it add to the vert count if you have the same UV seams? I thought I read somewhere that it didn't.

Edit: nvm I confused uv seams with the actual verts. Derp

ghaztehschmexeh

I figured it probably wouldn't be an issue, I was curious though. It's not like there will be tons of instances of this so it won't be an issue. Thanks for the help!