Efficient mapping for assets

Tyevve

What is the most efficient way of making maps for a building that has many wood planks/beams such as a medieval house/town house? I have a project still in progress that has 10982 polys. I want every piece to have as much detail as possible, but I feel that the way I have done things to this point were more tedious than necessary.

Say that I have 13 large wood beams that frame the building, for example. What is the most efficient way to handle UVs, textures, and normals so that I have as few files as possible? Are there issues for using a single shader/texture for so many objects?

I got a suggestion to retopologize the building as one object, but how would that work for a building with beams and planks protruding everywhere, among other objects, and for maps?

Maya, Mb, Ps, Quixel

Zack Maxwell

Generally, I believe you'd create a texture map with various elements such as walls, beams, windows, etc. Then reuse them all across the structure.
For example, instead of giving every wall it's own texture space, you would create a single wall element in your texture and map every wall with the same appearance to that one bit.
If you need to add some variety, you would create 2-3 different materials and blend between them with vertex painting to add stuff like wear and moss.

musashidan

Yes, as grimwolf says, texture atlasing is the way to go. And/or creating the building as a modular set.

Tyevve

How would you go about texture atlasing? I have been looking for tutorials on it, but they are all using 3DS Max. The only Maya thing I could find was using the Ninja UV script that must be purchased. So assume I do not have access to this script and I only use Maya and Photoshop. What do I do?

musashidan

Watch the Max tuts and apply the method to Maya. All you need is a basic understanding of the UV tools in Maya.

kwyjibo

Plan ahead and create one texture map that contains each of the elements you need, a wall section, wooden plank, window etc. Then place the UV islands for each part over the corresponding area of the texture map. If a UV island is larger than the corresponding section of the texture (at the desired texture scale) then you'll need to cut up that island in to smaller pieces and overlap them so the texture tiles seamlessly. For parts that will likely need to tile such as walls, make that part of the texture tile-able (and perhaps flippable for variation).

Another option if texture resolution isn't a big issue (eg. for mobile) you could just have separate texture files for each material type (wood, brick, window etc), apply them to objects/faces, mess around with vertex color and shaders as you like in your 3d app and bake it all down to a set of non overlapping UVs. Then you could go into Photoshop and add an extra pass of details to that baked texture. This way you can also combine it with your lightmap if you you're doing lightmapping.

musashidan

Another important aspect of atlasing is using the space outside of 0-1 to your advantage. So you can have long rectangular elements go into the adjacent tile, for example(remember UV space is infinitely tiling)

Eric Chadwick

Some resources here that might help you
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Modular_environments

gsokol

When working on bigger assets, such as buildings and such, tiling textures are your friend.  If your building has stucco, or brick or something, make a tiling texture, then you can control how much detail the material has because its tiling.  Efficiency wise, its a bit more expensive to have multiple materials, but think about how often the tiling materials might be used on other objects in the environment.  It can often make up for the cost of having multiple materials on an asset.

For the wood beams, there is no reason that every single beam needs to be unique.  Maybe you make 1 or 2 unique beams, and duplicate them, adding variation by warming the mesh and such.

If it were me, I would make an atlas sheet of Doors, trims, windows, etc that would be used (not just on this building, but all variations of this type) and use tiling textures for the bigger surfaces.

EliasWick

Hey, I have posted an image of how a texture atlas may look. I also suggest checking out the video below. The guy will go over all the beginner things you need to know in order to get started:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyJKHmDAH2Q