Modular Sink
polycounter lvl 6
Hi,
I was wondering about this: you see, in The Sims series, all objects are modular, and to make objects with depth/transparency appear correctly, they need a custom mask to cutout texture:
My problem:
- Using the mask approach can be a lot of work: because the sinks can be in arbitrary shape, it means the mask (transparency map) must be authored per sink, and stored on the sink object (otherwise your counter need to know about all possible sink variants and that sucks).
- In addition, your shader must know how to apply the transparency cutout to diffuse map properly (I guess using a standard UV/texture where the "up" face is at the same position?)
My question:
- Besides going further in modularity and just model the counter up-face along with the sink (so you can replace them as a whole), what else could I do?
- When I look at modular kits, most of time, people simply model windows along with the wall. But The Sims don't have such luxury, because you can even move the windows slight up/down a wall. So are there better solution besides a custom mask (transparency map)?
EDIT:
- I forgot about the depth mask option, so that's one solution.
I was wondering about this: you see, in The Sims series, all objects are modular, and to make objects with depth/transparency appear correctly, they need a custom mask to cutout texture:
My problem:
- Using the mask approach can be a lot of work: because the sinks can be in arbitrary shape, it means the mask (transparency map) must be authored per sink, and stored on the sink object (otherwise your counter need to know about all possible sink variants and that sucks).
- In addition, your shader must know how to apply the transparency cutout to diffuse map properly (I guess using a standard UV/texture where the "up" face is at the same position?)
My question:
- Besides going further in modularity and just model the counter up-face along with the sink (so you can replace them as a whole), what else could I do?
- When I look at modular kits, most of time, people simply model windows along with the wall. But The Sims don't have such luxury, because you can even move the windows slight up/down a wall. So are there better solution besides a custom mask (transparency map)?
EDIT:
- I forgot about the depth mask option, so that's one solution.