Trying to reverse engineer this texturing process

Easton

Hi all,

I am trying to get to a specific goal and I am trying to follow other companies into the field they are in. I know many of the good companies use textures in the format below but I am not sure how to go about recreating that process with my own building models. How did or why did they make the outside of the mapped textures look fuzzy? I know they're in dds. file format, and I had to take screenshots.



Any advice and discussion is appreciated,

Easton

Obscura

The edge "fuzziness" is called edge padding/dilation:
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Edge_padding
It helps reducing bleeding of pixels to neighbour uv shells when the texture gets mipped (lod-d). 

What do you mean by "format"? Do you refer to the way things are arranged and combined together?

Eric Chadwick

Solidify is awesome, and quick. It's in the wiki page above.

Easton

OK, I had never seen anything like it elsewhere, I also have not heard of a mip map either.

When I say format I just mean the padding and the way it is all laid out, like how did they get a wall behind a wall in that top image?

I read a little about MIP mapping but I still don't quite understand it. If I had a 4096x4096 texture then how would that work? Does it just go to the next lowest one and keep going the further you move away from the object?

I discovered that Nvidia has plugins for PS to create .dds files and mipmaps which is nice.

I have one last question, in terms of UV unwrapping what would you guys say is the best way to go about doing it for a building like above? Because on a model I have I think that I am doing it ass-backwards... If I remember correctly anything that you're going to add different textures to needs to be UV unwrapped separately but I feel like I have too many parts

Thanks for the advice guys

Eric Chadwick

The blurry padding is done with the Solidify filter, or something similar. There are a few different ways of getting that effect.

MIPs:
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Mip_Mapping

These articles explain how the UVs and textures are laid out.
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Modular_environments

Easton

Thanks a lot for the help and information! 

I didn't realize there was that much information on this website, very helpful.

I cant find any information on how to create 2 UV maps to one object though...How is this done exactly?

Eric Chadwick

Which 3d software are you using?

Easton

I am using 3DS Max 2018

Easton

I am also using Photoshop and Quixel, and also Substance in case it matters.
The finished textures will need to go into a game and like the pics above there are say doors and walls separated but on the same model.

Eric Chadwick

What do you mean by "2 uv maps to one object"?

Easton

I mean using two UV's for one model, I thought it was possible...

Obscura

It is possible but you usually only need that when you use light mapping. Its called uv channels. For light mapping, they use a second uv channel that is fully uniquely laid out, meaning that there isn't any overlapping uvs, so no lighting will bake on top of other faces. Let put your images from the post into an example. Lets say thats the textures of one mesh. But it has 2 textures on it. You don't need 2 uv channels for this. What you need is 2 materials. They are assigned to the polygon faces where you want them. So where you want the first texture, you assign a first material, and where you want the second, you assign a second. Now imagine your 2 example images overlaid on top of each other. Thats how the uv layout would look then. Its not a problem that they overlap, because which texture appears where is determined by the assigned materials.

Easton

Okay, that makes sense.
I just finished my first UV after spending over a day learning about how to make them and it is all out of whack... For some reason I am missing some lines on my objects which means that I wont be able to add textures to them and then my objects that do have all lines attached are checkered in Photoshop which I don't think is right.
Also, in case anyone looks at the UV below, I know, its nasty looking and not properly laid out. Just trying to scoot along through the process then repeat and improve.

How can I fix this?

Obscura

Its totally unreadable because of the alpha channel. Can't see anything...

Eric Chadwick

Better to embed images. To embed an image in your post, either drag and drop it, or use the Insert An Image button. 

If you save your UVs as a PNG that will make the background transparent. If you save as JPG, it will remove the transparency, since JPG doesn't support alpha.

Easton

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