Use of Trim Sheets, Tiled Textures or Baked Maps

jvicente

Hello everyone,

So, I started a personal project, to create an environment totally game-ready in Unreal 4.

I've been testing things out with my scene, and I'm trying to create the main building in a modular way but I've been finding issues with how could I approach the texturing and baking part of it.

Here is a picture of the building that I'm using for reference.

F**king building, why did I choose this? :')

Anyway, I'm already separating it into pieces for modularity purpose, but my issue is with the texturing part. As you can see, the building has some ornaments and stuff like that, which creates my doubts about how to go in texturing this whole thing.

I know baking each modular piece would create a tremendous amount of textures that would not be good for a game-ready level. But at the same time, I'm not really sure about how Trim Sheets and Tile Textures work exactly.

So here is how I did it and where the problems started:

1. I modelled one of the walls.


2. I've used Zbrush to sculpt details for baking.




3. Then I baked the HighPoly into the Low Poly using Substance Painter and created some textures for the wall.

It works for creating a mesh with decent details on it, but I know this is not the way to do it if you can use a Tile texture of the concrete, and Trim Sheets with a normal map to create these same details.

I just don't understand how a Trim Sheet would be able to achieve broken corners like that, and how could I mix the tile texture of the concrete with the trim sheets for the details. 

I'm really hoping you guys could give me some help, tips and point to me what am I'm doing wrong and how to approach the creation of this building. I've been learning so much in the past couple of months that the more I learn more things I know how to implement, but at the same time, more doubts come to how could I approach things.

Thank you for your attention, and hoping to find some help and advice!

ps: Sorry if there are any mistakes with my spelling or grammar, English is not my native language.

Eric Chadwick

Have you seen this wiki page yet?
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Modular

Specifically this tutorial should help, but the other links are very valuable also!
UE4 Modular Building Set Breakdown

cdr

Also, check these resources:

https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1022324/The-Ultimate-Trim-Texturing-Techniques

and Leonardo Iezzi artstation:

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/l3wwa

kidzorro

@jvicente

Wish I could offer you some advice on this, but am also struggling with a similar building.

I started out by making a trim sheet, which took some time considering how detailed the building is, and when I tried mapping it to the sub-elements, I soon realized that it only worked on maybe a third of the facade.

I then tried baking unique materials for each architectural element. It worked out better than using a trim sheet but is still very time-consuming, and honestly, don't know how game-ready I can get it with said approach.

I am considering learning Substance Designer in order to create a damaged plaster material and to shave off some time, considering Zbrush is very slow for sculpting large-scale set pieces.


So how did you manage on your end? Did you find a method that worked out for you?