Hoping to get some input for variation in the edges of meshes?
polycounter lvl 3
I'm wanting to begin work on an "old west" town, and there are a few things I want to figure out before I start. The main one is that, with old west architecture, there is a lot of variability in the construction of things. Yes, a brick building most likely will be pretty solid and flat. There's going to be warping, of course, but not much that you can see in a game environment. But when it comes to the wood constructed buildings, there is a LOT of variation. I took two out of my collection of reference images and circled the things I'm worried about.
I have three potential ways I can do this.
1. I normally would just have a box for sections like this with a material for the planks over the top of it. However, the problem with that is that the silhouette of the box is always going to be just that: a box. Nothing will protrude out, and it will look very fake.
2. I could go through and create a bunch of planks of varying sizes and texture them individually. Then, if I randomly replicated them, it would add enough variation that it would look good, and I could have some stick out of the end. It would probably look the best visually, but there are two issues with this method. Making the planks would be incredibly time consuming, and I'm not confident in my abilities to make them look good. I don't know how really to do that. In addition to this, that would be very very expensive. This is going to be displayed in VR, so it's already performance heavy.
3. I could make a large box again, and just extrude random bits here and there to try and get the silhouette to look good. The problem with this is that the texture would have to line up perfectly with those extrusions, and it still might not look very realistic.
What solutions would you guys think would work well for this issue?
I have three potential ways I can do this.
1. I normally would just have a box for sections like this with a material for the planks over the top of it. However, the problem with that is that the silhouette of the box is always going to be just that: a box. Nothing will protrude out, and it will look very fake.
2. I could go through and create a bunch of planks of varying sizes and texture them individually. Then, if I randomly replicated them, it would add enough variation that it would look good, and I could have some stick out of the end. It would probably look the best visually, but there are two issues with this method. Making the planks would be incredibly time consuming, and I'm not confident in my abilities to make them look good. I don't know how really to do that. In addition to this, that would be very very expensive. This is going to be displayed in VR, so it's already performance heavy.
3. I could make a large box again, and just extrude random bits here and there to try and get the silhouette to look good. The problem with this is that the texture would have to line up perfectly with those extrusions, and it still might not look very realistic.
What solutions would you guys think would work well for this issue?