Are Tileable Textures used on the whole Building?

Iqualizierer

Hi,

Normally you use in Games Tileable Textures for big Buildings (because of the Texel Density) so my Question is do you use the Textures on the WHOLE Building so for example Tileable Textures on the Building itself, on the Window Frames, on the Glass, on the Doors or do you use for some pieces the UV's like for the Building you use Tileables Textures and for the Door UV Textures

I hope you could understand my Text

icegodofhungary

You would use the tileable textures to cover large areas that are impractical to texture by hand. You can use trim textures on details that repeat so you avoid having to do unique unwraps there.  Say you have a large brick apartment building. The walls of the building will be a tiled brick texture. The windows would be a glass material, and some kind of wood trim texture you've used to create modular windows. Theoretically you could apply a tiling painted wood texture to the window frames too. But depending on your lighting setup, it could come off as very plain looking. If the building is in the background, far away, on on taller sections away from the player, that may be just fine.

There's some good links in the wiki on modular buildings that show you a use of tiling textures and trims.

gnoop

Nobody would scrutinize your  final product for texel density . So not  perfectly  same  texel size  is ok and in some cases logical.    Doors  could be  unique  textures   or be  mix of unique and tillable " detail " textures  + decals + material layers  as pretty much everything else.     

There is no single "right" way.   It's a part of creative job to find  a perfect  balance in between  unique and sometimes not so hi-ress details and tileble ones.     And do it in reasonable time  (a hard part) 

Alex_J

as a starting point for big buildings, i usually use some stock tileable textures to fill things in. Just get some color and texture and view the whole thing in your game engine/renderer.

From there it's easier to figure out where you'll need unique textures to fit in later.

Obscura

Some things needs"unique" texture on building. Say it has a statue piece or ornament that appears multiple times. Those can be baked from a highpoly, and then repeated on the lowpoly building.Or doors, yeah.

Eric Chadwick

Yes
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Modular_environments

Iqualizierer

icegodofhungary said:

You would use the tileable textures to cover large areas that are impractical to texture by hand. You can use trim textures on details that repeat so you avoid having to do unique unwraps there.  Say you have a large brick apartment building. The walls of the building will be a tiled brick texture. The windows would be a glass material, and some kind of wood trim texture you've used to create modular windows. Theoretically you could apply a tiling painted wood texture to the window frames too. But depending on your lighting setup, it could come off as very plain looking. If the building is in the background, far away, on on taller sections away from the player, that may be just fine.

There's some good links in the wiki on modular buildings that show you a use of tiling textures and trims.

Really Helpful Thanks!

poopipe

I would scrutinise your final result for texel density but in fairness I'm a texel density nazi. 

strict adherence to texel density is not about how many pixels there are per metre,  it's about  making sure that the scale of detail like bricks, bolt heads and other such visual references are consistent and believable. 
If an artist knows that a tiling material is designed to cover a 4m square then they know how to UV it so that it fits with the assets that the rest of the art team is making.
The fact is that  as soon as somebody improvises and decides bricks are 10% bigger on this building it fucks up the player's perception of scale and makes the whole scene look wrong

gnoop

poopipe said:

I would scrutinise your final result for texel density but in fairness I'm a texel density nazi. 

strict adherence to texel density is not about how many pixels there are per metre,  it's about  making sure that the scale of detail like bricks, bolt heads and other such visual references are consistent and believable. 
If an artist knows that a tiling material is designed to cover a 4m square then they know how to UV it so that it fits with the assets that the rest of the art team is making.
The fact is that  as soon as somebody improvises and decides bricks are 10% bigger on this building it fucks up the player's perception of scale and makes the whole scene look wrong

Such approach is understandable  but imo wastes lots of precious  texture space  on uniquely unwrapped objects  where nobody just place a texture from a library  and usually use something like SPainter to make  proper scale adjustment .     

  Where it's  something tillable we always have  scaling inputs in a shader/material  since it always a mix of  macro  and  regular textures.  So no need to be crazy about UV and you just pack it most efficient way  possible

poopipe

That's true but it really comes down to how many people and how many assets youre dealing with.
Once you start looking at 60-70 artists you can't rely on judgement because it becomes very difficult to validate the results - also at that point there's so many people that your team's average quality level is going to be by definition average - you don't get 70 rockstars in a team of 70 people. 

in a small team where there's implicit trust you can afford to be more flexible but if you're talking about 2-3000 assets coming from outsource/large internal team you can't afford to take chances on things you can't write automated tests for. 
As such a fixed td makes highlighting potential TD and scale  issues easy and leads to a better chance of catching problems before your game ships. 

I realise that this isn't necessarily an issue for an individual but from my perspective ( the person who designs the pipeline youre using) its an important consideration