Texturing modular assets efficiently while retaining quality

TheSteamDyer

Hey there, I was hoping to gain some insight on the topic's title, and maybe learn some new trick from those of you who work in the videogame  industry.

I'm making a modular environment (a house interior) in a post-apocalyptic setting, but I came to an halt when i got to these assets. They're pieces of a kitchen, and I'm trying to think about them as if they were modular pieces to be used across multiple instances in an hypothetical game. As you can see they have multiple repeating elements and I'm not sure how to texture them to make them both efficient and interesting. My goal was to use not more than a couple of materials and texture sets (the bodies should be made of wood, the doors and drawers white painted wood) but if I overlap the UVs of similar elements and use tileable textures I won't get much detail (like tear and wear on the borders and such). On the other end, if I try to keep those details I would get a different texture set for each modular piece, which in turn is not efficient at all. Third and last option, I could fit everything into two materials but I would have to make the UV islands smaller, loosing consistency in texel density.

My question is, how would an environment artist in the industry approach the problem? Is there an option I didn't think about? Do you have cool resources that talk about this?

Really curious to hear your answers!

 

Kanni3d

You wouldn't want to use unique textures in this case for many of the reasons you described (expensive since there'd would have to be many of them, limitations to uv's, repetitiveness since they're unique uv's, issues with T.D.). You'd likely want to look into midpoly modeling and texturing using a few tileable/procedural textures + masks. You'll get your consistency of textures across your models, precisely the same texel density, and have more fidelity via beveling your edges to get edge highlights via weighted normals. I actually just made a small tutorial on this for a small academy and I'll PM it to you, if you'd like

poopipe

Conventionally youd group them up by how likely they are to be used together and ram them into a texture page per set. 
Texel density is key to maintaining consistent quality

In my experience mid poly working leaves you with too much geometry, limits your artistic wotsits and lods like shit so I tend to advise against it. 
If you have a rendering pipeline thats specifically set up to support layered materials and you're willing to suck up the artistic limitations it makes sense  but that's not normal.

TheSteamDyer

poopipe said:

Conventionally youd group them up by how likely they are to be used together and ram them into a texture page per set. 
Texel density is key to maintaining consistent quality

In my experience mid poly working leaves you with too much geometry, limits your artistic wotsits and lods like shit so I tend to advise against it. 
If you have a rendering pipeline thats specifically set up to support layered materials and you're willing to suck up the artistic limitations it makes sense  but that's not normal.

Yeah I'm not a fan of mid poly workflow either to be honest. Thanks though @Kanni3d

@poopipe can you expand on the first part? What do you mean with texture page? And what's the idea behind grouping them?  

poopipe

That just means map them all into the same texture

 That set of assets is perfectly suited to being grouped together, there's lots of repeating elements and they're all conveniently box shaped. 


To work out your UV layout,
make a box around each cupboard,
unwrap the boxes,
set your texel density,
lay out the resultant UVs - overlapping anything you can, using tiling etc.

If it won't fit into the first UV tile, start using the next one along one of the axes. (This means you'll need a rectangular texture set)

That gives you your LOD UVs and tells you quickly how big your texture is going to be. 
Next step is to lay your higher LOD UVs over the top  - fitting any details/edges etc into the empty space  you inevitably have left.