(UV Doubt) How to properly UV large architecture for games?

Luiz_Gustavo

Hey everyone!

So I'm working on a personal project (I'm making the Indominous Rex Paddock from Jurassic World) to run on UE.

But I just can't figure out how I would UV the walls of the paddock, I built it in a modular way like the real walls on the movie.

Is one texture set enough for the walls?

One segment of the wall is about 12m high and 10m wide (30m total)

I tried stacking all matching UV islands together

Here I just threw in a concrete material from Painter and realized the tiling is very noticeable, is it just a case of going in and hand painting the details to try to make the tiling less noticeable? Or am I missing something with trim textures and UVs altogether? Lol

Thanks!

Ghogiel

tricks and techniques that allow you add layers of detail will help. Uniquely hand texturing every inch of an env is time consuming and inefficient, having a smaller set of resources that you use to build up the pieces is the basic idea, you just get more assets for the time and effort. Whole envs can be made with not that many total pieces or textures.

You can use decals and texture blending to basically eliminate any noticable tiling in this case. eg make 2 or concrete materials and blend them together in the shader via vertex color is a simple enough start. 

an added layer you could make a decal trim sheet and stick decals on parts of the wall to break it up even more, add visual interest/story telling. eg a leaky stain strips coming from the horizontal cuts in the wall, maybe some green mossy/algae building up towards the bottom, cracks or other damage patches where some might logically happen.

Luiz_Gustavo

Ghogiel said:

tricks and techniques that allow you add layers of detail will help. Uniquely hand texturing every inch of an env is time consuming and inefficient, having a smaller set of resources that you use to build up the pieces is the basic idea, you just get more assets for the time and effort. Whole envs can be made with not that many total pieces or textures.

You can use decals and texture blending to basically eliminate any noticable tiling in this case. eg make 2 or concrete materials and blend them together in the shader via vertex color is a simple enough start. 

an added layer you could make a decal trim sheet and stick decals on parts of the wall to break it up even more, add visual interest/story telling. eg a leaky stain strips coming from the horizontal cuts in the wall, maybe some green mossy/algae building up towards the bottom, cracks or other damage patches where some might logically happen.

Hey Ghogiel, thanks for the tips!

I didn't think about making 2 materials and blending them together, I could do it using masks and layers in painter and achieve basically the same results right? Or is it more time-efficient to do it via vertex color in engine?

Now about the decals, I was thinking about doing the stuff marked with green arrows (scratches) with decals, so I could use decals to do the details I put the red arrows (the leakage, mold) on too right?

Thanks again!

Eric Chadwick

The scratches are probably best as decals, while the mold could be done with texture blending. Another good trick is using trim textures.

http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Modular_environments
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/MultiTexture#Modulation_Blending
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/MultiTexture#Trim_Sheets

Luiz_Gustavo

Eric Chadwick said:

The scratches are probably best as decals, while the mold could be done with texture blending. Another good trick is using trim textures.

http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Modular_environments
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/MultiTexture#Modulation_Blending
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/MultiTexture#Trim_Sheets

Hey Eric, thanks for the links! I feel stupid saying this but I didn't know about the wiki, lol... There's a lot of great info there.

I'm going to read more about trim textures, I knew you could store different information on each channel I just didn't know the information could be so wildly different from each other haha.

Just a quick question, nowadays I could use something like Substance Designer to make the trim texture with channel packing and use instances and vertex painting to control it in engine right?

Thanks again!

Eric Chadwick

Yep, lots of ways to slice and dice it.

Luiz_Gustavo

Eric Chadwick said:

Yep, lots of ways to slice and dice it.

Thanks for all the tips guys, I think I finally understand how to do it haha.

First I read a lot on UVs+Texel Density and fixed most of the tiling issues just with better arranging the UVs, then I ended up using 3 textures from quixel for the vertex blending, also used some blending techniques to add some noise between the materials and I think it turned out OK.

I feel like a whole world of possibilities opened up hahaha

Thanks!