Art Test Building Texture
polycounter lvl 2
Hi Ladies and Gents,
I applied to a company, they liked my portfolio and gave me an art test. Im about a week into the test now and Im at a critical stage that will affect the quality of my submission.
There is no official NDA but I will treat it as if there was one, just to be sure.
Vague summary of the brief:
1) Task: Create and texture a building solely from google street view images (link to specific building was given to me). Its about the size of a two to three story family house. My model looks right and is well within the poly limit. So far so good, BUT...
2) Texture: a single 1024 texture for the entire building
How on earth do I texture that thing with only one material?
Approach 1)
The easy thing would be to just UV it and give it all unique UV space but that decreases the texel density way too much for my taste. It doesnt look nowhere near the buildings in their games
Approach 2)
Use multiple tileable materials, but cant do cuz of limitation listed above
Approach 3)
I know for a fact this company uses lots of decals in their buildings (Trim, Windows, Cornerstones etc). Its a nice and flexible workflow but would require even more unique UV space for the decals in my case. Very little advantage over approach 1 in terms of texel density.
Am I wrong with any of this? Any help is greatly appreciated and im looking forward to hearing from you.
PS: Even though the HR person stated I could ask further questions about the test, Im worried it might reflect negatively on me - plastering them with a bunch of technical questions they will have to forward to the art team (who are also busy).
I applied to a company, they liked my portfolio and gave me an art test. Im about a week into the test now and Im at a critical stage that will affect the quality of my submission.
There is no official NDA but I will treat it as if there was one, just to be sure.
Vague summary of the brief:
1) Task: Create and texture a building solely from google street view images (link to specific building was given to me). Its about the size of a two to three story family house. My model looks right and is well within the poly limit. So far so good, BUT...
2) Texture: a single 1024 texture for the entire building
How on earth do I texture that thing with only one material?
Approach 1)
The easy thing would be to just UV it and give it all unique UV space but that decreases the texel density way too much for my taste. It doesnt look nowhere near the buildings in their games
Approach 2)
Use multiple tileable materials, but cant do cuz of limitation listed above
Approach 3)
I know for a fact this company uses lots of decals in their buildings (Trim, Windows, Cornerstones etc). Its a nice and flexible workflow but would require even more unique UV space for the decals in my case. Very little advantage over approach 1 in terms of texel density.
Am I wrong with any of this? Any help is greatly appreciated and im looking forward to hearing from you.
PS: Even though the HR person stated I could ask further questions about the test, Im worried it might reflect negatively on me - plastering them with a bunch of technical questions they will have to forward to the art team (who are also busy).
Replies
Any further feedback is very welcome
cheers
ask any other questions you need
both neilberard and Taylor Brown are correct
if you can do this effectively and they dont want you, I'll interview you myself
Thx fellas, appreciate it. I drew up a little meme house to illustrate the situation a bit better. This is obviously not the building for the test 😭
TLDR:
Option 1 not optimal but uses less UV space compared to option 2
Option 2 uses more UV space for unique decals but I feel like the company wants me to use decals (reading between the lines of their brief)
@Alex_J
Im about 7/8ths to my maximum poly count but might need more geometry to support the texture/trim/atlas whatever you wanna call it. Always makes me feel wierd carving up my model and adding geo just for the texture 😩
Delivering options probably isn't a bad idea if each has it's own pro's and cons.
"Meeting these guidelines was a challenge so I wanted to try a few methods to see what would be the pro's and con's of each. With method A I believe the visual quality is good for X-types of projects, but with method B I made more efficient use of resources on a technical level."
just an exmaple. Just be yourself, be honest about what you are confident about and what yuo aren't, do your best. If they feel like you are somebody who can communicate clearly to work through a problem in team environment that is worth as much or maybe even more than being super awesome art guy.
you can use freebies from quixel or google and whip up some quick test. Try to figure out the whole process with stand-in items and get an idea wha thte final quality would be without having to do the tedious work of making textures and all that. In the end if it is just a judgement call between a couple options, that call should go to the superiors who make project-wide decisions. You just provide as much "on the ground" information as you can.
Big hint... You only ever see two sides of a house at once if it's square / rectangular
Awesome thanks, seems to be the only way. I have used & made trim sheets before (stucco etc) but they were their own seperate material and not part of a single overall building texture.
Down below is how I think Ill have to go about it judging by the feedback. That right? Pretty much one of the fronts split up and stacked into multiple shells.
About the hint: are you referring to saving time by using the same UV's for the front/back and left/right of the building? If so, the building I have to make has different facades all around (left side is entirely stone, right side is 70% plaster and 30% stone etc).
Laying out the trim sheet/atlas will be a real challenge. Ive already looked at a bunch of tutorials and if anyone has more tutorials or videos about this topic I'd love to see them
How do I go about the layout of the trim sheet, where do I start?
-Decide what textures/materials my house needs should probs be step 1 and then
-Decide on a TD?
-Unwrap entire building first?
-Is it a constant back and forth between Maya and PS to see what/how it fits?
Once again thanks for the help and any additional feedback!
https://www.artstation.com/pixelmasher/blog/1zja/creating-trim-textures-4-part-free-tutorial-step-by-step
Cheers
Ended up creating a single 1k Trim Sheet/Texture Atlas with multiple tileable materials + some unique UV's + damage & grime decals. I even got a decent texel density of 1px/cm out of it imo. All windows, doors and blinds are photobashed from high res textures to look exactly like the ones in the reference without having to use low-res warped street-view images.
I really hope that I executed the task well, at the very least on a technical level and especially with the constraints I had to work with.
Cheers