House

GLandolina

Wahoo I'm back doing CG
Hi all, long time no post-a-project
Last night...morning I couldn't sleep (before a test next morning hehe)
so I decided to model me a basic house, for those of you not in the UK this type of house is pretty common on 'estates' in london - very cheap and not very big.
In truth its a slight continuation of another project because some of you may remember This, it was too big of a project to handle so I gave up, plus noone seemed interested with one or two posts.

Anyways onto the progress;
About half an hour last night modelling and about 10 mins planar mapping some basic textures to it for an idea of how it will look:

The render is in monochrome because I havn't had time to make my textures match, they vary in hue.
Anything thats plane is... not started
I will dirty up the textures later.

QUESTION
What do you all reccomend for this project:
Planar map etc the textures on half-life2 style... or unwrap it?
its a hard decision but i need to make it soon.

oh and there will be loads of props and piping and stuff added in later on.

I really hope I can finish this one...

GLandolina

praetus

Looks pretty neat so far. I would normally say that doing it with Tileable planar textures is better if it's game art. Looking prett cool thus far.

malcolm

Neat!

Wells

if you added a bit of realestate to either side, you could easily randomize the clutter/details and have an entire street.

its looking real good. i want to see the back yard!

cholden

Good start, clean looking mesh.

I’d go with tiling textures on a single sheet (1024 with rows of materials that tile). Then, for example, leave the bottom 256x1024 of the sheet for props unwrapped as normal. Nothing to fancy about the technique, but it allows you to use tiling textures without a bunch of materials. Otherwise, it’s just as easy to use multiple materials.

I only suggest this method because it's less draw calls for materials and can make it easier to import into other editors or games. I recently used this technique for a race track. My programmer needed it in maya, but I built it in max. The export/import process went perfectly with the entirety on a single sheet.

noritsune

cholden, am I missing something? how are you going to map the UVs onto the texture sheet and make them only tile one section of it? for instance, if he puts bricks in a little 256x section of the texture sheet like you're suggesting, how does he make bricks tile across the whole wall?

GLandolina

yeah i was thinking of doing it that way too, Cholden but like noritsune I didnt know i'd make it tile, i used to know but i've forgotten
I'll experiment, i might just end up doing a multisubobject material since im used to that.

sectaurs: If this reaches the 100% finished stage that is what i'm likely going to do, but since this is the first project I can see actually being done I am not going to push it cause i'll give up.
Going to be working at a slow and steady pace:)
few more bits and pieces them i will start texturing - back garden wants work so thats up next.

cholden

Faces tiled across horizontal strips of the texture, and/or extra horizontal/vertical cuts in your model to apply individual faces to specific sections of a material (which can be required for smoother [vertex] lighting).

This is slightly covered here: http://chrisholden.net/tutor/util02.htm

noritsune

gotcha. I thought you were suggesting using this technique with textures meant to tile both horizontally and vertically (without adding cuts), which is why I was confused.

Daz

The thickness of the plant pots seems too much, making them appear model-like. Other than that, looks like a proper sarf London estate mate Satellite dish is a nice touch. Hang some washing out in the back garden and add graffiti and you're all good

hawken

nice

go the whole hog for normal mapped goodness?

btw I like your apt block

GLandolina

thanks
gonna do a bit more today then probably start the textures:D

GLandolina

Was thinking i might make the front garden paved or concreted over but with weeds poking through the gaps and stuff, really run down stuff.

GLandolina

not really a worthy update but i spent a little while doing the front garden,
i first off did a lawn with grass but it looked too good for this working class house, so its been covered over with paving - im gonna have weeds poking through the gaps.
Click Me - Warning HD sized image

GLandolina

Cause I cant continue texturing yet, i've been adding bits each day and its got a bit bigger.

Steve Schulze

[ QUOTE ]
Faces tiled across horizontal strips of the texture, and/or extra horizontal/vertical cuts in your model to apply individual faces to specific sections of a material (which can be required for smoother [vertex] lighting).

[/ QUOTE ]Isn't that a terribly inefficient way to work? Surely you'd be much better with one single 64*64 brickwork texture and one big polygon than the texture stuck on a sheet with a bunch of others necessitating a whole bunch of extra polys cut in your wall... Am I missing something?

malcolm

I will have to agree, the whole sheets of textures things for me doesn't make any sense.

1. if your engine streams data you are wasting space because you are streaming in large textures that are not seen instead of individual textures.

2. tiling is limited to one axis.

3. the only way I can see this making sense is if you want the texel density of every model in your scene to be perfect you could put them on one sheet so they match up. Powers of two's are hard to match if seperated. I'm finding mip mapping does a really good job of matching texel density so I strongly suggest ditching the whole must stick all textures on one page.

4. anyone have any info that contradicts my 3rd statement?

GLandolina

i agree plus its overly complicated for the few gains, i am going to do it the half life 2 way where its just normal textures on their own sheet each and they are uvw mapped onto the surfaces the normal way, not all on one sheet.