Environment Modeling and Texturing Question

Jeremy Lindstrom

When using modular designs like this tutorial

Modular Design

I'm trying to wrap my head around it. If I create lets say a wall section square at 512x512 or so modular piece or create many of them to create my building then when ready to texture them lay the uv's out by planning to use the same 512x512 spaces or several of them on one sheet to save texture space instead of using one big sheet for the whole side of the building.

Correct?

Also when building with modular designs, once you put the pieces together you do go back and merge all the verts as well right? So they are one piece and not modular really anymore it's all one mesh. Then you just uv the modular sections one by one matching each modular piece to the appropriate uv space on the texture map, right??

This can also work with thirding the textures... again I'm assuming. You can add borders, trim, etc by how you break up the modular piece and the uv map.

I think it makes sense, I just wanted another opinion. I am starting 2 seperate city scenes and I'm building several buildings for my final project at school and wanted to make sure this made sense prior to starting out.

Thanks in advance.

JordanW

Usually your modular pieces are simply put together in an editor so the verts are never merged. Dont worry about UVing at the end, do it while you still are working with 1 piece that way you're not just redoing work.

Jeremy Lindstrom

This piece won't be hitting an editor so they will just be rendered out in maya. I saw a nice texturing for environment the other day and now I cant find it, had a circle and arrows on a brick texture and showed how to use thirding and stuff.

JordanW

Right but i was aiming the comment more at the fact that you dont need to merge the verticies or do UVs after you make the pieces, just make your single lego piece, texture it, the instance it throughout the scene.

Jeremy Lindstrom

anyone seen that tutorial on environment mapping a wall, that was similar to poops on thirding but it had a brick texture and blue circle and arrows and it had end caps and was showing how you can layout for using like 4 textures for a bunch of walls?

In english thanks to NoelCower;

anyone seen that tutorial on environment mapping a wall, that was similiar to poops on thirding but it was useful and it had end caps and was showing how you can layout for using like 4 textures for a bunch of walls?

Joseph Silverman

For reference, if anyone else wants to know where the tutorial dekard mentioned is, Chris Holden posted it here:
http://www.game-artist.net/forums/tutorials/182-step-step-techniques-tiling-textures-3ds-max.html

Sage

You might want to read this, as it talks about modular design and kind of puts it in context of using it in game editor. At any rate I kind of modeled large scenes with a lot of what was mentioned in an instinctive kind of way but this put a lot of doubts to rest and helped me get it. Hope it helps you too.

http://udn.epicgames.com/Two/WorkflowAndModularity.html

Alex