repetitive texturing

sir-knight

hey guys, I'm trying to do a moderately high poly race track, how would I texture the various sections of road surface? Would I just create 1 road section, texture it and paste that sucker all over the place and weld the verts, or is there some other way of doing it?

Xaltar

Basicly from what I understand yeah, you would use a single unremarkable track texture tilled end to end and then add decals or whatever your engine supports for track details like cracks, potholes, warn areas etc etc.

Eric Chadwick

Vertex blending is one way to help avoid repetitiveness. Detail texturing is also helpful. Do some searches, using terms like +vertex +race +texture

sir-knight

this is a model that's going to be used for money shots, no in engine use for it, in the polycounts we're going to be dealing with, we're going to have to go with something much simpler.

[Deleted User]

How complex would these road surfaces be? You might be able to do most of it as a procedural material, depending.

Richard Kain

Are you going to be using a terrain engine for the race track? If so, it might be possible to simply create it using texture blending. Of course, that would make it impossible to add details like the dotted lines on the road...

odium

How would it make it impossible? Decals are decals, they can be added anywhere on anything...

IMO, the best you can do is set up your surfaces, then vertex blend between the two, i.e. the road and the dirt, and whetever other surfaces you want. Then, with different blend modes, set up skid marks, the white racing lines, old dirty puddle stains and the like. You can do this, and have it look great and unrepetitive with about 5 textures, whatever res you want.

sir-knight

alright cool guys, I'll look into it some more and come back with any questions, I figured I'd model some of the infield stuff as well, but texturing that stuff would be far simpler than the road surface.

sir-knight

rather than start a new thread, I'll bump this up...


The vertex blending tutorial I found relates to importing it into Q3, (http://www.bakdesign.net/tm/tutorial/3dsmax_tutorial.html) is there a tutorial out there that shows how to do it so it displays internally in max renders? This model will not be exported to a game engine.

Eric Chadwick

Use the Vertex Color map type in the Mix Amount slot of a Mix Map, and put your two bitmaps in the other two Mix slots.

kio

actually i would recommend a composite material with 4 sub materials for each vertex color+base. its quite easy to setup - for realtime editing you could simply create a dx shader which does exactly the same as the render material.

okkun

Regardless on how you create the material I would recommend creating a spline and lofting the road. That way you'll get continuous UV's from start to finish. You can control width and banking by adding new cross sections shapes.

Depending on the width of your track you can even include shoulders with dirt or grass by adding verts to your shape and setting those sections to use different materials, be careful with the inside of tight corners though as the loft tends to fold over itself.

Also if you're just concerned with how it looks forget about vertex blending and use blend maps, that way you can play around with different tiling values in the material until you get the right look.

Toomas

I think the modern way to do it is unique texture for the whole track, every game uses streaming textures nowadays.

okkun

As long as you can tile a detail texture that could work. It's a pain in the ass to work with though and I don't recommend it if you have other options.