Guys, i'm working with Procedural City Engine to develop very large cities. The application is perfect, but there is a major flaw: texturing sucks. We were able to achieve a good amount of mesh detail with the procedural scripting, but texturing is still a problem. We decided, then, to texture our city in 3DS Max.
But... what is the best approach of doing that? I'm talking about thousands of different buildings.
Keep in mind that we are mostly programmers, without advanced knowledge of the 3DS Max workflow, so, treat us like dumb people.
Replies
1.) select all buildings
2.) in the modifier panel add the 'UVW Mapping' modifier, set Mapping type to 'Box'
3.) slap a texture on them
done
I am working atm. on a random skyline kind of level where I model and texture prefabs that get randomly shuffled together in the engine. That way I don't have to model any thinkable building but instead let the engine do the random part for me.
So that in the end 1 have 4 different types of elements each with about 5-8 different elements to be modeled and unwrapped and textured.
Free procedural building generator for 3ds Max
http://www.allegorithmic.com/
http://download.allegorithmic.com/documents/brochures/substance_air_brochure_v1.0_en_web.pdf
http://www.neilblevins.com/cg_education/vertex_map_wear/vertex_map_wear.htm
http://saschahenrichs.blogspot.com/2009/02/procedural-concrete-material-xx.html
http://saschahenrichs.blogspot.com/2009/01/procedural-materials-in-3dsmax.html
if you're textures are well done you will just need to change them to increase the diversity.
Big advantage you're city will look more architectural than with a random process.
Did it few months ago for a video game. That was the best things to do random tools are just doing random things ...
Random will work perfectly for SF worlds but not for real one.
Sorry but i don't trust anymore into one button do everything visually nice, optimized, and retakable ...