Industrial Tower

SaferDan

Hey guys!

so im building a sci fi tower with Midgar from FF7 as inspiration. I still have a ton to do but before i go much further i have a question about map sizes and textures. Basically what would be acceptable in a game? Like the building would be the focus of the scene, i was thinking a couple of 2048's? Is that too much?or can i go higher?

Too many things i don't know!

overal size of the building

Gerasimimumu

A few 2048's for this size building would not be enough. This thing is monstrous huge! You need to modulate it into sections you can repeat. It might sound a bit boring, but you can not see the tower from all sides at once. This plating you have going all around it... I would make 4,5,6 of them that are unique, stick them all on a single 2048 map and once you paint those pieces, you use them to populate your tower surface. For fake occlusion from pipes I would use alphas for faked shadow decals. UDK also does occlusion (assuming you're taking it into UDK), but it is not nearly as good as the maya occlusion bake.

The parts of the building that are way to high for the players to get close to, you can probably cheat with lower texture density (the whole top part above the double rings). You can make that section with a single 2048 map, I suppose.

I would suggest to set this guy aside for a moment and do a quick test on a very small prop, because there's quality loss when you take textures into UDK, due to their native compression. You would want to see how it compares to the way it looks in maya, so you have a better picture of what to aim for.

Having said all that, I think for a prop this size you can easily do 5-6 2048's, but you will still have to be clever and recycle a lot of the texture, it you want a relatively high rez result.

Good luck,
Gera

SaferDan

wow thank you for the epic reply!

Although im fairly new to UDK i have taken one small scene into UDK :-



Just after i posted this thread i did think about just making a few variations of the plating. I realised that i would have to tile quite alot! So do you think i should have a 2048 for the metal plating then another one for the rest of the actual tower then one more for the extra bits like pipes etc? and then maybe a 1024 for the big pipe next to the tower? Is that practical for games?

As im fairly new i have no idea how to make fake shadow decals or decals at all tbh but now is the time to learn i guess!

so would 6 2048's be acceptable for a game?

Again thank you for taking the time to reply

motives

Gerasimimumu wrote: »

Having said all that, I think for a prop this size you can easily do 5-6 2048's, but you will still have to be clever and recycle a lot of the texture, it you want a relatively high rez result.

Good luck,
Gera

that would be like... the entire world texture memory budget in frostbite 1

EMC3D

Gerasimimumu wrote: »

A few 2048's for this size building would not be enough. This thing is monstrous huge! You need to modulate it into sections you can repeat. It might sound a bit boring, but you can not see the tower from all sides at once. This plating you have going all around it... I would make 4,5,6 of them that are unique, stick them all on a single 2048 map and once you paint those pieces, you use them to populate your tower surface. For fake occlusion from pipes I would use alphas for faked shadow decals. UDK also does occlusion (assuming you're taking it into UDK), but it is not nearly as good as the maya occlusion bake.

The parts of the building that are way to high for the players to get close to, you can probably cheat with lower texture density (the whole top part above the double rings). You can make that section with a single 2048 map, I suppose.

I would suggest to set this guy aside for a moment and do a quick test on a very small prop, because there's quality loss when you take textures into UDK, due to their native compression. You would want to see how it compares to the way it looks in maya, so you have a better picture of what to aim for.

Having said all that, I think for a prop this size you can easily do 5-6 2048's, but you will still have to be clever and recycle a lot of the texture, it you want a relatively high rez result.

Good luck,
Gera

Six 2048 maps? That's ridiculous, espically since the UDK engine has vertex painting, which on its own can add variation to the modular parts.


I'd get down all your modular assets your gonna import seperately, take a look at some of the unreal maps and see how their huge buildings are constructed out of seperate meshes, that's the best I can think of at the moment on the preperation side.

SaferDan

ok so i have been playing around with stuff and for the actual main body of it im thinking a tilable 2048 maybe even a 1024....

i just made a new set of panels from a cube and baked the normals and then duplicated the normals in photoshop and laid the uvs over them and this is what i got



i actually reduced the map size to a 512 and appiled it and thats what it looks like. So really i should be able to to use a tileable 2048 for the whole of the main body?
and then just another map for all the extra bits?

some commnets on wether this is actually right would be awesome!

also can your normal map be a different size to your diffuse? It seems like a noob question but i just want to be sure!