Ideas for faking building detail with only materials?

spacekatgal

Hey everybody! Long time lurker, first time Polycount poster. ^^

So, I'm working on texturing this scene for our team. I would like to stick to just materials, since UVing all of this and texturing it would waste a lot of dev time. I'm using Maya 2011. What I want is to just break up the flat color on the side of the building. I can cheat it a bit with the MIA_Material_X shader and some blending - but the calc time is super high.

http://idisk.mac.com/spacekat/Public/buildings.png

You can see the windows are already built with translucent materials a bit. I know it's a dream without UVing, but I'd also like to do a bit more with them. Random lights on and off is a great trick - but the only way I can think to so it is to UV. I would be spending a week UVing all 30 building types.

Any of your nifty moves you'd like to share would be super appreciated!

Frankie

Just paint a generic dirty texture and stick it on with a quick&dirty unwrap over the whole building? ie planar, cube or even camera projection might be best.

Noors

yeah i don't think you'll get very far without uv and textures. That's the all point to make modular stuff. You model and unwrap just one pattern, then duplicate it.
But i agree now, the lazy way, would be to make a generic concrete texture(s) and apply a box projection to your uv's (+ fixing the size). This is not too much work and could be easily scripted.

spacekatgal

Okay, I've got you. I'll UV the buildings with the planar tool. It will be time intensive, but I think it will have to be done. Thanks for the perspective!

That's really surprising that no material can fake cement or concrete.

Frankie

at the distance in your picture I think the small concrete or cement detail would be lost, eg the tiny stones and cracks, and you would mainly be seeing dirt and grime.

I'm sure you can do a convincing procedural concrete texture in maya but I've no idea how

Just as reference (no use to you because its not in maya) most of these materials are procedural. http://www.luxology.com/asset/materials/?mode=Category&id=

but at the end of the day if you didn't care about dirt relative to the buildings features you could just automatically unwrap then apply a large concrete image to it.