Medieval Building
Hey all I have been trying to finish this part of our game project for a while now and I keep running into walls. My first design made this building out of tiny set pieces which would form the walls on the inside as I build them but I guess the inside parts are supposed to be separate for games?
This new design built each floor out of 512x512 Bigger pieces that are 160 Units high (128 Units + 32 to represent a floor buffer on the inside), It is also one big 2096x2096 texture that fits in 4 1024 textures to make up the scene.
More so than just art knowledge I need some technical help as well, should the wood boards, and the windows and a door be separate objects and added later on in the game engine? I'm using Unity so they can easily be their own prefab for instancing, and if I set up their UV maps right they can use the same material as the building the large one.
I do not have many skills when it comes to painting on textures and my Game Director wants our scenes to be photo realistic even though I think a more stylized approach would of been more appealing.
Also do you think my original idea with smaller pieces (Like a wall being 128x128x6 Units) to fit them together to form new buildings could work? Keep in mind the player needs to be able to enter into most of these buildings.
This new design built each floor out of 512x512 Bigger pieces that are 160 Units high (128 Units + 32 to represent a floor buffer on the inside), It is also one big 2096x2096 texture that fits in 4 1024 textures to make up the scene.
More so than just art knowledge I need some technical help as well, should the wood boards, and the windows and a door be separate objects and added later on in the game engine? I'm using Unity so they can easily be their own prefab for instancing, and if I set up their UV maps right they can use the same material as the building the large one.
I do not have many skills when it comes to painting on textures and my Game Director wants our scenes to be photo realistic even though I think a more stylized approach would of been more appealing.
Also do you think my original idea with smaller pieces (Like a wall being 128x128x6 Units) to fit them together to form new buildings could work? Keep in mind the player needs to be able to enter into most of these buildings.
Replies
These used smaller textures that were re used in the scene but did not use one giant texture. I'm really confused and not sure which one is the right way or if I was right the first time or wrong.
I should also mention my original method that you are currently looking at has each object with multiple material IDs. So on one wall channel 1 would be the stucco texture and 2 the wood etc..
Some things i would change:
- the colors of the textures look kinda the same... everything seems a bit uniform. Get more variation inside.
- the normal maps look too noisy... maybe it's just me, but it stresses the eye a bit.
- the stones at the edges and the stucco?-parts have the same texture.
(i personally can't really make out what material this should be ^^ stone, stucco, mud?)
i, myself, did a medieval village not long ago: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=97810 maybe you can get sth out of this.
oh, and one more thing: change the glass. It looks too modern, clean and so on for a medieval setting.
Keep going!
For example, take another look at the Modular Mount & Blade tutorials on the wiki.
These textures could easily be packed into a single 1024x2048 texture sheet. Then you UV the model to fit into the sheet. Make your own layout, with your own textures, based on what you need for your particular project.
To help you plan your texture sheet, take a look at this excellent thread
Mod Facade Challenge
Many more tips here on the wiki.
http://wiki.polycount.com/CategoryEnvironmentModularity#Modular_Design_.26_Workflow
Also... 2096 is not a valid powers-of-two texture resolution. 1024 x2 = 2048.
I did find some evidence that larger objects produce less draw calls though.
1024x2048 is a good place to start from. There's no ideal though, sorry to say, it all depends on the project. You just have to learn it as you go. Usually your lead artist, or graphics programmer, or technical artist will give you guidelines and budgets, depending on the size of the game level, the engine being used, the min-spec hardware, etc.
Feel free to keep asking questions!
Ok so I have 2 tests, one is this building made up of tiny objects so lets say 6 different types of them that are instanced to form one building. These objects all contain the same 1024x2048 texture and I did some "Smart UV Mapping" to make them all fit together and tile and all that good stuff.
But I also have one other test this is the entire house (minutes the roofing) as one big piece that I can easily swap out roofs and a few other things in my scenes to form newer building. This also uses only one Material ID and one big texture of the same size.
Obviously it depends on the circumstances, the game type in question and the engine, plus the target hardware.
Engine: Unity Latest Build Free
Game Type: JRPG Style Third Person from what I understand so far the camera follows freely with the character so manually camera control.
Circumstances: Test purposes but in total we plan on having one big scene with tons of buildings to form one of the first towns that the player visits. SO think at least 40-50 buildings or so plus some other things going on like water effects.
Target Hardware: Mid end to High end PC Hardware. We are not trying to make the best looking game with the latest graphics but we are also not targeting the low end like WoW.
Which one would you say is best?
On the one hand the smaller objects combine into "Instanced Prefabs" so for the 6-8 objects that make up this one large building each one only gets put into RAM once, not sure how it works but I think each one also counts for its own draw call so 6-8 calls.
On the other the bigger mesh means less customization and I have to build more of them to make my town to me maybe I'm having trouble seeing the bigger picture but this way seems like less options and more work on my part I made the smaller pieces first because I liked the idea of making tons of buildings using these tiny pieces to "trick" the player into believing each new building was something different even if they were roughly the same sets.
Not sure how LODs would be handled on the smaller pieces to be honest but on the bigger ones it would work out easier I think, unless I made a LOD1 and 2 and so on by combining the smaller objects in 3DS max and lower the final polygon count than re-importing into our game engine or does that sound messy?
As for the insides I'm really not sure but I think the best way is to make each inside of a building a separate scene.
Many objects vs. one object... you have to try a full-size test of this. Make a full-size level with each method, and compare the performance. Each house can be exactly the same, it's more a test of the number of objects than an art look-n-feel test.
If you don't want to test, you'll run into problems later, and probably have to re-do a bunch of work.
1.If you are not going inside the building then I would make it as a single asset (Iwould recomend you start this way).
2. If you are going inside the building then build it like a quake 3 map. Which means you justmake wall textures to give you the impression you are in a building (or infront of one), and dress it with props to sell the illusion.
I will have to do some tests but I'm not familiar with the Quake method.
Unity should have no trouble with rectangle textures. What's the error?
http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/Components/class-Texture2D.html
Not sure if this would be a fix but if I can get my UV maps to not change based on the custom bit map size, couldn't I just do a planar map with the resolution set to 512x512 and than tell the custom to change to 1024x2048 and snap it into place? There has to be a way to fix this? I'm so close!
Also I don't have 1500 dollars to shell out for Unity Pro :poly142:
Back in the good old days a quake mapper would have cranked out something of a similar spec (to what you have made) directly in GTKRadiant (probably without the normal maps) in a few days, and that would include interiors. Food for thought.
http://www.map-factory.org/quake-3