Ideas for faking building detail with only materials?

spacekatgal · Sep 2011

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 · Sep 2011

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 · Sep 2011

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 · Sep 2011

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 · Sep 2011

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.

Ideas for faking building detail with only materials?

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