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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.

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  • 1magus
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    Also I'm aware the rock surface on the bottom floor does not tile yet. Also here is my original design in Unity, as you can see they are made up of tons of smaller modular pieces or prefabs, and the inside are part of the outside objects.
    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..
  • 3dcaspar
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    3dcaspar polycounter lvl 10
    Good start.
    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!
  • 1magus
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    Very good advice but it raises further questions :-P for one is there a way to remove the noise from my normal maps? It is an increasing issue on my part. Also I was wondering if anyone could help me on my modular issue? I still don't know if smaller pieces or bigger ones work well? Also the stones on the edge are using a different texture but I guess they do look like mud
  • 1magus
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    The wood texture is currently one of my biggest issues do you think I need a different one? This is what I'm using, I just made a new one and literally removed all the noise was this the right thing to do?
  • Eric Chadwick
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    This is way too large a texture to use for a game asset. It's a lot of wasted texture space.

    For example, take another look at the Modular Mount & Blade tutorials on the wiki.

    8NYUB.jpg
    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.
  • 1magus
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    I will take your texture advice but I still have many other issues that the wiki only vaguely answers.

    I did find some evidence that larger objects produce less draw calls though.
  • 1magus
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    So for similar buildings like the mount and blade project 1024x2048 is like a sweet spot?
  • Eric Chadwick
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    Well, larger objects do not produce less draw calls. LESS objects do. So the more you combine objects together that use the same shader, the less draw calls you will get. Objects do tend to get larger the more you combine them, so I guess that's true in a way. :)

    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!
  • 1magus
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    I will :) Because we are now sort of getting some where!

    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.
  • 1magus
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    I just noticed when setting up a UV map for a large texture sheet in max that is not a square shape the grid in it gets messed up, do you know of any settings to fix this? I got the blue box to become a rectangle but the grids are not rectangles too instead of squares.
  • Eric Chadwick
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    Rectangular UV... here's one way. http://www.polycount.com/forum/showpost.php?p=1209009&postcount=4

    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.
  • modern
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    modern polycounter lvl 17
    Two ways to make a building:

    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.
  • 1magus
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    Oh ok so set up my UV maps to the rectangle shape than hit options in the Unwrap modifier and set the custom map size I see :) but will that fix it in game engines? I noticed Unity also has a problem recognizing rectangle texture sheets.

    I will have to do some tests but I'm not familiar with the Quake method.
  • Eric Chadwick
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    By quake method he means you don't make the whole exterior of the house. You only make a false front, like a stage set. This only works if the player is limited to traveling on one main street, and there are no spaces between the houses. Depends on your town style, and the gameplay.

    Unity should have no trouble with rectangle textures. What's the error?
    http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/Components/class-Texture2D.html
  • 1magus
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    After doing a Quick Planar map on each square section I down scaled them to fit where the wall portion of my texture is on my "Texture Sheet" but when I manually place them to snap into place it tiles but there is this slight tiny seam you can see if you look close enough.

    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!
  • 1magus
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    That join you guy keeps posting not sure why hes still here heh.
  • 1magus
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    Is there any external software that measures how many draw calls are being used on the computer? Only the PRO Edition of Unity does this and I can easily tell that the bigger modular set uses less ram by at least 14MBs when compared to the smaller ones but I would like to compare more than FPS and RAM.

    Also I don't have 1500 dollars to shell out for Unity Pro :poly142:
  • Eric Chadwick
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    Yeah there are tools, but they're pretty hard to use unless you're a programmer. Microsoft has one, Nvidia has one, AMD might have one too.
  • modern
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    modern polycounter lvl 17
    Sounds like you are getting tied up in knots. I would recommend that you get a copy of UDK and take a look at the "Epic Citadel" example map. Looking at what you have made already I think it would make a good bench mark for you to aim at.

    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
  • 1magus
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    I know mines can look better, but I'm still learning + I think Quake 3 has source code and some of those models look pretty modern or at least semi modern.
  • 1magus
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    Anyone have any basic tips on getting UV maps to tile perfectly with texture sheets? Once I switched to these I'm getting tiny seams on everything just barely visible but there.
  • 1magus
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    I figured it out, I had to scale them down by one pixel.
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