Modular Environment Piece
Hello friendly Polycounters,
I started learning game art recently and am modeling and texturing a modular environment piece for practice. I have several questions and would like advice and critique please. Also any correction of terminology used is much appreciated.
Here is my reference image:
I'm not trying to recreate the reference. I would also like to move through each stage and come back if necessary without getting too bogged down with details. I find this helps me to learn better and keeps interest.
Here is my mesh:
Here is the current UV layout in maya:
I have a basic concrete texture applied to the mesh for now. I will work on the textures when I get some free time from work. As you can see the resolution in the pillars is not great.
1. Do you recommend piping in directly from a psd (as I've done) or an image file such as tga or jpg for eg?
2. Would it be beneficial to stack all pillar uv's (bottom left) on top of each to save texture space and then increase the size so that the resolution would improve?
3. Do you have any feedback on the way I've laid out my UV's?
4. Do you have any other comments about anything else?
Here are 2 snapped modular pieces in Unity with a couple of lights:
Thanks so much for your time! :thumbup:
I started learning game art recently and am modeling and texturing a modular environment piece for practice. I have several questions and would like advice and critique please. Also any correction of terminology used is much appreciated.
Here is my reference image:
I'm not trying to recreate the reference. I would also like to move through each stage and come back if necessary without getting too bogged down with details. I find this helps me to learn better and keeps interest.
Here is my mesh:
Here is the current UV layout in maya:
I have a basic concrete texture applied to the mesh for now. I will work on the textures when I get some free time from work. As you can see the resolution in the pillars is not great.
1. Do you recommend piping in directly from a psd (as I've done) or an image file such as tga or jpg for eg?
2. Would it be beneficial to stack all pillar uv's (bottom left) on top of each to save texture space and then increase the size so that the resolution would improve?
3. Do you have any feedback on the way I've laid out my UV's?
4. Do you have any other comments about anything else?
Here are 2 snapped modular pieces in Unity with a couple of lights:
Thanks so much for your time! :thumbup:
Replies
Also overlaying the uvs will give you more resolution.
First off, the poly count is deceiving because while you deleted the edges, you did not delete the vertices. The result is that the polycount didn't really change. If you want to do that properly, select your edges and go to Edit Mesh> Delete Edge/Vertex. That said, I personally wouldn't delete those verts because they're crucial to your silhouette.
The other thing is that it looks like you might have used Maya's automatic mapping feature? I don't think I've ever found a good application for that tool. I might have used it for light mapping once, but it required a good deal of tweaking afterward.
I don't know if you plan to create a high poly version but if not, consider checking out Spitfire's fantastic sci-fi tunnel breakdown; a scene he did without the use of high poly bakes.
As others have pointed out, the UV shells could all overlap and your texture resolution would look tons better. If it's not obvious, the larger a UV island is, the more pixels it has on it. Therefore, you can get dictate how dense in detail your pieces are using the UV editor.
Lastly, I've never personally used Unity so I don't know what kind of textures it prefers but I know I use Targas (.tga) exclusively with Maya, UDK and Marmoset without any issues.
Good luck bud, and I'm curious to track your progress.
@TJ062 - I wasn't sure but I'm getting the idea that this texture sheet should only be for this modular piece.
@BringMeASunkist - No offense taken dude, I'm here to learn! Nice spot on the additional vertices, I missed that and tx for the menu item to deal with that issue, have wondered about it in the past!
Yes, I used automatic mapping. This is my very first mapped piece, can you recommend another mapping method in this case? ..or perhaps even your workflow?
This piece is intended for gaming so low poly. Thanks for that link, interesting!
It looks more to me like a slightly squashed hexagon and like only the doorway is circular. It's also a lot wider.
If you're not trying to recreate the reference, what is it for? Just curious, not sure what you're after.
It's pretty good practice to be working on your diffuse, specular, normal or whatever other maps you've got in the same PSD, so that you can make changes to one map and make sure that the changes align in all of the others. So, if you're going to need 3+ different textures anyway depending on your material, you'd need 3+ different PSDs... or else you'd be exporting different layers from one PSD anyway, in which case you might as well get used to doing that.
Regarding file format, .tga's a solid choice. .png is fine if you don't need the alpha channel. (If you do, Photoshop tends to horrible things with pngs in my experience...)
It'd probably better for your team too, so that you're sending/receiving/version controlling 2MB files instead of 50+MB PSDs.
How would you have interpreted this piece?
@Elyaradine - thanks that makes sense, you have mentioned it before but I c people approach these things differently. I still need to figure out how much of the alternative maps like normal, height, etc you actually do yourself as opposed to a third party app.