Having some trouble understanding uving and texturing house/environment assets
polycounter lvl 9
Hey all! I've been modeling for a little while now, as a uni student. I usually like to focus on low poly, hand painted characters, so I don't have much practice in environment stuff. This year I've been slowly getting into doing environment props, and some tiling texture stuff, and it's been going okay.
However, I'm pretty confused when it comes to things like texturing a large house. The process has never really been explained to me. As far as I can tell, the usual workflow is this: specific props and areas of the house are textured on a large map and then repeated. A map containing a variety of tiling textures is made, and the areas of the house that will tile are unwrapped to fit the tiling.
I'm confused mostly on how to accomplish things like trimming on the building, or non-box shapes that require tiling.
I'm making a hand painted witch's house at the moment, and I'm at the point where I'm fairly happy with the blockout and I'm starting to work on some tiling textures. I'd like some help with figuring out the best workflow for the house, and how to uv specific parts. Any tutorials on this specific thing would be awesome!
Would it be at all more efficient if I unwrapped the entire house to one large texture? The screenshot is at roughly what the camera distance will be, so super fancy high res detail isn't really needed.
Edit: oops, I had both this subforum and the technical help subforum and accidentally posted it to here....
However, I'm pretty confused when it comes to things like texturing a large house. The process has never really been explained to me. As far as I can tell, the usual workflow is this: specific props and areas of the house are textured on a large map and then repeated. A map containing a variety of tiling textures is made, and the areas of the house that will tile are unwrapped to fit the tiling.
I'm confused mostly on how to accomplish things like trimming on the building, or non-box shapes that require tiling.
I'm making a hand painted witch's house at the moment, and I'm at the point where I'm fairly happy with the blockout and I'm starting to work on some tiling textures. I'd like some help with figuring out the best workflow for the house, and how to uv specific parts. Any tutorials on this specific thing would be awesome!
Would it be at all more efficient if I unwrapped the entire house to one large texture? The screenshot is at roughly what the camera distance will be, so super fancy high res detail isn't really needed.
Edit: oops, I had both this subforum and the technical help subforum and accidentally posted it to here....
Replies
You could have a texture containing strips of tileables for the beams and trims and then have separate tileable textures for your walls and roof. You may want to check out Hand-Painted Wells http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=87797&page=13 pages 12 and 13 to see how it can be done. I wouldn't advise chopping up the UVs so much (that's why I suggested a strip of tileables approach where you keep the mesh more whole). I hope this makes sense!
To explain a tilable texture atlas with overlapping UVs a little better I'll use the case of your roof and trim.
So you know already that one way is to simply texture your roof using a single tiling texture and scale your UVs accordingly. But that means you'll need to use more than one texture and that means more and longer, what are called 'drawcalls' or in the long-run of things, your 'loading time' for your graphics card/processor during gameplay. That's not a huge no-no, but if you're like me and like to show your understanding, this wouldn't be the first choice. The other option is a bit more complicated, BUT it will allow you to have your tiling roof texture AND your trim texture AND your stone AND your wood all on one sheet
What I mean is that you'll have to split your roof's UVs into separate (but identical, or close to it) overlapping shells. You can have a roof texture take up any percent of the entire texture as long as the left side continues into the right. It's a tiling texture within a texture atlas and it only works if your asset is modeled and UV'd in the correct way. Now you can have your trim texture share the roof texture as well AND it can tile or simply be the resolution you need. I'll attach a picture of something I'm working on to show what I mean.
The Mesh w/ WIP Texture
The UV's:
Right side X lines up with left side X and same with top to bottom X (a tile) - the difference is that you can 'cut' this texture out and put it into a larger texture atlas; just as long as the UVs stay overlapping where they need to
The drawback to this method of splitting a mesh into more UV shells means that there are going to be more vertices (two UV shells sharing the same vertex means one vertex on each shell). However, from discussions in the tech forum, games are hitting polycount caps way before they are hitting vertex or texture resolutions caps. The only place that you'd need to consider vertex count is in mobile gaming.
If you don't care for either of these methods, one last way would be vertex painting which is used in UDK/UE4. It blends two (or more) textures together based on vertices. If you choose this technique you'll have real-time control over your asset's textures (instead of alt-tabbing the hell out of photoshop), but I doubt it is as processor-friendly (don't quote me there). It'll allow you to paint rust/grime on a metal surface, moss/lichen/grass between the cracks of a stone wall, etc., etc. - all based on a black and white mask. A quick youtube search can inform you about this method.
Hope this helps!!!!