Texture Resolution - UV Map
polycounter lvl 7
Hey everyone,
I am currently working on a few assets for a personal game project and in this particular case on a steam driven jump pad. I nearly am done with modelling and starting now creating the textures inside Substance Painter. Here is my question:
How would you in the industry normally deal with the uv maps on a model like this? Would you split the wood frame etc. from the steam tank and give them their own uv map to get max detail out of the 2k texture and later merge them in an fbx or would it make more sense having everything compact in one uv map and use a 4k texture instead? Or should I split it up into the components I could reuse in other areas of the environment e.g. the bucket is getting his own map and I position him later in the engine?
And another question
I can imagine that the texture resolution each model gets depends on the importance of this object. Probably most players would rush through a level and using a 2k texture on a single wood plank would be a waste of resources. Are there some basic guidelines for the artists working on a game to know where to use what resolution? Or are the artists themselves responsible for the decision?
Thanks a lot!
I am currently working on a few assets for a personal game project and in this particular case on a steam driven jump pad. I nearly am done with modelling and starting now creating the textures inside Substance Painter. Here is my question:
How would you in the industry normally deal with the uv maps on a model like this? Would you split the wood frame etc. from the steam tank and give them their own uv map to get max detail out of the 2k texture and later merge them in an fbx or would it make more sense having everything compact in one uv map and use a 4k texture instead? Or should I split it up into the components I could reuse in other areas of the environment e.g. the bucket is getting his own map and I position him later in the engine?
And another question
I can imagine that the texture resolution each model gets depends on the importance of this object. Probably most players would rush through a level and using a 2k texture on a single wood plank would be a waste of resources. Are there some basic guidelines for the artists working on a game to know where to use what resolution? Or are the artists themselves responsible for the decision?Thanks a lot!
Replies
Or you could use tiling textures for some of the re-able assets and add decals in-engine.
One of the major things to set-up before you texture is your world's texel density. This ensures that all assets have consistent texture res. So an example of what to avoid would be unwrapping the bucket on its own, maximised to a single UV space. This would mean that your hero asset would have a much lower texture res than the bucket.(it's much bigger physically in the world than the bucket, but gets far less UV space comparatively) A good idea is to set up this world texel density scale to something like 512x512=1m2(or whatever suits your project)
Another important factor is: are you intending to bake unique normal maps, or will you rely more on extra geo?
Geo is much cheaper than textures. Another option is to use extra geo and re-usable tiling normal maps for details. You can bake curvature maps in SP from low-poly geo(per-vertex)and texture that way, without having to rip NMs from high-poly.
So take the time to weigh up the options and plan ahead. Do you really need to take everything to SP and uniquely texture everything? Or just the hero asset? Would tiling textures be suitable for certain assets? etc....
So I guess a good way would be to lay out the whole environment and area first before and see where to best reuse what parts and have the texturing in mind while and even before modeling.
The information with the cheap geo is golden. So that means, that often panel lines on hard surfaces e.g. are way cheaper to bevel with the actual geo than using a normal map. Or that also adding very low res nails on wood planks arn't that big of a problem. Does this include giving hard edges a very small round bevel is fine instead of a baked rounded edge?
Thanks again for the valuable information!
Different artists prefer different techniques. Some prefer to rely on NMs for hard/soft details, others would rather model the detail into the low-poly(and/or use smoothing groups/edited vertex normals) Others might use a combo of geo and NM decals.
@obscura has some great info on here on some of these techniques(the decals in star citizens thread and his edited vertex normals thread)
Geo in modern engines isn't nearly as big a deal as it once was, and poly-counts are on the rise all the time. Textures are more of a bottleneck. But this isn't to say you should go crazy with your tri budget and avoid textures. It's a balance really and relies on your chosen workflow route.
Another thing I think will influence this is the growing popularity of VR. Geo will always look more realistic than NMs in a VR environment, due to the very nature of how it's experienced. So maybe we will see a widespread shift toward modeled detail over NMs in the future? Then again, the tech evolves so quickly that real-time displacement/tessellation may replace NMs entirely. Who knows?