DEUS EX: MANKIND DIVIDED | Golem City & Swiss Alps | Environment work
Hi everyone, this is my first post ever on Polycount. 
After many years of hard work on Mankind Divided, posting
this thread feels like a relief for me. I worked on the game since
pre-production as a Senior Level Artist.
I was in charge of two levels, Golem City and Swiss Alps. Level Art, Modeling, Materials&Texturing were done by me and also some Lighting and FX. I also polished as much as I could materials and textures in the whole game.
The wheel mounted cabins on the last image of Swiss Alps were done by Marc-Antoine Hamelin.
Hope you enjoy !
This is the basic Housing Unit module I created to build Golem City. It measures 16m x 8m x 4m. Starting from this unit, there are hundreds of possible permutations, replacing certain sections by others that I obviously won't show here, like walls, windows, doors, airvents, roofs, and floors. I had to take into consideration to have at least 1m of height (cover system) on wall covers, windows, inside and outside, and also across door frames. I also needed at least 30cm of wall thickness for sound purposes. Doors and windows needed to have a specific size, Level Design purposes. The whole mesh could not have any section that would extrude more than 10cm from its base collision; navmesh & cover purposes. Corners had to be dead square also for the same reasons. So the thing had to be pretty flat but I tried to make it look as "not flat" as possible.
As this is a very large mesh and we can see it up close, texturing was also very complex to achieve because nothing tiles, everything is unique. The only way to have a good pixel ratio was to use the "Hybrid Assembly Line Technique". This is a method we use on DX, it takes long to do, but you save a lot on texture memory and you have an amazing pixel ratio. So what you see at the bottom right corner is a single diffuse 1024x1024 texture that I used to create 4 (16mx4m) walls, 2 (8mx4m) walls and also all of the other modules related to this one. All of those walls/modules are unique and look different from each other, using the same 1024x1024 texture I mentioned above.
Replies
I used two UV sets. The first UV is for the assembly line texture, where I stretched it on the mesh as much as I could. It works as long as the UV is not flattened, flipped or rotated. The second UV is a 1 to 1 perfectly mapped UV. This is where the tillable dirt/detail map textures come in (diffuse, roughness and normal). They can be small as they tile and they blend in the material using different blend modes using an RBG mask. I reused the same tillable textures on many other objects.
Here is a sample of the geometry:
What it looks like in the unwrap (UV1):
Cheers for the small explanation on the modular texture usage!