Texturing Buildings for Large Scale Game
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Hell, i'm making a large open world game with a plan to have many villages and towns. Currently i have made a few building, some small hut sized buildings, and some larger semi detached two story ones. I'm confused as to which way would be best to texture them. My first idea is to just unwrap it into a very large image (image size depending on the size of the building), and then with it being one texture to the model, LOD would be easy to set up. But i'm not sure if having very large textures would take too much memory to load in and would destroy frame rate. But this technique is so far what i have done.
Another couple ideas i had i'm not too sure about.
One is to have each part of the building it's own object and texture each part separately (meaning the roof is separate to walls which is separate to stairs and so on). Which to me means smaller texture sizes which would be easier to load but multiple of them which in a village would be loading possibly hundreds of textures.
And the other idea is to have an in between of the two i just said. So maybe i'll have all the large parts as one object to texture, and then all the smaller parts as its own. Resulting in two textures one large and another small/medium.
When i refer to a large texture, that is a 4096x4096 texture. Which i have used to create the two story, semi detached house.
So in all my question is, is any of those techniques a good way to go about creating buildings for games?
Or is there a more professional way of doing this, keeping a nice detailed look as well as being non-performance heavy?
Thank you for reading.
Another couple ideas i had i'm not too sure about.
One is to have each part of the building it's own object and texture each part separately (meaning the roof is separate to walls which is separate to stairs and so on). Which to me means smaller texture sizes which would be easier to load but multiple of them which in a village would be loading possibly hundreds of textures.
And the other idea is to have an in between of the two i just said. So maybe i'll have all the large parts as one object to texture, and then all the smaller parts as its own. Resulting in two textures one large and another small/medium.
When i refer to a large texture, that is a 4096x4096 texture. Which i have used to create the two story, semi detached house.
So in all my question is, is any of those techniques a good way to go about creating buildings for games?
Or is there a more professional way of doing this, keeping a nice detailed look as well as being non-performance heavy?
Thank you for reading.
Replies
You also don't need to build a building as one piece. You can have lots of smaller pieces that add detail (windows, trim, etc) that then disappear the further you get from the building.