"GTA SA" and similar trim textures enviroment techniques
polycounter lvl 6
Hi guys :)
Example:
Notice how arrow sign are just another texture with same buckground asphalt texture + white arrow sign.
I just wonder: did people normally did this by hands or GTA SA and similar project have some in-house level editors with special functionality for this?
Maybe these some well known 3ds Max plugins for this?
Replies
You want to be way more precise in your description of all this, as the way you are showing it in this screenshot makes it near impossible to tell.
You seem to say that this half-arrow texture has the asphalt in it - but that's unlikely to be used that way in game, as an obvious texture seams would show up along the edges shown in red in your screenshot, not matching up with the tiling road texture behind. Therefore it would make sense that the asphalt pixels of the road marking texture (if any) are only here to provide the proper grey color/value around the white paint, with the surrounding area being cut out by a mask of some kind.
Anyways - as said, be much, MUCH more precise in your description. Make the effort of describing things in full detail. Include clear screenshots of the assets, equivalent screenshot of the location in game, all the texture passes used, and so on.
Its actually exactly how its used. And yup where some seams there and there.
Another examples:
Now that's much more clear ! And really shows how careful they've been with authoring these textures, as the seams barely show in the end. Ilike how this illustrates how something that isn't supposed to work "in theory" can work great in practice in the right hands.
So I guess that pretty much tells it all doesn't it ? No special tool (and no special rendering feature) needed, just good old texture mapping. Perhaps some tool to map any near-square selection of polygons to a perfect UV square, and a couple scripts to rotate/flip things around ?
An ancient technique . I'm still doing it similar way. If you use something like Houdini or Blender you could do it all procedurally across huge extents. With a few extra decals over like dried off or wet puddles , fallen leaves etc nobody would ever notice those seams so in modern games it would rather be a combination of decals and such insertions .