Any engine really taking advantage of vertex colours for this purpose would only store the vertex colours per instance. Just like baked vertex lighting is stored per instance while the actual mesh data is the same. And probably only storing a vertex colour channel if the mesh actually uses it.
Loving those rocks :) Nice tutorial and btw how do you paint in ambient occlusion with vertex paint? Do you just generate a map and put a vertex blend material on the mesh?
JohnnySix: Many game engines allow vertex colours to be assigned to meshes inside the game level editor (eg. Unreal definitely can, id Tech definitely can, I'd imagine Source can too). Not sure how much this helps with memory savings, since vertex colour is stored per vertex, but I would hope a clever engine will only…
Great tutorial, the vertex colours for variation on tiling sets was a nice idea - can these be baked out to an exportable format for some games - say if you want to keep one asset in memory, but assign several different vertex colour variations throughout a map?
Thanks! Great that you brought that up. I'll add something about that in the tutorial as well. In Max there's a utility called "Assign Vertex Colors", if you open that up you see you can goto your radiosity setup there. You run the radiosity bake and then press "Assign to selected" assuming you've got your mesh selected :)…
Yeah, I saw in UT3 /UDK you can paint vertex colour, Maybe some engines compress/ignore the 'unused' vetices, say if you only coloured a few choice sections. The main thing is you're still saving texture space regardless, so you can resuse the same shader on multiple assets but get more milage with subtle vertex colour…
Thanks a lot people! It's really great to hear you find it useful! I'm gonna try and wrap this one up asap. Maybe I'll try and move on to a more specific modular rock/nature workflow one after that. I read that vertex color wiki entry here too. Great stuff. I may do a quick tutorial where I go into some workflow I usually…
Thanks! Good point there, I'm actually not sure about how that works either.. In UEngine, if you make a a mesh and instance that and then starts painting vcolor on it... It'd be great if it could instance everything but the vertex color info somehow. Just like MoP said in a better way :P Anyhow I'm wrapping up a (quite…