Texturing large objects

[evenblij]

I've made an old ruin for my internship, and now it needs to be textured. I'm aware of the fact that usually stuff like that gets built up from smaller components, but as I'm with a really tight poly budget it'd be great if I could just tile my seamless texture over the unwrapped object. Is this possible in any way, and if yes will it work in a game engine?

Thanks for your help in advance,

Jan-Willem Evenblij

[mmcleo11]

There are a few ways you can do this:
- you could use vertex colour to bake AO to the verts instead of using a texture then have tiling texture for the details. This would need more verts so you dont get weird shading and then instead of using a normal map tweak vertex normal to get a smooth looking model.
- you could use a large res AO and normal and then combine it with tiling detail texture(you will need 2 UV sets for this)
-you could cut up the object and use multiple tiling textures e.g. cut a strip of polys around the top of a wall with some occullision and dirt and drips

It really depends on the object and how its built/going to be used really.

[poopsterspappy]

Hey mmcleo11, I am new to texture painting for games so here go's: it seems to me what you are saying in a nut shell is that if you have to pick between dense geometry,( more verts for the bake) or larger bitmap images for a large asset (like a lengthy rocky ground plane ) Your better off with utilizing denser geometry as it is less memory intensive? Or am I totally off base? Thanks PPappy

[mmcleo11]

Again its dependant on the object.

An example might be a giant bronze statue the size of a building. I would build this by creating a high res scuplt, then re-topo but to a higher tri count that a normal asset to capture as much detail as possible then bake AO to verts, using a tiling texture for the metal, tweak vertex normals to get a nice shading so I dont need a normal map and then maybe to localise some details vertex paint/blend with another texture in-engine.

But this is just 1 example I can think of I have done in the past.

Do you have an images of what you want to achieve and are at so far? Hard to give opinions without