Environment Texturing Question..

[Natace]

I was interested in this tutorial since i'm creating an entire city for a total conversion mod inside of a 3d modeller (of course it's split up into "sections"/"areas"), and it is a pain in the butt to do texturing using UV's compared to doing it in the game level editor such as Valve's Hammer editor where you just select the wall, pick a texture, paint it on, and you can fiddle with a few simple values and you're all set.

Anyway, rambling aside, I think personally, the best way to do it is think about the textures you're going to use first.
A clean tile texture, should not be 1024x1024 or even 512x512, depending on how much tiling there will be on the surface, you can make it whatever size you want, and then just tile it.
For example say you want a bathroom area with really small tiles that really don't need alot of detail, but they all will look the same, you wouldn't create a 512x512 texture map and copy/paste one tile piece so that it covers the 512x512 texture map, heck, you could create a 20x20 texture of just one little tile, then stretch the UV's out until you get the desired effect.
Yes it may seem a bit extreme, but it works, and as far as game performance goes, your game world will run a hell of alot smoother than if you had that 512x512 or 1024x1024 texture map with the same looking tile repeated all over it.

With larger tiles, you would obviously scale your texture map accordingly so that your individual tiles will have sufficient detail on them.
If you wanted say...a black and white checkered floor that was completely clean and shiney, you could create a 256x256map or a 512x512 (probably not needed for such a simple texture) and just have 4 tiles on that map, blacks in one corner, whites in the other corners.

And finally if you wanted to have something like a large brick wall, and you wanted a few bricks missing..well, that is tricky, because any obvious detail like that is noticable when it tiles, so every few metres, people will notice the same brick missing over and over and over again...and that's BAD, it's do-able, but personally I think it looks like crap.

The only way you can really do detail like that is by having more detail on the mesh, and also seperate textures as shown earlier in the thread with the arch, there was the concrete with grime, and there was just the base concrete texture that would go above in order to stop the grime texture from looking stretched.
So if you had that one brick missing from a wall and you didn't want it to repeat over. You would have different versions of that one texture. One version has one brick missing, another with 5 bricks missing, another with a big chunk of bricks missing, and then one with no bricks missing.
You would use all of those textures and mix it up a little to hide the repetition.

If you just wanted that brick wall with no bricks missing, but you wanted things like grime detail, you can simply make whats called a decal, which is a single poly plane with a grime texture that has alphas applied to it.

There are many ways of doing texturing really, it all depends on your skill and the engine limitations as well as your own mental limitations, because I know for sure that modelling AND texturing a whole city really takes it out of you, even if it's a small city, there are just so many details that need texturing, and doing it all inside a 3d modeller, as I said, is a pain in the butt.

[Kaburan]

Very helpful post, thanks for that quick tut Pankake

[Geomancer]

Okay great. Thanks everyone for the help...

So basically this is okay for games?:

[Talon]

Yep, perfectly fine. Infact, I'd say it's neccessary :P

You might want to try and scale your UVs to fit the box vertically, though. That way you can swap in unique texture variations (stuff like one for the base of the wall, with dirt creeping up from the ground, or a trim around the bottom of the building) and be safe in the knowledge that they'll fit and line up perfectly.

[Geomancer]

Thanks a bunch. Okay one more question for everyone ( I promise I won't ask anymore after this lol).

Are there any good tutorials on texture painting environments? Not photoreal stuff but environments that have art styles to them like the new Prince of Persia or Streetfighter 4. Are game textures like those, all hand painted from scratch? Or do people use some sort of photo as a base and go from there?

In case your wondering what some of these environment textures look like here you go:






its interesting because these environments look like they have had photo reference, yet they give off a stylish look, they do not seem photoreal.