Environment Texturing Question..

[Geomancer]

Okay so i am relatively new to the environment texturing process. I was fortunate enough to talk to someone from the industry and they told me most textures for game environments are just tileables... So that being said I am trying to figure out how to texture using just tileables.. The first pic here I am showing the 2 pieces of geometry i plan on texturing, just so I have an idea on what to do.












So here I did a uv snapshot of the 2 pieces ( I know theres alot of extra texture space, just trying to get a basic understanding of this stuff), and I have 2 tileable stone textures. ones a basic clean one, the other is "dirty". Now the question I have is do I just scale these tileable textures so it fits within the uvs like this:






Thus giving me the end result; or am I going about this all wrong? I have a feeling I may be doing this wrong because I got like 8 more pieces like this, and I doubt I would have to do a uv snapshot for all 8. That would be alot of texture sheets hehe.

[myles]

When they talk about using tilable textures, I think (I could be completely and utterly wrong) they mean making your mesh UV mapping it and then putting it straight into the engine, and simply add tilable materials from the engine to texture your model, you may also then add layers ontop such as AO and scratches/dirt.

[dukesy]

yes myles is right, by tileable, its, for example,
a tileable brick texture, then with vertex colours or map channels and alphas its a dirt map blended in, and then an Ao or whatever on that

i would find it very difficult to make a complete tileable dirty perfect texture for every part of a level

So for your case in UT3:
I would make all the walls that stone grey brick texture, all tileable and stuff,
then use a vertex colour on the bottoms of it to blend in a tileable dirty map, or use alpha maps to blend it in.

im not an expert on this stuff atm but maybe someone else can help more??

here are some links to have a look at, might give you some ideas?
Hourences' Community Site - Books - Tutorials - Jobs - Textures
Hourences' Community Site - Books - Tutorials - Jobs - Textures
Learning Unreal Engine 3 – UE3 Editor - Material Basics 2
good luck mate
Rob

[Pankake]

Hope it helps!

[glynnsmith]

Pank has it.

Another way you could acheive your varying texture blending up into your clean texture, is to make a 512x512 (or whatever) of your clean texture, then copy that file, dirty it up and save that out as a seperate texture. Then you can use a mix map or vertex values to blend from one map to the other.

This is generally how large areas of terrain blend from grass to mud to rocks, for example. It's also a great way to add dirt, damage, whatever to your buildings

[Apophis3d]

The tileable textures you would not generally see on static meshes.

Before I get into that let me clear some things up.

BSP (Binary space partitioning)
Which can be used to make very primitive structures. For example a brick wall, which then you could map a tileable texture onto it. The BSP is generated from within the level editing program itself.

Static Meshes
Which would be assets built in a 3d application like Maya or 3D studio max. Which is what your building in you maya scene. These would be UV mapped within Maya and textured in photoshop like you have done. Then imported into the game.

One thing you will want to look into for generating game content is specular mapping and also occlusion mapping. These helped with adding a greater sense of depth. Also normal mapping which will simulate a higher polg mesh than you actually have modeled. But don't worry to much about that right now keep it simple for your first time as these are pretty advanced techniques.

[Pankake]

Only a handful of engines available to the masses support BSP geometry, so the same techniques can (and are) applied to meshes to flesh out the game world. Also, tileable textures are often used on large props too, where unique UV space would be impractical, like rock faces,buildings and other large structures.

Meshes with tileable textures are still UV mapped (see my post above), so there's no trouble with engine compatibility or the like.

Edit: For his model up there, I would definitely recommend tileable textures in 3 stages, horizontal tileable at the bottom for the dirt details that collect by the base etc, maybe a trim too. A 'filler' in the middle with the bulk of the base texture, in this case, cinder blocks, although the model for the arch looks a little too ornate for cinder blocks, maybe some kind of stucco texture base would be better. And a horizontal tileable at the top for a trim and dirt/dust details at the top, too. These can be different sizes of course, like a 512x256 for the base and top and a 512x512 for the top middle section, etc.

[Dekard]

you could also use the tileable texture and then just decals on alpha'd planes for the dirty parts and unique wear.

In regards to getting a good handle on how texturing works, chris holden has an awesome tutorial.

Texturing Single Page Vs. Multiple Materials (Max 8)
Tutorials @ chrisholden.net

[Geomancer]

Thanks alot everyone for the help! The tutorial helped alot, I ended up doing a method similiar.. (still working on the textures)

[Pankake]

Good stuff, bit of texture stretching and what not, but easily fixed.
The best way to scale your UV 'islands' or 'clusters' is by inputting the values into the scale and offset boxes, so you can move them by one whole UV space, or double the horizontal scale, etc to keep it all uniform. So if I stretch this poly: [..] to be double it's size: [....], and the texture becomes stretched, I'll just stretch the polygon in the UV space by 200% on the appropriate axis (U or V, depending on it's orientation).