tudor village

[lucy_maria]

Current Polycount - 163
Texture Size - 1 x 256x256, 3 x 1024x1024
Description of background information on piece - Working on buidling a small village square of tudor-esque buildings, this the the ground floor of my first building
Where are you looking to receive criticism - Where do I start? Texturing advise would be most appreciated but I would be grateful for anything that can help me get this piece looking as game-like as possible. Oh, any help on how to render wireframes would also be useful.

Use of texturing space is especially poor, I know, I'm just not confident in scaling the corresponding sections up appropariately and in proportion, any tips?

[Apophis3d]

First thing I notice right away is your UV layout is a rectangle. Going out of that 1 to 1 space is a bad idea. Especially if this is going to be a game model. Secondly overlapping like pieces will save you texture space and time.

For example if you have a box that you want to be a crate or something like that. Overlap all the square pieces. This lets you do two things save UV space and you can uniformly scale up the square pieces to allow for more texture detail.

You house would benefit tremendously from this, right now the house looks extremely blurry.

As for the normal maps did you bake those in your 3d package or use CrazyBump or the Nvidia filter? Right now I am not seeing any normal mapping going on at all in the render.

Here is a little tut that has been floating around on the forums for quite some time. It's and excellent tut on working with normal maps. It goes over hand painting normal maps from a height map then combining them in photoshop with a normal map baked in a 3d package. Normal maps out of crazybump work well but you need to understand how to control them to get the desired results.

[lucy_maria]

Thanks Apophis3d. I do have overlapping textures, the window polygons are on top of each other, as is the otherside of the building. What I really wanted to do was texture the windows seperately from the building, but I couldn't work out an easy way to get the scoring between the beams to scale in proportion to each other. This is also why the texture atm is rather rectangular, I'm not 100% sure of how to rectify any distortion in the scaling.

The blurring has been put on intentionally. It's only now that I've looked at the model without the normal map that I can see how blurry it is, but without the blur the texture looks rather harsh, to me, though I'm no expert. When I've seen character models textured, the skin is always coloured with shadow and highlights, as well as being lit in a scene itself. I was trying to add shadow and highlights by adding a dark blur inside the beams and a light blur on the corners of the beams. Any better suggestions?

As for normal maps, I've never had much success with the normal map generators in Maya and Max, I've made mine from a bump map I created for the texture, only using the generated one as a guide for where I've put beams and what not. Still, what I would have given for having that tutorial before I started playing with it and working it all out through trial and error.

Sorry, didn't mean hat to be an essay, but any help more help you, or anyone else, can offer would be really appreciated.

[Apophis3d]

Well to help with the shadows you can use Occlusion maps and Specular maps. When you do your UV mapping do you use a checker board texture with numbers on it? It can be an easy way to see the stretching on the UVs. When you make the pieces larger it will add more detail and will create less blur.

You can have the windows separate. What I would do is just extract the window pieces and leave them as a separate mesh on the building.

Here are two programs to check out they help with unwrapping tremendously.

First one is Headus its totally awesome but its not free.

The second is Roadkill UVW.

Those have helped me a lot and made unwrapping a lot easier.