Tips and Guidelines Creating Exterior Houses (with or without interior)
polycounter lvl 11
I'm not necessarily asking for the best method, but more so what you guys feel is the most efficient method of modeling and texturing houses. Do you model it, and unwrap it as a whole like you would any other prop? Do you only model and unwrap chunks at a time(Main Building, Windows, Doors, etc) What about exterior and interior. Would you model the exterior and interior walls as a whole? The best reference I can think of is the fishing house that comes with CryEngine. Is how they went about it good practice?
Replies
If i was you, i would spend sometime over at http://www.evermotion.org where they have lots and lots of tutes regarding modeling house and building.
If ever you'd like to have physical props of modeling (buildings, house etc etc etc) just PM me and we can arrange something.
On edit: The Archviz training helped me alot understanding geometry placement and props http://www.evermotion.org/modelshop/show_product/the-archviz-training-dvd/6475/0/0/
1. Create tileable textures.
2. Model base blockout of whatever you doing (house).
3. Identify repeatable shapes.
4. Model those shapes and unwrap them over your tileable textures. (yes this is the key, you conform models to textures not the other way around).
5. Assemble bigger structures.
This way is dependant on multi materials. But it's the esiest and fastest way to produce bunch of architectural stuff.
For greater variation use decals, vertex blending or UDK for more advanced material (vertex blending + world offset blending).
As for interior. You do it in the same way. How exactly you are doing it depends on your project needs.
This makes it so that you only have to use one material, but usually costs some material definition.
That's the biggest hurdle people used to characters & props have to overcome when it comes to environment art, learn to love the tiling texture.
The important thing to remember that unwrapping beyond 0,1 space is very valid, common and useful option.
I've been even using tileable textures for props. Once you get into it, it's hard to stop thinking "do I really need to make unique texture for it".
And due to greater texel density and moving towards PBR, using tiling textures over everything will be more and more common practice in next-gen.
You can use masks packed into single texture to define where and what materials are. Of course it's not possible with CryEngine. But it's perfectly doable with UDK and Unity (if wish to get dirty with writing shader).
You can still paitint you unique texture and then artifically increase it's texel resolution but ovverlaying additional tileable materials.
It's now common to use grayscale textures to add detail.
But with masks and more advanced blending it could be take to new level.
It's also worth remembering that lot's of details that were on texture, were here because of polycount. That issue is now pretty much non existient now. Just throw as many as triangle you need(with reason of course, flat surface doesn't need thousands of polys), create LODs and problem will solve it self.
CryEngine supports a few different methods of blending and applying color to vertices. But I think regardless of the engine(since most of them should have a feature like this), I think utilizing tiling textures, plus unique RGB maps, is the way to go for stuff like this. A simple grunge texture could be used as a mask for most surfaces. Creating a single tileable texture saves a lot of time since you can just create versions of it and already get a couple of extra textures.
The thing I was thinking about is not possible in CE. At least without access to shader source. As it require more customized materials per object.
Default materials doesn't support RGBA spliting, and vertex painting can be hardly used to mask anything useful in current shader setup.
Looking at the house in CE it looks like you cant go inside and texture is modular sheet, the house is unwrapped according to it rather than other way around.
Yeah, that's true. I do miss the ability to work with RGBA images for custom masking. There's supposed to be a bunch of new features in 3.5 though, some that aren't shown in the tech demo. Maybe we'll get a better material editor :poly121:
If so then its modular construction, otherwise uses vertex coloring and custom collisions but is made as a whole house sort of what architects do but without the engineering work calculations etc. As mentioned above follow some Evermotion tutorials, make one box type room add collisions , door, windows and unwrap it on a texture sheet sort of like this in my video. [ame="
I would recommend checking out http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=39&t=444791&page=7&pp=15#post4855106
Hope it helps.
http://wiki.polycount.com/CategoryEnvironmentModularity
These should help.