Modular walls

[Perversonality]

Getting back into the swing of things having been forced into an unexpected break!

Two renders, one with lights, one without, both without anti-aliasing and no texture filtering applied, so what you see is the actual 512x512 texture, pixel-by-pixel

[Rhauk]

Could you please post a bit on how you unwrap and texture these goodies?
I've been trying environmental modeling/texturing for ages, but I never seem to get the grip on it. Would be nice to be able to make scenes for my models, but I never get how to properly UVW them (grass, floors, walls, etc.)

I love the look on those, you did a great job~! Do they serve any purpose or did you just make them for no reason? Or rather, do you plan on making more of the same style?
Either way, really good work.

[Perversonality]

They were done more for practice than anything, but I can now simply redo the texture sheet to create different wall styles.

The models are fairly basic, so unwrapping them wasn't too difficult. The main thing that I wanted to do was to have a single texture space for each component/wall within the 512x512 so that I could give each wall a different texture, which meant that all of the panels needed to remain consistently sized in the texture sheet so that the edges would match up without creating ugly seams.

For the walls, I used Max's Unwrap UVW modifier and did a face-to-face walk unwrap. What this basically means is you end up with all four sides of a box-based wall connected together in a big line, with the top polygon attached to one of the walls. To save on texture space, I then took one large side and one thin side and moved them so that they are layered over the top of the other large and thin side. This looks something like this:



Before manipulation, the L-shape would have had a much longer base... More of an "L_" shape, if you see what I mean.

Having unwrapped all of the other shapes using the same method, I then used render to texture to create the full 512x512 sheet, as follows:



To fit everything in, I had to move things around, so a couple of walls are upside down and the tops of the curved walls are separated from their base. The door should be fairly obvious based on what I said above - basically it is half the door layered on top of the other half. The tall, thin part to the right of the door is the inner part of the arch for the door frame component, and the square in the middle is the floor tile, though it's more of a space filler as I would probably do the floor tiles in their own texture map to get more variety than a simple, single tile!

Speaking of the floor tile, what I did for that was drew an unevenly spaced set of horizontal lines, then copied and rotated them. This created a grid where each edge vertex of the grid matched up with another edge vertex on the grid, regardless of how it is rotated. Basically you can rotate the square 90 degrees and the texture will be seamless when next to an unrotated copy. I then drew the middle lines in a more random manner, making sure that the only parts that touched the edge of the map touched where the grid points are.

If I wanted to be more efficient with the texture space then I would have layered all of the wall tiles over the top of each other and had a much smaller texture map, but I didn't want obvious repeating patterns.

[Rhauk]

Whoa, that's more than I expected Ô_Ô

You could start writing tutorials, you're great at explaining~!
Thanks loads for the walkthrough, I will certainly try to make some environmental work now.

If it isn't asking too much, I got another small question for you.. If you were to map a large area, let's say a grassy plain. You would obviously need to tile the grass somehow, but my question is; how would you unwrap it?
The only way I can think of is mapping the whole thing then manually detaching areas and putting them on top of each other.

Here's an example of what I mean~

Here, I detached every poly and merged them all on top of each other, then I scaled it up so that every poly/tile would get the whole texture on them.
Now, if I wanted to add variations in this plain/floor/thing I would have drawn that and put some tiles there instead.

Did this make any sense at all?
I hope I'm not being annoying here, I'm just trying to realize how environments are made *_*

[Perversonality]

You're not being annoying at all!

The way you have done it is perfectly valid. With my single floor tile texture I would have to do the same thing, though I could rotate the tiles through 90, 180 or 270 degrees to get different patterns. It really depends on the engine as to how you can do it. A lot of engines will allow you to tile textures by setting the UV coordinates to a percentage of the overall floor, so you could recreate your example with a single quad and a UV scale of .25 (or 4 for some engines...) for both U and V values. That would give you the same tiling, but with less polys

Edit: Just realised I screwed up the tiling on my floor panel and it only works top to bottom and left to right... D'oh!

Single tile:


Simple repeating pattern using that tile

[Rhauk]

Thanks, that clears up a lot!

Sorry for hijacking your thread like that, but I can assure you that you gave me some great help n_n

[Perversonality]

No worries! Just glad I could help

[Perversonality]

Rushed this one a little bit as I've got some other work on, but I thought I would try a quick texture with some slightly more fiddly bits... It's not great, but it proved that the sheet layout is viable for quick editing

[Tank[NL]]

very nice cartoony style. kinda warcrafty. nice work. no bumpmap or shine?

[Perversonality]

Flat diffuse textures only

[Tank[NL]]

still looks really nice

the texture on the curved wall is cropping. any chance on fixing that?

[0sharp0]

Looking sweet

mind telling me where to turn off the texture filtering?

[Perversonality]

Originally Posted by Tank[NL]

the texture on the curved wall is cropping. any chance on fixing that?

Yeah, I could fix it when I revisit this later on. It's an easy enough job, it's just that I rushed the wood texture, so it looks bad...


Texture filtering is switched off in the "Renderer" tab of the "Render scene dialogue" box, in the same place as the anti-aliasing switch.