Big Boom At High Noon

I am going to texture the window frames with tileable materials too, but I soon noticed when testing the game in VR that the grain of the wood on my test material was all going in the same direction which looked very unnatural.  I decided to edit my UVs further, and tread the shells like planks of wood, facing the direction of the grain.  The result is, a tileable material will now now longer make the frame looked like its one coherent piece of wood with the grain flowing in the same direction. It looks a log more natural with grain flowing up and down different parts of the frame. 

The doors for the buildings won't just be textured using one, singular, tileable texture. They have frames, insets and door knobs that will have different colours and textures. Even if I did want to use tileable materials, I faced a new issue with the Texel Density. If I wanted to have a doors UV shells on their own material, matching up them up with the Texel Density of the rest of the assets gave me the results below: Matching up the density and giving the door its own material, in this case, meant I'd waste a lot of UV space, too much to justify having a 2k texture just to match the resolution. Making full use of the UV space of course resulted in inconsistent resolution. The door would now look extremely high res next to the building. Following some research I found a online (JackX570, 2015) which helped towards solving my problem: Using my chequered UV texture I got from google, which by default was 2048 x 2048, I created a photoshop ...

To prevent different buildings and assets from having inconsistent texture resolutions, I need to ensure that the Texel Density is either identical or as close as possible between all UVs. Otherwise, you might see a low resolution door next to a high resolution window frame, which will look unnatural and could brake immersion. I was able to use the chequered UV texture to help me visualise this. With the largest house taking up the most UV space, and scaled to as far as it's UVs could go, I already knew what the ceiling on my Texel Density was. After doing some research I found the Texel Density tool in the UV tool box by looking through the Autodesk Knowledge documents ( Autodesk Knowledge, 2017) . This tool allows the user to highlight UV maps and 'get' the Texel Density, then highlight a second set of UV maps and 'set' the density. This prevented me from having to manually scale objects by eye, as I had been before.   I "Got" the ...

If I was going to model the entire town with tileable textures, I had to ensure that my UVs were laid out that would: A) Make sure the applied textures looked natural without visible seams B) The UVs were prepared in a way which would mean no adjustments or tweaks would need to be made after applying the tileable material. C) The resolution would have to match on all assets. (with some potential acceptations such props only visible from a long distance like mountains or plants etc) The idea is to invest time in setting up the UVs to save time of texturing and making several adjustments when it comes to the texturing stage. First, I aligned the top and bottom parts of the buildings, snapping them together vertex to vertex. Both building blocks (top and bottom) have the same material, although they will be two separate models.  I found it hard to stare at the black and white chequers and was unable to determine whether the UVs were matching up perfectly. I googl...

Initially a whitebox of Scrap Town's streets was made without any colours and asked 10 students to navigate through it using teleportation points. The feedback from 8 players for improvements included: - Was hard to differentiate the buildings with gray colour (base colours added) - Some Parts felt claustrophobic - Players wanted to be able to go between houses and use them as cover instead of just being in the middle of the streets (telepoints between alleys added) - Some also suggested having narrow streets for the easier parts as it wouldn't be as hard to aim, then have open spaces once the player is used to the mechanics. This is something we are considering and will test. We applied colours using Joe's colour schemes and changed teleportation points so that it felt like players were zig-zaggin through the streets and placed some down alleys so they could use houses as cover. We also placed proxy barrels and crates in the streets as cover. These ar...

As our game will now feature a town consisting of a long road with a number of forks an turns, the amount of buildings needed has increased drastically. Therefor, an efficient texturing pipeline is required as time would not allow us to texture 30,40 or even 50  buildings. Several avenues were explored: Creating a semi-procedural material in substance Designer Procedural materials would have meant we could edit parameters on a texture directly in game engine. So after apply a texture, we could change the amount of wood planks, the size, colour and level of details. Unfortunately, parameters are not accessible through the material, instead, the imported material comes with a sort of support file that controls the parameters. Making an instance of the material does not create a new support file to edit the materials, meaning every building would need a new material adding an additional draw call. This is not an option given the number of buildings we need. Texturing...