Anonymous at Thu, 20 Feb 2025 10:22:53 UTC No. 1007835

>>1007834
Why is "texturing" that much of an issue? Also by texture do you mean "material" or actual image textures?

Anonymous at Thu, 20 Feb 2025 10:28:33 UTC No. 1007836

>>1007835
I mean organizing myself to texture the model. I'd like to have as few materials as possible, since I'll be exporting to a game engine and having a ton of materials is going to get messy.
I've tried having a single material for the entire environment, UV unwrapping the whole thing with Smart UV Project, and then just stencil painting the textures where I want them.

A few big problems with this:
1. Getting them to align with each other (like in corners) is very VERY difficult
2. Since the entire model uses one material with one texture, the texture needs to be massive or else individual faces will be very low poly.

Pic rel is my environment (on the left with walls, on the right with the walls hidden). It's for a 3D platformer.
How would you go about texturing it?

Anonymous at Thu, 20 Feb 2025 10:30:13 UTC No. 1007837

>>1007836
>or else individual faces will be very low poly
Meant to say "very low res", bit of a slip there.
But yeah.
I've looked at the links in the sticky and they're all broken

Anonymous at Thu, 20 Feb 2025 10:38:39 UTC No. 1007838

>>1007836
I've never worked for games assets but advice I could give is:
>UV unwrapping the whole thing with Smart UV Project
You'll have to do some of it by hand at least, if you're doing a low poly game it shouldn't take too long and you'll have more control + the ability to cheat and use some areas of your texture on multiple objects
>he texture needs to be massive
Have you considered .dds? That's how UV maps are packed for games as it's more lightweight.

Anonymous at Thu, 20 Feb 2025 10:39:58 UTC No. 1007839

>>1007836
>2. Since the entire model uses one material with one texture, the texture needs to be massive or else individual faces will be very low poly.
You want to look into tiling texture or procedural textures. Look at what's possible in your game engine. When you're modeling for a game you need to keep the game engine in mind.

>How would you go about texturing it?
What will the final look of the game be like? You will have an easier time texturing it if you know what the end product is supposed to look like

Anonymous at Thu, 20 Feb 2025 10:46:47 UTC No. 1007840

>>1007839
I know exactly what it's supposed to look like: a lot of concrete, tiles, then some small details like a nice dark red to denote platforms and the like.
That's not helping me come up with a way of texturing it though. At least not in a way that doesn't involve hundreds of separate objects all with their own material, which is just HELL for gamedev

Anonymous at Thu, 20 Feb 2025 11:07:24 UTC No. 1007841

>>1007836
Dude just do a few seperate objects. You're not going to break the bank if the cylinders and walls come in seperately, especially with such minimalist geometry

Anonymous at Thu, 20 Feb 2025 11:09:48 UTC No. 1007842

>>1007841
Oh yeah its blender right? You can assign a material to selected faces in the material menu and objects can share materials and textures, so like, how many do you expect to need?

Anonymous at Thu, 20 Feb 2025 23:20:33 UTC No. 1007876

>>1007842
A different material for each texture is not the way for gamedevving bro, not at all

Anonymous at Fri, 21 Feb 2025 23:46:51 UTC No. 1007921

>>1007876
Suit yourself. You'll just have to do an insane UV unwrap and make a different 5k texture for every map element.

Anonymous at Sat, 22 Feb 2025 02:52:00 UTC No. 1007926

>>1007921
It's either one hellscape or another. I'd really like to know how actual devs do it

Anonymous at Sat, 22 Feb 2025 05:00:01 UTC No. 1007931

>>1007926
no idea. but whatever you're trying to avoid by only having one material, id bet it's offset by being able to tile textures, set different material properties, have more than one bump map and actually being able to finish the project

Anonymous at Sat, 22 Feb 2025 05:12:57 UTC No. 1007932

>>1007931
I don't necessarily need just ONE material for everything. Just as few materials as possible.

Say I have a bunch of industrial props, then also a chair of some kind, then a plant.
Having each of those have their own material (or, God forbid, multiple materials in each object) is absolutely not practical.
The idea is to have one material for the entire map (that is, just the environment with no objects), then have one material for all objects that needs to have transparency of some kind, then one for all other objects.
That would mean, I guess, textures that are basically tilesets, since a single texture is going to give its colors to multiple different objects

Anonymous at Sat, 22 Feb 2025 08:58:08 UTC No. 1007940

>>1007932
i dont know blender that well, i can barely put two cubes together, but AFIK blender will only let you apply one texture per material. i know it has a textures tab, but thats apparently a legacy thing that does just about nothing.
if im right that you only get one texture per material then you NEED multiple materials to have your textures tile correctly, which ought to save a shitload of memory and vram even if you need a few more data points and texture files to do it.

sure for a potted plant you dont need your textures to tile, so just unwrap that bitch and do it all on one material, but for a full level? i dont see how it can be done practically.

like, take a look at this. the noise texture on the concrete walls is scaled down 1100 times. the way you're going you'll max out the memory on most graphics cards with just the bump map

Anonymous at Sat, 22 Feb 2025 09:22:21 UTC No. 1007941

>>1007940
See, that's because you're having a single image take up the entire texture. If you do it as a tilemap like in pic rel (from silent hill) then you need far less materials.
>but what about tiling
You manually place the faces over the texture you want. Like, for the cube, you'd place all 6 faces on top of each other over that tile.
>but what about tiling over large surfaces like the big walls at the sides? Wont there be stretching?
Not if you subdivide it into a lot of faces and place each one over its corresponding tile on the texture.
That's how game devs used to do it in the old times, and if memory serves, those games looked way better than the slop we have today

Anonymous at Sat, 22 Feb 2025 11:42:49 UTC No. 1007943

>>1007941
with the SLIGHT caveat that you have to have 100x the density of geometry, you're forced to make sure they're all scaled and positioned correctly, you have to then unwrap those thousands and thousands of faces, and after all that you end up with graphics that belong on a gamecube. So unless your game is being played on something with a CRT its going to look like shit and you'll need a shader to filter it all anyway, in which case why go to all the effort?

if you want to emulate art styles from 20 years ago and you're using models from 20 years ago then your work should be so simple that you dont need to overcomplicated unwrapping techniques because your models are dead simple. And if you want complex geometry then you need extremely complex geometry, which probably outweighs the benefits regardless

Anonymous at Sat, 22 Feb 2025 16:04:40 UTC No. 1007958

>>1007943
>you have to have 100x the density of geometry
That's how Silent Hill and all other PSX games did it. Triangles are very light on memory compared to hi-res textures.
They can also be easily culled in chunks.
See pic rel, that's Silent Hill

>you're forced to make sure they're all scaled and positioned correctly, you have to then unwrap those thousands and thousands of faces
Select all similar quads thanks to Blender's agile selection tools, press U to open the unwrap menu, select Reset, then in the UV menu press S to scale and hit forward slash followed by [number] (because your tileset is [number] times smaller than the size of the full image), and drag them all to their tile easily thanks to snapping. It's very easy.
>and after all that you end up with graphics that belong on a gamecube
You can still give them normal maps no problem using the same method: the normal map will be a tileset too. PBR materials can still be accomplished.

Your method is for rendering, because you do all the materials you need then forget about them.
Videogame developers need to deal with the materials in their engine of choice: they'll clutter up the place, and often times make life very difficult since engines will usually want to modify them into their own versions of the materials.

Games that did this method could run on 2 MB RAM.
Games today that do your method can't run on 16 gigs of RAM

Anonymous at Sat, 22 Feb 2025 16:10:19 UTC No. 1007959

>>1007943
Oh and if you can't make a grid in Blender you might as well quit 3D

Anonymous at Sat, 22 Feb 2025 17:23:39 UTC No. 1007962

>>1007958
Okay but
1) if its so easy (assuming you're OP) why are you complaining about how impractical it is?
2) what do you do when you dont have perfectly alligned and square geometry
3) im doing my shit for a game engine. Admittedly nothing fancy and im not doing anything too interesting with materials, but theres zero clutter because the material's data is saved in the model's file, and it runs fine. Im not sure what the point of "minimizing clutter" is unless you're developing for the DS and it just cant handle anything as complex as having it all in one place
4) if your game isnt running on 2mb of ram then there isnt a point to optimizing it for that unless you're trying to run 250 copies of it at once on an apple-watch
5) admittedly i may have fucked it up somewhere, but i exported two versions of that map as a test. one with three materials and one with no materials and an 8x subdivide on the outside walls. The subdivided one was twice the size. From what ive seen a model gets demanding based on how many high rez textures you use more than anything.

Anonymous at Sat, 22 Feb 2025 17:28:28 UTC No. 1007963

>>1007962
>1) if its so easy (assuming you're OP) why are you complaining about how impractical it is?
Where did I complain that it's impractical? Read the OP again
>2) what do you do when you dont have perfectly alligned and square geometry
Are you aware 3D modeling programs have snapping options?
>3) im doing my shit for a game engine. Admittedly nothing fancy and im not doing anything too interesting with materials, but theres zero clutter because the material's data is saved in the model's file, and it runs fine
You won't have access to the in-engine material controls, which will fit better than the exported ones. Let me guess: the game looks like ass
>4) if your game isnt running on 2mb of ram then there isnt a point to optimizing it for that unless you're trying to run 250 copies of it at once on an apple-watch
And that's why all modern games run like shit.
>5) admittedly i may have fucked it up somewhere, but i exported two versions of that map as a test. one with three materials and one with no materials and an 8x subdivide on the outside walls.
Bro you're not supposed to make the model then subdivide it. You're supposed to make it grid-like from scratch. Look at the silent hill pic again

The bottom line is that this >>1007940 doesn't look good.
If you had made it look somewhat decent I might have been convinced better, but your method makes everything look bland and samey unless you make a billion materials

Anonymous at Sat, 22 Feb 2025 23:42:16 UTC No. 1007982

>>1007963
>Where did I complain that it's impractical?
Assuming the op is you, you're complaining that you cant do it.
>snapping
I assumed you wouldnt want everything alligned to a grid for artistic reasons. If you just want to make miles of rectangular corridors then im not sure why you're struggling
>the game looks like ass
Of course. Its a game, its supposed to. Theres no reason to build assets fancier than i need if im probably going to change it all later anyway, and theres no point bogging myself down with a perfectionist workflow if it stops me actually making the game
>modern games run like shit
Mine runs just fine. Modern games do run like shit, but you dont need this level of optimization if you're just trying to make rectangular corridors.
>You won't have access to the in-engine material controls
I can define materials and assign them to the mesh in-engine if i want to but its a waste of time since we're doing our modeling and unwrapping in blender anyway
>You're supposed to make it grid-like from scratch
YOU'RE supposed to make it grid-like from scratch. I can do whatever i want. I made it minimalistically because its efficient and only subdivided it to simulate the density you're working with. That was only so i could compare the sizes of the files, which flows into
>thisdoesn't look good
1) its your design
2) its untextured. I dont need or want to make textures for a test-piece, and...
3) the point was the size of materials, so i only used materials, noise and a grid texture shader, not my own textures
4) it doesnt need "a billion materials". You only mentioned three textures for the entire map, so you only need three, which is why i used three
5) the high-material model is literally half the size of the high-geometry model, and both are below 200kb. Neither are running like shit on anything made in the last decade

Also, shit though it may be, it only took me an hour to copy and If i want it textured its as easy as importing an image file.

Anonymous at Sat, 22 Feb 2025 23:44:38 UTC No. 1007983

>>1007982
>how do I texture environments?
>"here I remade your environment. Didnt texture it properly though, I could do it but didnt feel like it"
wowow

Anonymous at Sun, 23 Feb 2025 00:49:54 UTC No. 1007986

>>1007983
>you cant ACTUALLY click two buttons
you're just trying to waste my time now.

the file with materials is 45kb. the file without them is 190kb. if you want to avoid inefficiency by spending more time modelling, more time unwrapping, more time texturing and more memory on the file then go for it.

Anonymous at Sun, 23 Feb 2025 08:53:46 UTC No. 1008010

>>1007986
Dude that looks like absolute shit.
It's really cool that you're doing this, and I really appreciate the attention and effort, but that's just not good.
>it's a prototype!
Why the fuck would I ask for help in texturing a prototype, I'm asking for the final product.
If you're going to go that route then stochastic texturing in-engine is a must to avoid the repeated pattern

Anonymous at Sun, 23 Feb 2025 15:20:17 UTC No. 1008018

>>1008010
>Why the fuck would I ask for help in texturing a prototype, I'm asking for the final product.
why the fuck would i do your homework for you? my investment in this is an efficiency test. its not efficient. i've already said why, so that's all there is to it.

Anonymous at Sun, 23 Feb 2025 16:41:14 UTC No. 1008031

>>1008018
I'm not asking for you to come up with the entire art-style of my game, I'm asking for a good texture workflow.
What you've done here >>1007986 would look like complete ass no matter the textures: bad tiling, grand total of two textures over the whole thing, probably an unoptimized amount of materials for gamedev (you most definitely have a single texture per material, which is peak "I only need this for rendering and not gamedev" thinking)

I'm asking how do good devs go about texturing environments, not "how to literally texture it". I know how to apply a fucking material mate

Anonymous at Thu, 6 Mar 2025 19:34:59 UTC No. 1008737

>>1007834
the buzzword you need is trimsheets kek, also you don't need to draw to make textures, just use photos or a material, or make your own materials , bonus points, learn art fundanmentals, with that you can use any tool and still get your work done

Anonymous at Mon, 24 Mar 2025 00:42:54 UTC No. 1009991

General overview of approaches to texturing large assets:
https://youtu.be/QcqJckp_q3M?si=QgGtIQJt0PNJ4AI_

More specific techniques (links in description):
https://youtu.be/rfXGAjHwzD4?si=qUFLPyNxxkqmWhG7

This is a workflow geared towards games, maximizing fidelity while minimizing number of materials.