2x texture for a big building?

Unity Engine
1

Hi all,

I’m making a model of a rather big and complex brick building. Just tested it with a 4k texture and it’s hmm… not quite there yet in terms of accuracy - I thought I could use 2 textures for the entire building, doubling the pixels.

So, what’s the best way to do this? Just split the model in half?

2

Related question - is there a way to stream textures in free Unity? I know “fully fledged streaming” is a Pro feature, but is there any way to stream textures in the free version?

I’m thinking that my “game” might start from the inner yard of the building, making about half of the wall area not visible, when the game starts. It would be sweet if I could start the game as soon as the visible textures are loaded.

3

Tile your bricks. Lower resolution, higher quality. Never try texture something huge with one single texture unless fine detail is unimportant.

4

what modeling program are you using? i use maya and instead of just putting a texutre straight on i use a program called UV layout by Headus, this allows me to cut up the mesh then put it into photoshop with no hassle, then i can texture even huge buildings with accuracy and optimization. Img below

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5

Thanks for the replies!

I’m using Max and it’s standard UV tools. I can rotate and modify the UV shells, but in this case it’s not really about bad packing. It’s just a heck of a lot of wall area to cram into one texture.

Tiling was what I initially used, but if I do that, then how do I paint details on the walls? In fact I’m not planning to paint graffiti or anything like that on them but suppose I was, how would that work then?

There’s a lot of surface detail, like air vents etc., but I’m planning to model those as a separate object.

EDIT: I just Googled this graffiti example, suppose this was on one wall, and others were just using the underlying brick texture

6

Flat polygons close up to the walls with textures on them and alpha channels to cut them out. Turn off cast shadow for them and you got yourself simple decals. Use them for things that don’t get too close to the camera which you’d normally model too, while modeling the versions that do get too close, vents etc. as mentioned.

7

Thanks, sounds promising for the flat vents. This building also has a bunch of vents with a cover and other detail, that will need to be actually modeled. I guess I’ll use the technique discussed earlier and combine those covered vents into one object to save out on the performance?

But what about dirt and color variations on the wall? Could the diffuse detail shader be used for that?

383521--13234--$vent_136.jpg

383521--13235--$detail_121.jpg
383521--13235--$detail_121.jpg555×800 189 KB

8

You could use the detail part of that particular shader to do it.

OR

Do what I just said, with the flat polygons. Check out the sewer demo for an example of that very method in use.

OR

edit a shader to use UV2 to add random dirt and such across the whole model (it can be less detailed). You should in theory not harm use of lightmaps with this method either.

9

Thanks a lot!

10

Yes.

The www class is available to the Free version, however asset bundles are not.

The www class can import Textures and load them in from file without the use of assetbundles ,provided you use JPG or PNG files.

11

Thanks!

That will come handy even with the tiled textures :slight_smile: