How to texture game environments?

News & General Discussion
1

Hi guys, I’ve been recently dabbling into making indoor and non-terrain-based game environments. I’ve firstly found them to be incredibly difficult to model, but diligence goes a long way, and I’ve been able to model some rudimentary building interiors for testing purposes.

My only issue: texturing. UV mapping an entire building onto a single plane of 2048^2 or smaller seems a bit compromising in quality–even if I up the texture resolution–and I’m aware that it’s possible to use texture atlasing to achieve high quality building texturing with minimal texture footprint (as seen in the Bootcamp demo)–however, having to retopo geometry just for texture atlasing is quite a pain, so I’m still not sure where to go from here.

I’m considering investing in and learning how to use a package like this one on the Asset Store, because it would also eliminate my issues with texturing building interiors and exteriors on the same model in addition to making interior environments vastly easier to create.

Regardless of what I end up choosing and using, I’m curious as to how more experienced people go about doing this. How do you go from something like this (large image warning) to this?

2

There’s no reason to use a single texture; use as many as you need.

–Eric

3

Yeh since in building walls occlude everything that player cant see, you usually dont spend much performance there. You can go as nuts as using new texture and material for every piece of wall probably. But the best two ways are either do whole building in 3d software, where you overlap your UVs so that one texture can be later assigned, or use UDK with BPS level builder and then export it as fbx. mesh into Unity. Either way would work.

4

Well, if you have Pro and are using occlusion culling (or make your own occlusion system). Otherwise everything in the view frustum is rendered, even if you can’t see it.

–Eric

5

Yup, like Janpec says, you can use multiple materials and multiple textures to texture building… it is a process that is use quite often in game dev.

6

Ye sure i meant with culling ofcourse:smile: