I am currently modelling quite a complex house and I am texturing it in Substance Painter.
I see online people texturing houses with one material all the while keeping everything a decent resolution.
I have only just finished the walls and them alone look bad even in 4096x4096. I still have the floor, roof and misc beams to do which will result in 4 materials all together.
Obviously I would like to get the draw calls down and while 4 isn’t too bad I would like optimise where I can. I could prefab, however I don’t plan on having that many buildings and that doesn’t seem to solve the amount of materials problem.
Is using multiple materials really the only way to go around this while making the resolution and details good?
Example - Imgur: The magic of the Internet
1 Like
There’s a few things you can do in this case, and I won’t lie, can be quite challenging…
First - a question: did you make that building? If so - is there a reason why you have so many polygons for it?
Second:
The options you can do to make it look good (Possibly).
- UV Map the building without unwrapping, just UV Map it and have a texture of what you like to (tile) across the surface leaving no bad resolutions and only good resolution.
- Do Option One and use (Decals), etc to add grunge, etc as an overlay.
- Unwrap the mesh as multiple pieces and just paint away.
Option 1 and 2 are the most wildly used I believe - I could be wrong of course. There might be some new techniques I’m not aware of now days.
Thanks for the reply.
Yeah, eventually I will using the edge loops to make the wood look less straight along the walls - I haven’t got to this part yet and I will probably change a lot here as I go.
Step 3 was how I was thinking of going with it, but of course this has the added effect of more draw calls, if thats correct.
I’m assuming with Step 1 it avoids the problem of pixel space?
I’m quite new to this, so apologies for stuff that may seem simple.
you might can also look into this. Not sure if it will help,
I haven’t ever used UDIM. But from what I read it’s not useful for all cases.
If an edge loop isn’t holding shape, get rid of it.
Those walls are just long rectangles. You should only need six faces if that is the shape you want from them.
Your textures look muddy because you have that wall split into a hundred different pieces, all fighting for pixel space. If you had just six polygons taking up that same pixel space, you’d get way more resolution. A 4k map would look fantastic.
If you wanted to get really stringent, you could have half your UV shells stacked on top of each other. Nobody would ever be able to tell if two walls had the same textures, especially if there was other things inside the cabin or it was dark.
In order to get a good looking, seemingly 3d log walls without building each log with actual geometry, you could either sculpt a higher resolution version of the building and bake a normal map, or you can learn how to make Substances in Substance Designer. You can also manually paint out the logs in Substance Painter, but if you spend a little time learning how to automate things like this by creating tileable textures, it will save you in the future. You can still go in manually and tweak things to give a custom look, but there’s no sense in painting an entire cabin log by log when 90% of it is exactly the same.
If none of that makes sense, google the specific terminology, and consider heading over to polycount wiki and read up on the basics of UV space, texture maps, etc.
One material, or one texture? They’re different things.
I definitely agree with tiling or otherwise reusing texture space. Wood is wood, you don’t need every single log to have unique pixels. I’d probably suggest using more than one, but certainly not have every single one unique. Remember you can rotate or mirror to get more perceived variation from a small number of images.
Considering the depth of the gaps between logs I probably would suggest having them in geometry rather than the material, but as already said it does depend on the use case. You could consider changing the design to have smaller gaps, as another approach.
Also consider that if you have a material that accepts multiple textures you could do stuff like a tiled detail map, allowing you to use much lower resolution textures while still giving a detailed look.
It’s worth considering why you want to keep this to a single texture / material, though. It’s good to have fewer draw calls / material changes, but since you’re talking about a whole house I would find multiple materials perfectly acceptable as long as you’re not wasting them. Considered in the broader context of the scene it’s in this could potentially end up being more efficient, too, but there are so many variables there that speculation is pointless.