Help a newbie!

[RedKetchup]

i would like to see if it is alot more easy and see if it takes alot less time to do with blender than 3dsmax. i know how to do it in 3ds , and it kind long and complicated and losing so much details unless you do a 2048x2048 which is crazy in .png format ^^

[Necora]

@RedKetchup do you mean the AO or texture map?

[jesta030]

@Necora Well it's not that hard once you have everything set up. basicly you make a separate UV map where you arrange all the pieces so they fill the map as good as possible and then use blender's "bake" function. for Color you just bake Diffusion, for AO you bake.. well AO. I'm using the cycles render engine which means i have to define which UVmap to use for the bake and which Image to bake to in the node Editor. you can bake to different Images, rebake only part of  the Image (only the faces with a single material) and modify it in your graphics program afterwards. Colors I usually bake to a 4096x4096 Image since blender is bad at anti-aliasing and when you bake two faces that border each other but have different Colors and are not horizontal or vertical on the UVmap you'll get jagged edges. i then downsize in GIMP to 1024x1024.

i'm actually thinking of making a series of tutorial vids because there's so much i have figured out on my own and i want to make it easier for others. last hurdle i took was figuring out why the .pkm wouldnt build: dots in the file path...

[Necora]

@jesta030 right, I figured it would be something like that. Do you use multi materials to texture the building, then render those onto another UV map? What render option is it? I have only used a method similar with the texture paint. For that you arrange 1 UV map over an image using project from view, in this case a goat, and paint the image onto another UV map on a black image that is smart projected using the texture paint tool.

[Necora]

@jesta030 I answered my own question, nvm.

So I tried it and got a nice map at 4096, but it looses a lot of detail compared to how I was doing it before. But that is because my unwrapping previously was not using seams and things, so each individual face has its own spot on the texture map, so even at 4096 everything is super condensed in. It will be a lot of work to go back through and unwrap everything again in a way that can make a good map.

Is there any benefit of using this over multi material? In a large mod maybe not, when lots of buildings are using the same image. But in a smaller mod of only one or two buildings than maybe?

[RedKetchup]

@RedKetchup do you mean the AO or texture map?

was talking about texture map like



working with multimats until everything finished and then at then end from it , make a huge 1024x1024 or 2048x2048 one single .png with all the sides and roof on the same image.

[Necora]

@RedKetchup I just tried it with the tavern. The problem I have is that every face has a space on the map, which means it is all squished in there even on a big 2048x2048 image. The problem is that I didn't use seams and no faces share a space on it, so I'd have to go through the whole model and re-unwrap everything that is the same size together... I think that when starting a new building it will be good because I can carefully unwrap as I go, but for existing buildings it will take a long time to produce a good image for each one, especially the larger, more complicated ones.

What I really want to use this method for is smaller objects such as barrels and things, as they are what I struggle with the most in terms of good unwrapping. If I can paint freely using loads of textures then bake it into one image it will be really cool.

(ignore the size of the attached image, it is highly compressed and colour reduced to make it shareable).

[jesta030]

On my texture map you will notice that there's only one big Window, only one first floor "triangle" (Grey Wood) and the timber Frame pieces are also fewer than there's walls on the ground floor. there's alot of overlapping to save space and the whole marking seams, unwrapping and arranging to get the max Detail per texture map size takes ALOT of work.

[RedKetchup]

yeah

1. yeah everything get on it, every face so,  thats what i was saying, even at 2048, we lose so much quality.
2. i understand how you go: you do your own ONE texture and put everything you need on it and you overlapping. it is a custom


cause i can do that too! with a 1024x1024 i can put and paste all the 6 roof colors of 256x256 each, i can put a 768x512 wall which serves for all the walls, a 256x256 stone for the chimney and foundations, a 128x256 door and same for window....
and i still have some space left to put my ground dirt footprint on it too !!


but what is the avantage of 1 custom with everything on it, versus .. use 5-6 png of 256x256 or 512 ?
out maybe to have 1 file .png for everything ? is there any game improvement ?

[jesta030]

i actually have 2 things i can do on a texture map that cant be done with seamless textures:

1. I can overlay it with AO for the specific object adding more athmosphere
2. I can add Little Details like the moss decal on the Roof to make every house dofferent.-

[Tom Sawyer]

Nice to see you back and working at your promising houses @jesta030. The first model looks already very nice in game. Your way of texturing is similar to mine and I can say if you are going to design your details in 3d as you said, you will save a lot more space in your texture by overlapping. Arranging uv's in such a texture is a lot of work, that's true, but it becomes faster. I also noticed what you meant with the blurry wall. You will solve it by 3d designed timber pieces. It will look sharp in game and benefit from Antialiasing. Your vert count will increase but the pkm size will be smaller. The textures are great, especially the roof is a masterpiece in my eyes and shows the advantage of single texture files for individual design.

One tiny thing I noticed at your house is this gleam of light on the ground. You can solve it by adding a face on the bottom to close your model. And for my taste the house is too dark in game. Maybe it's because of the AO or just the texture. It can get more contrast. This half-timber style has a lot potential to look nice and atmospheric in game. I still want to make such a house too but I stuck in nordic wooden style.^^ Just my thoughts to the first model. It's going to be a great addition to Banished.

[jesta030]

I thought I'm nearly done with the first house but instead I'm going to try what @Necora suggested wth the AO and multiple UV maps. I'll see if it offers benefits that justify the increased size for the AO map.

Also I'm on holidays for a week and am collecting pics of houses like the one I'm making to get better textures... I don't think I'll ever be satisfied.

[RedKetchup]

Also I'm on holidays for a week and am collecting pics of houses like the one I'm making to get better textures... I don't think I'll ever be satisfied.

hehe i know how you feel ^^

[Necora]

@jesta030 if you are worried about the size, there are a couple of things you can do. I just baked one of my more complicated buildings, a water mill with 2,500 faces. Saving the AO ith blender preset values, so a 1024X1024 .png with alpha channel, 'RGBA', 15 % compression, results in a file size of 849 KiB. Saving it with 'BW' selected instead of 'RGBA' gives a file size of 532 KiB. So quite a difference just changing the colours.

I'm not sure if you have come across the RIOT image optimizer... http://luci.criosweb.ro/riot/

Give that a go, it allows you to compress and change colour depth of your images, side by side so you can see if you loose quality. You can do this on the textures and AO once you have built the mod and have the houses loaded up in the mod kit 'run.bat' as you can change these texture files on the fly and see how they look as you do, to make sure you don't lose quality. I would just keep decreasing the colours, of all textures, until you start to see degradation. Then go back a bit.

I got the AO mentioned above down to about 400 KiB before it started to noticeably become pixelated and loose quality.

You can use this for all textures, and the difference is quite a lot some times. It is also really good at resizing a texture with very little loss, depending on the texture. Look at the image I have attached, it took this 1024x1024 wood panel texture from 1.61MiB to a 512x512 texture at 115.88KiB with no perceivable loss in quality. There are a couple of places where some minor detail has changed colour, but you'll never notice that in game.

[RedKetchup]

nice thanks you, i downloaded it