Game UVs

[philnolan3d]

I have this model that I did a while back and haven't gotten to texturing yet. I had originally done the UVs the way I thought made sense, the building itself is split into two maps that I think would be fairly large, then all of the signs are on one map that would have to be kinda large to show the detail. Then one other map that would be kind of smaller for other misc. details.

Then someone who works in the games industry suggested that they make maps that will be closer to the player higher res than others, which makes sense. So I was thinking of redoing the maps so that everything above the Starbucks text is one 2048 map and everything below that would be on 2 maps at 4096.

You game guys, what do you think of that?

Here is the original photo that inspired the model:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/heavylift/65657985/sizes/l/

And you can "walk around" the actual building with Google Street View here:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&...=20&iwloc=A

[Oliver Thornton]

Hi Phil,

Really like the model, you've posted the wires a few times and I keep waiting for the textures to appear!

I think you have the right idea, player areas should have the higher res maps and the building areas they can't see should be ramped down and/or use overlapping UVs to tile the textures and save on memory. I think the best test though would be to load the model into a game editor like the UT or half-life editors and test it. I have a friend that works in games and this has always been his first line of advice for game visualization. I haven't done any game textures since the last editor version (bout 5-6 years now), but apparently the 'newer' UT editor is pimped out with all sorts of support for normals, advanced level of detail, etc.

-Oliver

[philnolan3d]

Thanks, I've just been so busy, once Andrew finally got the low poly stuff working I hadn't had time to work on it. I'm actually starting now though because I got myself a task management app for my iPhone to keep myself on track. I have a copy of UT3 here but it's been a while since I used the editor. Maybe I'll give it a go. It's a shame the newer versions no longer support LWO files natively.