School House Pictures!

[Yali]

Wow guys, I come back from Gahreesen to check the SE site and within 5 minutes there's an update, and what an update it is!

I brought this up on the main blog, but just to note, here is a picture of the schoolhouse from the original game...



Full Res

Notice the tribal geometric design on the benches. This is one of my favorite little details in Riven. Would it be possible to include this in the textures for the benches?

Sorry for the nitpicking , Riven is my favorite game.

[philip]

Yes. Quoth the blog:

Note that these images are not representative of final assets, there’s still plenty of work to be done here.

[Yali]

Ok wasn't sure if by assets you meant the models only or both the textures and models. Thanks!

*goes and hides in Gahreesen dungeon for writing nitpicky posts*

[Cykelero]

To me, it looks like the lighting is going to be one of the hardest parts, here. I know the Unreal Engine is good at it, but it's especially dramatic in this scene!

[tim]

Yali, no worries! We would be disappointed if Myst fans didn't notice these details. I explained it a little in the comments of our blog post, but I'll just mention a bit again here. I like to build up my textures one layer at a time. So I'm still in the base layer phase, just establishing what everything is made out of (wood, clay, paint, etc.). I'll usually also try to add some variety and grunge at this phase too just so the base is a little bit broken up and doesn't feel too repetitive or tiled. After this I start laying on the next layer which, for the example of the chairs, would be that tribal pattern. Or for the walls, it will be the white paint, all the cracks, and the triangle pattern around the lower half.

Ultimately, rest assured, that we are looking at references of the game til our eyes bleed, cause that's what we like to do! But please never stop paying close attention, cause it is always possible that we'll miss something.

Cykelero, you aren't kidding. Right now I'm rendering in Marmoset because it's just a little bit faster for me to keep previewing my textures as I work in Photoshop. So the lighting in these scenes isn't really indicative at all of what will be in the game. We have been having internal discussions about the challenges we will face when we get to lighting in UE. I'm both excited and nervous to see what happens.

[Andross]

So when you are texturing these models, are you using a separate texture for each? or are you using the same texture but positioned differently, and a separate 'grunge' layer to quote your post? When ever I texture things, I always wonder what the most effective way is to modify textures so they don't look too repetitive.

[tim]

Andross, it's hard to really say which way always works best. I think that each situation often requires slightly a different approach. For the schoolhouse I am combining UV layouts on a number of objects. In total, there are 10 separate UV layouts/materials (though I"ll probably split up a few of them by material to customize later). For example, the chairs, tables, and things on the tables are all sharing one UV map.

Currently nothing you see here is tiled, it's all just straight texture map. All the grunge and cracks I'm putting in are being done in a giant photoshop file I have for each of the 10 layouts. For smaller objects like a chair or a desk, you rarely need the amount of resolution that could come from tiling, and since it's easier to avoid repetition by just manually creating the entire texture in photoshop I like to start there. If after creating my texture, and testing it on the model I find that the texture doesn't hold up then I might consider alternatives such as tiling, or adjust my UV layout to get more space.

For the walls, they are not getting enough resolution from the texture, so I'll be working on a way to up that, probably through tiling. I haven't done it yet,but my plan is to make a base white paint texture that I tile, and then through the material in unreal, I can overlay or multiply grunge and cracks at either a different tiling rate, or not tiled at all. This will hopefully break up the texture enough to avoid things look repetitive.

Hope that helps

[KellyCoston]

A quick answer is no. We don't use a separate texture map for each. Mainly because of the game load time. We have to balance texture file size with the number of textures used in the game.

[philip]

With the larger scenes, we also have to worry about running out of texture memory. I believe every texture that's being used has to be loaded onto the GPU at once, so fewer textures is better. That said, we haven't had to get much into optimization yet, and we're saving that for later...

[Andross]

Thanks a lot for your answers guys.