Mesh and multiple textures. Best practice? (Maya)

[Nya Jules]

Hi,

I have a floor, for example, and option 1 is to UV-Unwrap it once, assign the floor texture and bake it. Now if the floor is bigger then the texture becomes very blurry.

Therefore option 2 is to select multiple pieces of the floor and assign a differnet material with the same texture to each of them. Now either UV unwrap each part separtately and fill the UV-space with each of them, or UV unwrap only once, slice the UV parts and fill the UV space with them.

My problem with option 2 now is that this is very tedious to also make sure that also the relative texture size of the pieces is the same.

Is there any best practice of increasing the texture quality of a larger mesh by assigning multiple texture files to it?

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

I think you're asking the wrong question.

You can tile your texture in SL. That of course means you can't bake in your shadows, unless your floor is symmetrical.

If you want your shadows, occlusion, dirt etc baked in, I'd suggest tiling your diffuse texture so it stays sharp, then use an extra plane, sligtly above it, with the baked in effects. Those effects usually don't need a lot of detail.

[ChinRey]

If you have to cover every surface with those fake looking static baked shadows that are so fashionable these days, you definitely want to do it the way Kwakkelde suggested or you'll end up with astronomical render weights.

A third alternative is to study some works of some of the real texturing masters and see how they manage to create low lag wonders using just a handful of relatively low resolution textures.

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

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ChinRey wrote:

 

A third alternative is to study some works of some of the

real

texturing masters and see how they manage to create low lag wonders using just a handful of relatively low resolution textures.

---

Just split up the area to texture into bits that have reusable textures. That means tiling and rotating and mirroring small textures that will seamlessly connect in various directions and between various unique textures. (mirroring normal maps in SL won't work, so be aware of that)

It's more or less what I suggested at first, so it means baked in textures will be nearly impossible, the option to use them will heavily depend on what is casting shadows on them.

A very basic example to illustrate.

[Nya Jules]

 

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Kwakkelde Kwak wrote:

 

If you want your shadows, occlusion, dirt etc baked in, I'd suggest tiling your diffuse texture so it stays sharp, then use an extra plane, sligtly above it, with the baked in effects. Those effects usually don't need a lot of detail.

---

Thanks for your response! I've thought about that, but it would really work only for a few selected surfaces that are also flat. I'm sticking with playing around with the UVs for now, I start getting a hang of it I believe.

@ChinRey: "those fake looking static baked shadows that are so fashionable these days"... TBH the last time I bought an item without occlusion baked onto it was @Xstreet SL

[Chic Aeon]

 

There is a way to do exactly what you want to do in Blender , but I have NO clue how you would do it in Maya.

 

Basically you have one UV map that will be your final bake (let's call it UVcombo). Then you make a NEW UV map with just the material you want to get finely grained and lovely (let's call that UVfloortiles). You then use a UV map node that feeds into your node structure and use that second UV map (UVfloortiles) to define the tiling parameters and placement of the tile texture. You can then with "UVfloortiles" (only) selected as well as the texture that you want to USE for your floor tiles active on your UVimage editor, resize the UV map and move it around as needed for placement.

 

You designate the texture that you want to bake to, the UV map ("UVcombo") and you can bake all the ambient shadows you would like on a tiled texture that is not blurry.

Maybe someone that knows both programs can explain how that would work in Maya.

 

The EASIER (but not as nice) method would be to remake your floor texture into say a tiled 4096 texture and then resize to 1024 (assuming that is what you are baking at) and then use that NEW texture as your floor texture -- getting a much finer pattern.  You will still be able to bake your textures.

 

Hope that helped some. I suspect this same "idea" works in Maya and possibly simpler LOL, but again, not my program. Good luck.

 

PS. Here is a link for a video showing the basic idea but without all the baked shadows. It is not exactly how "I" do it, but it might help get the idea accross.   

 

 

And here is a photo of my floor done this way. The tiles could have been smaller if I wanted. There are subtle light differences (even without advanced lighting on) where the light comes in the windows. I don't "do" cast shadows. Hate them, but you COULD with this method, certainly . 

 

 

[Cathy Foil]

What Kwakkelde Kwak is probably the easiest and most practical solution.  This being said there is another way.

If the floor is it's own separate mesh it can have up to 8 materials.  For the example I am about to give I will only be using 4.

Take a flat square plane and divide it into 4 equal quarters so that two are across the top and two on the bottom.  Create UVs for each quarter but have them in the same UV set.  Make each of them cover the whole UV space so you have all 4 stacked on top of each other.  Select one of the 4 and move it out of the UV space so that the lower left hand corner which should have been at coordinates XY UVs of (X= 0  Y=0) and move the whole shell or island over so the lower UV left hand is now at (X= -1 Y=0).  Do the same for the other 2 UV islands / shells but put them not on top of the one you just moves.  So put one so the lower UV left corner is at (X=-1 Y=1) and the other can be at (X=0 Y = 1).

What this will do is allow you to bake out the shadows and floor texture for the UVs that are still in the UV space between XY = 0 and XY = 1.  You will have to bake out 4 separate textures.  So to bake out the other 3 you will have to move the UV you just baked out and move one of the others back into the UV space.

Thing about SL is it doesn't care if UVs of the mesh are outside the XY = 0 and XY = 1 space so you don't have to have the UVs stacked on top of each other when you create your DAE file.

Now if you don't want to keep moving the UV islands / Shells and bake all the shadows at once you can.  Just increase the UV range in the Baking Options window.  And you will want to bake out a texture that is minimum 2048 by 2048 with fill texture seams set at zero.  Then take it into Photoshop and cut up single image into 4 1024 by 1024 images so you have 4 separate textures to upload to SL.  One for each of the 4 materials or in SL are called faces of the mesh.

Basically what you would end up with, in my example, is one mesh object with 4 faces but each face has the maximum UV area for maximum resolution of the 1024 by 1024 texture.  Kwakkelde Kwak's method is way more efficient and easier and produces less lag but sometimes it just can't produce the effect you are looking for so good to know the method I just described.

Hope that helps.
Cathy

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

What you describe sounds very workable, if you don't mind the bigger amount of textures.

One concern I have though, wouldn't there be very visible texture bleeding? especially if it's a bright floor with occlusion (very dark) on one end and no occlusion (very light) on the other? Depends on the diffuse texture type (tiles/wood/carpet) and lightness I suppose.

(The tiling/rotating I described above has the same risk of course)