I am fairly good at texturing small objects, but anything that is building sized or more, I find a couple of problems are arising. First and foremost, the larger the object the larger the texture map that is necessary to maintain resolution but this obviously has a memory footprint. Using small texture maps on large models means that the texture appears strectched with a crap resolution. Small maps are also difficult to paint because the mesh lines appear mashed together. What is the best way to maintain a compromise between the resolution of the texture and to reduce the memory size of the texture file?



thanks in advance for any ideas, insight or suggestions.

its all down to planning really mate take a look at a building theres not much to them really 1 brick texture a few windows & doors & a roof texture ,so thats only 4 parts. its just being creative with your uv layout really.go for a 2048x2048 as a start you can always make it smaller later if needs be.



heres one of my building textures take a look at whats in it ,thats the sort of thing you should aim for.



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cheers henry

that one is fine for a exterior only building. I find that issues are arising when you want to include an interior in particular, which multiplies the face count as you have to account for floors, the sides of doorways, wall interiors, stairs and ceilings.

Make your house into separate object. Off coarse you will have rooms in them with outside wall textures. But planning is a must. Doors and windows separate.



So you have a kitchen, living room, 2 bedroom and couple of bath rooms.

I would call that 5 sets of textures. probably at least 2048 x 2048 if you have a section you can tile the UV mapping to allow more of the texture to be on an object face.



Make a set rule for yourself that a 1024x1024 texture maybe covers a 20 x20 foot area or a 30 x 20 foot area. Be consistent when you adjust all the textures, thinking about how much the texture will cover in reality. Split you walls Faces into those dimensions.



If your outer house wall is 65 ft long, then maybe you split the face into 3 sections long by 2 sections high. Your have turned your 6 poly wall into an 18 poly wall, but with 6 faces on the wall face that can have the whole part of the texture on each face. giving you the texture detail across the whole wall, with out stretching the texture. It is a little more UV mapping work, but the results are way nicer.



Plus by having more faces in your wall, Boolean cuts for your windows and doors will be cleaner and less shape freaky.



OK so you get your house made and lets say it has 8 objects. Export each of them to separate xfiles with respects to which textures you are using.



Make all the fpe files. Use Collisionmode=1 for all fpe files.



To the map editor:

Since you exported all your parts with the same 0,0,0 center, you can now set the editor snap to (bb) And place your first object at a set location. Wright down the location coordinates. insert each addition piece into the same spot. Once complete, you should have your very nice textured house with different rooms textures and a common outside texture for all spots in your house. I would do door individually so you can control them by script. Windows probably you could do them all together unless you plan on scripting them to open and shut.





Hope this gives some better insight.