5 Common Texture Methods for Game Assets | Blender Tutorial

hi guys it's roy from bellados 3d here with another blender video and today's video will be a quick overview of five different methods of texturing for game assets now this isn't going to go into detail on how to actually create the textures and things like this it's an overview of what types of texturing methods there are which are generally used for game assets so without further to do let's get on with the video okay first up we have what i like to call the pixel palette method of texturing and you may have seen this in my previous low poly videos with this texture method you take a palette of colors on a texture each color being one pixel on the texture and then you take each of the uv areas or the faces polygons etc scale them down and place them in the color that you need so let's see this in action let's go and create a material so go to the materials tab and click new and if we go to shading we can see our be principled bsdf and what we need to do now is just drag our texture into there and the reason i could drag that into there is because i'm using the node wrangler add-on if you aren't using it why not it's one of the most useful add-ons that are built into blender just go to options and turn it on it will change your life anyway let's connect the color to the base color and you notice it's a little bit blurry and this is because each of the colors is one pixel wide and it doesn't quite know how to interpolate it so we just go down to here to the texture interpolation click on linear and click closest and now we've got nice sharp colors so if we go back to uv editing and with everything selected press u and you again to unwrap it make sure everything's unwrapped and then over the uv unwrapping window press a to select everything and press s and 0 and that brings that down into a tiny little dot in the middle there and then we can move that to whatever color we want so let's put it on the red and you'll see that the whole cube is red and then we can select individual faces and we can move them to other colors like so and as you can see we have a nicely colored cube there now as i said each of these colors is only one pixel wide which means that this whole texture is only four by four pixels which is almost no resource usage for a text engine to use so this is brilliant if you want low poly mobile assets that don't take a lot of resources the only drawback is individual detail you can only color it you can't add any other details to it unless you do it via geometry so for example if i wanted to write something on here i'd actually have to create text out of geometry which would increase the geometry value but for a low poly flat colored asset this is the perfect type of texturing and you can have as big a palette as you want as many colors as you want because each one's only a pixel you you're only gonna you know at the most probably end up by like 128 by 128 pixels or something like that with a full color palette so bear in mind that you can't do much in the way of detail it is just pure color um it is pretty good for things like mobile assets and very very low poly stuff so now we come to what i would say is probably the most commonly used method of texturing for game assets and that's a single atlas texture where all the uvs in the one object are all on the one texture seat and then you paint onto the texture sheet for example this smg2 here that i modeled for a commission a while back it's lots of different parts but if you drag over it and make sure one piece is highlighted and go to uv editing you'll see that all of these parts are on the one texture atlas all nice and neatly laid out separately so that they can be painted and if you look at the texture you'll see that each area is painted separately now this is great for small to medium sized assets because it's relying on textual density that's how many pixels can be seen for each of the details etc it relies on how big the texture is and how much geometry and how how big the geometry is so for example if you wanted to see a house and you want to see every brick in detail a single atlas texture is just not going to be enough for a model of that size and type in that much detail you'll either need to have multiple textures or you have to have a huge texture which will lag down your games something chronic so any medium sized object any small object that you want to see close up and in detail this is perfect for it because it's one set of textures so it's only one set of draw calls on the engine and you can get plenty of detail in there but if you want to go big i recommend the next type of texturing and that is a multiple atlas texturing okay so if you want a larger object something like a house or anything like that i would recommend going multiple textures or trim sheets which i will explain about later on but multiple textures i'm going to um use my my locker as an example for this actually the size of the locker it depending on whether you want to sit up close or not it doesn't really need a multiple texture but i just found it easier to do the door separately when i created this so i gave it multiple textures so in this example if we go into um if we click on our model and we go into our materials you'll notice that there's two materials available on this one there is actually a door material and i don't know why i put that on there that but on the main part of it there's the main texture each of these materials has its own set of textures and it's quite simple if i go into uv editing and let's see some color first okay so let's go into our main part you'll see that our main part of our locker is all nice and neatly unwrapped on that material and then if we go into the doors the two doors are all unwrapped together on a separate material now this means you can have a lot more surface area a lot more detail larger models can be spread across multiple textures but it does have the drawback that each set of textures is a set of draw calls on the engine so the more multiple textures you have the the harder the engine will work so you need to balance between large textures on single atlases or lots of smaller textures for multiple atlases so it's it's a bit of a balancing act between the two which now leads me on to the next types which are trim sheets and there's two sort of types of trim sheets that i want to talk about so what is a trim sheet trim sheets are basically a texture where you've already applied your material to the texture and then you can just apply your uh uv islands into the areas that you need on the texture to apply them to the model much like the pixel palette method but with proper textures rather than single colors so let's take a look at what a trip machine looks like first things first i'm going to create a material so click on new i'm going to go into my shading tab and with my printable bsdf selected i'm just going to drag a trim sheet in and then connect it up to the color now we don't need to change the interpolation because uh it's not individual pixels but as you can see it's there on the model now let's go to uv editing and as you can see here's our trim sheet this is a standard basic trim sheet we've got three materials there across the width of the the texture and these will tile on the x-axis all the way along just like any other texture um these will tile but you can only tile them on the x-axis because if you try and tile on the y-axis you get the three textures uh three materials repeating so all we simply do is we will select our pieces of wood and i've already quickly unwrapped so that we can do this nice and easily and we'll move them over to our wood texture so now if we go and give it some color you can see that the the wood pieces are in wood not very good wood because it's not a very good example and let's scale that down as you can see they get bigger and bigger and we can scale them down g y move them about and make it look a little bit better like so um now the roof pieces let's have the main part of the roof there and we'll move that scale that down and give it its tiles and there's the overhang just there so we've got our tiles on there and now the actual brickwork so we can just move that into there and as you can see it's all nicely bricked up there and what's this piece here um that's the floor in there so i can put that in there and i'm gonna because i want to make that plank so i'm gonna stretch that out like so and as you can see it's all nicely modelled it's all nicely textured all in the right places now this is great if you want quite a bit of detail on large objects and if you want it on multiple assets this is great for sharing between multiple assets so if you've got three or four different buildings that will use the same textures you can put them all onto the one asset and that means you can then only you only use the resources for one draw call for the textures rather than multiple for each model the drawback as with any of this type of texturing whether it's the pixels or the or this is detail you you can't have unique details um most of the maps have to be quite the materials have to be quite clean um you can't have a lot of dirt or edge wear because it will tile and it doesn't look great you'll see repeating patterns and things like this but this is great for things if like if you like five or six buildings or if you've got a whole castle castle where you've made it up with lots of different models and you want to use the same texture over and over you can use it for that and which leads me on to the second type of trim sheet and it's pretty much the same sort of thing however instead of the three the um horizontal textures let's delete this we now have our texture broken up into six squares like so with six textures on that's exactly the same as the um previous trim sheet except we can't tile in any direction on this we have to lay everything out inside these little boxes and again it's great for models where you have to have the same texture over and over again for multiple models so you can save on on texture loading but it's not so great for details so i mean with this we can have more different types of texture so let's go into tab mode i want to make the main roof this piece here i want to make that thatch so i'm going to move that right down to there and that is now a thatched rope and i want to make the porch tiled like so so we've got our tiles and again i want the main body of the um the building which will be this piece i want that brick so i'm going to move that into the brick area and scale that down and that's all bricks stones sorry there and now all the wood uh let's take that and see if i can find there we go there's the wood and ctrl l and we'll move that into the the wood color now i've got an extra piece here so let's have the floor and let's move that into this now obviously you can see this this tiles now and it's as you can see you've got two different textures on there so what we need to do is we need to take this texture and we need to wrap it down into one so i'm just gonna turn that on and go into face mode i'm gonna select half and half and i'm going to move that like so and let's select the rest of it move that in there and scale that down and now we've got planks in the whole floor so as you can see it's exactly the same sort of thing let's take a look at that wood it's around the wrong way r90 and there we go it's the same sort of thing as the previous trim sheet but you can get more materials into one um but again if you want detail individual details for for faces you you can't really use this method that well you need to need to use an atlas texture or a multiple atlas texture for this that kind of thing so there we have a brief explanation of the five common types of texture methods used for texturing assets for games we've got our pixel palette which is great for low poly mobile assets that use plain colors we've got our single atlas texture which is the common use texture mainly used for small and medium-sized assets but not so great for the bigger assets unless you want to go for the x-ray resource usage of larger textures and then we have the multiple atlas textures mainly used for large detailed assets that you want to get plenty of detail in and finally our two types of trim sheet which you use mainly for assets that share texture so you have multiple buildings that use the same texture to cut down on resource usage i hope you found this interesting i hope you learned something from it if you did please hit that like button and tell your friends and as usual subscribe to see more and if you want to be notified when i release a new video then hit that notification bell thank you very much for watching and i hope to see you in the next video

Channel: Belidos3D

Views: 7,157

Keywords: blender, low poly, understand, texture, paint, 3d, art, painting, how to, gamedev, rig, animate, modelling, blender low poly, blender game assets, blender unity low poly, blender unity game assets, blender assets for unity, blender game asset tutorial, blender game modeling, blender to unity, blender 2 unity workflow, blender to unity textures, unity, low poly unity assets, blender 2.8, blender 2.9, low poly unity game, blender 3d, blender tutorial, 2.8, 2.9, method, texturing, atlas, trim

Id: QBf0_QptCcw

Length: 16min 15sec (975 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 21 2021