How to Model and Texture Huge Props for Video Games

hey YouTube this is Warren Marshall and today we're gonna talk about how to build a texture really like big props like bridges and stuff like that you know cuz honestly the first bridge that I ever built for a game I was I really hadn't done that kind of thing before you know there's always a first time for every kind of prop and you I had to figure out ways of making it work and how could I get it to look decent on a single texture sheet and all that kind of stuff so we're gonna look at what I learned what techniques I still stick with and while not super in-depth hopefully this will give you enough to chew on that you'll be able to attack this kind of thing yourself in the future [Music] so real quick let's just look at the finished product I don't have these avenging right now but we're just go look at some screenshots from my art station this is these are the sorts of bridges I'm talking about big sprawling span or bridges that are huge in the game and people ask me pretty coz about pretty regularly I should say how do you put these together how do you approach them and looking at these if you really stop and look at these you can probably see you know a lot of what the answer is you see a lot of repeating elements you see stuff that's stuff that's repurposed reuse twisted turn that kind of thing we're gonna dive in a little deeper here in a second but now in terms of where you start the thing at the advantage I had with these but this particular bridge was there was already an existing bridge and they said well it needs to fit these dimensions of the old bridge because we wanted to be a drop-in replacement so I knew the size I knew the basic complexity level that they wanted so like it's just kind of extrapolate from there and go you know other options are you may have concept art for the bridge like and that kind of thing or you may just be told to make something up which is fine too it all comes down to the same construction technique regardless of where it begins and so let's jump into let's jump into painter and look at it there okay so here we are in painter and if you're familiar you like I sent with the micro to macro video this probably looks pretty familiar to build the the pieces for the bridge I basically went ahead and I made a bunch of different kinds of beams a connector piece up here there's a big cable over here that I can reuse in various spots some small plates and some connector connecting your pieces and doodads I mean it's really what it is at this stage but it's just a matter of picking out some interesting stuff adding different patterns of bolts you know I'm giving it that doesn't really have any huge landmarks on it but she'll notice repeating and that sort of thing so this is this is how I lay it out in terms of the texturing see if I can get a good look at the the texture map yeah so if I split this up click on something that's not annoying and that ok yeah you can see this is all just laid out on the UV map nice and flat so I can map any piece of geometry to any piece of this this essentially becomes a big it's not really a trim texture and it's not really an atlas it's sort of a you know a hybrid between the two but it gets the job done and if you're wondering why these girders and bangs don't have actual holes in the geometry they do well what you'll see here when I jump into mode and we'll look at the actual meshes but this was done for optimization purposes because we couldn't have this piece being used everywhere with holes cut out of it all over the place it would just chew up q.what polygons already and these things are are so huge that that's a real concern you do have to watch it yeah I know these days were getting less and less worrisome about the number of polygons on props and things but with something the size of these bridges you do have to take a little bit of care so having said all that we're gonna jump into moto we're probably doing things in a weird order here but I just wanted to show you the pieces laid out and finalized and now we'll talk about the thought process behind constructing them over in in moto so as you can see inside the moto this is pretty much exactly what you'd expect I've got my lope or my high poly mesh set up here there is some stuff on here that I didn't actually end up using uh this weird little spiral frame thing and and and it could be a few other little doodads it didn't get transferred but you can see the high poly meshes in here it's got the bolts all stuck on I just found it easier to control that here in moto this time around or on this particular piece sometimes I stamped those on and painter but this seemed like it was probably more productive to do it in here so I can have more control but yeah it's just a high poly well I said it's a high poly match it's not even all that complicated and then the low poly gets laid out and we determine our UV map like so like you saw in the other you know if you saw in painter pixel density I just kind of went with whatever I felt looked good there were no guidelines on this and I exported from painter out of 4k resolution when I exported it if I remember it correctly because it's such a massive piece and even then it was a little blurry in the game so you got a you can either use multiple texture i beez and to give yourself more resolution or maybe overlay like a detail normal map which they may have done but but probably not that's usually the first thing that gets punted when optimizations come around but yeah it's all a dance it's all about how can you build it efficiently how can you text your so it looks decently like you have to optimize late night the key with it really is with something this massive is you have to optimize for the general view that the player will have of whatever it is these bridges the players well I'll say that the size of my my cursor here for example right like if you're standing here or here yeah you're pretty close to this but generally you've got sort of like a like a long long shot view of the bridge and as long as it cohesively hangs together you're in terms of of the vision of the Texel density it sells well enough to you know to work and in games with massive massive leaf our view distances and things you just can't you use 14 textures on the bridge it's just not gonna fly so having said all of that and just thrown random fact factoids at you I'm gonna pull up the de moto file that has the constructed bridges and we'll talk about the road and things like that hang on okay so here we go I've got the the assemble pieces pulled up in modo now since we've seen these a few times you probably recognized the pieces you're looking at there's the connector doodad the word of the day is apparently doodad sorry I said it about eight times in this video I'm I'm really trying to stop but you can see you know the connector pieces in there there's the there's the crossbeams I was telling you about here's all those little bits that hide all the bolts on them and they're all just kind of assembled and stuck together in ways that look interesting but you know they fill up the space but they're not horrendously dense it's just what it's all very much a you know a balancing act trying to find something that looks good in the game but it's not too expensive now speaking of expensive you probably noticed that I do have these cut out down here and this was a conscious decision because when you're looking at the bridge from say this sort of an angle you will see through those holes and it's kind of cool looking down here and it's not directly in the area where most of the action takes place like this this is kind of a design thing really nothing to do with this bridge technique but the center area of the bridge is where the bulk of the action takes place and you notice that's fairly clear of stuff most of the details up top and on the sides and a little bit on the bottom the central area is pretty plain and that's intentional so you can see people anyway so the only thing left to talk about really is the road and the sidewalk inside here because you'll see they don't have a texture that's because we don't handle that here all we do here is we make allowances for it so let me show you if I pull up the you v's isolating these polygons so the road is mapped just I think it's about four times four times vertically and that just means that when the client gets the bridge they can say it I could put in whatever type of texture they want on that bridge Asch fault or you know whatever I'm not gonna get into all the different types of road material so you know what I'm talking about and the sidewalks the same way the slide walk is actually tiled more than the bridge was but as long as from this is not exactly aligned but it doesn't matter because from here to here is one 1uv block of space vertically and then it's whatever it is lengthwise ten or nine or whatever but the important thing is that this again lets the client swap out that texture for whatever they want it to be and you don't have to eat the cost of bad on the bridge texture which is already packed tight full of stuff and really that's the bulk of it you just go through and you create or more he said Oh sir this is little laughs that's a test piece or a special case piece I should say but you can see again thing on this piece same pieces being a reassembled it's kind of like like Taco Bell prop them a prop development you've got a certain number of things and you just mix and match in different orders and create new things see what's this one here we got like a the same kind of thing but with a shorter with a shorter entrance there's a little rant piece that lets you merge in with the terrain and this this is the thing that's sits underneath the bridge so you can see all the middle area on this on this bumper piece not bumper piece support support base or whatever all the metal pieces are using that same bridge texture just mix and match stand put together in interesting ways in this base part then we flip back over to the actual screenshots is a that's a separate texture that wasn't gonna get used anywhere else so it's so it's got a custom little you have concrete base built for it but that's it really there's a one texture here there's one for the bridge so I'm delivering two to texture sets to the client for this whole bridge construction and they supply the sidewalk and Road this is what you know this is how it comes together you've got all those pieces we just looked at and they're all strung together and they all snap together like Lego like a modular set shed and it looks like one big bridge and that's the general construction technique so before we fade to black here I want to to address one more point I know in these tutorials things can look kind of slick and it's like not mine but other people's videos you know it looks kind of slick like they've made all the right decisions from the beginning and I knew every piece I was gonna need for this breed so I put it all together and it was just like snap it together boom and I'm done you know the reality is pretty far from that the reality is that I started off with a few pieces that I knew I was gonna need started building bridge pieces discovered that I needed more variation or I needed to have a different kind of girder or I needed to or I wasn't gonna use this piece anymore but I really could use this piece let's scoot him out of there and put him on the Atlas and that kind of thing and back and forth back and forth so you know don't feel bad if you give in to this and you find yourself you're having to go back and revisit the mesh over and over until you have enough stuff I mean it really is an experience thing if I built another bridge now I'd be a lot more confident in knowing what I needed but when I started I really didn't have a good idea at all so yeah this is one of the pass along that word of encouragement I guess don't be afraid to iterate because that really is how these things get done the reiteration so thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video you

Channel: Warren Marshall

Views: 34,988

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Id: pxdoXxYcqvc

Length: 14min 31sec (871 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 17 2019