What are Trim Sheets?

as an environment artist or really any developer within games you've likely heard the words trim sheets uttered once or twice searching this term online is likely going to yield more questions than answers as you'll be learning different names and uses for what many others online use these images for part of the issue with understanding trim sheets is that there's no one consistent application for them so it can be difficult to find a place to just simply start learning this point of confusion is also trim sheets biggest strength they can be used anywhere for pretty much anything and depending on the ability of the artist you may never know they're being used at all i'm chunk traffic ander with flip normals and if you are trying to just get your footing with trim sheets this is the course for you in this series we are going to develop a solid foundation for what trim sheets are why we use trim sheets and how we can make trim sheets this series will follow the creation of an environment asset from concept to completion all with a studio mentality in mind so hopefully that's whetted your appetite let's get into it what are trim sheets well to be as true to form as possible they can be anything now that really isn't a satisfying answer and i don't blame you for thinking that way but i think it's important for you to hear that first so that we can begin to build towards that understanding trim sheets are just images with the intention of being used within a 3d environment we know that images used in games are often called textures and that we can use several different types of these textures to make what are called materials so why do we then call trim sheets something different well that's because their creation and subsequent application in these 3d environments is a little bit different i first posed to you a problem normally for high priority assets which are often called hero assets we will unwrap them to be textured with a unique material that only lines up to that specific assets uvs this allows for great customization but takes a significant amount of time in both unwrapping and ultimately texturing and we can't even use this awesome material for any of our other assets if we think about how many assets comprise any game level in current generation games that's a lot of time spent on wrapping and texturing and while environment pieces are incredibly important to games as a whole the amount of time and screen real estate that these assets take up is minuscule in comparison to these hero assets so unique materials aren't as much of a priority as well in these environments we can usually find very similar looking assets as it's not too far off to suggest that they may have been built using the same resources from an in-world perspective it is here that the idea of trim sheets comes into play trim sheets are images like i've said before however i like to think of them as a list of materials like when building a wall in the real world we need to know the resources that we would be using in its creation let's look at this wall here initially it's going to be a brick wall that's easy i can make a brick material no problem but now i realize that i need to create supports for these pieces and i'm going to have to make them out of some kind of stone but instead of wasting resources on creating an entirely new material i can just allocate some space on my bricks with really no issue but then i remember that this is actually an apartment building and i need windows 2. again i can't really justify an entirely new material for just a window texture and so on to my bricks it goes as i continue to compile a list of materials onto my image what i've really been doing whether i know it or not has been creating a trim sheet designed for apartment building wall assets the best part of this trim sheet i can use it on anything and even make some tweaks to update and create quick variations to these assets on the fly now i'm able to quickly texture my thousands of environment assets while also maintaining some visual cohesion across these assets because i'm drawing from the same resources another positive side effect is that we greatly reduce the number of images we need to load a level even as low as loading only one trim sheet material for an environment where materials may be centered around specific surface properties such as brick rock glass and so on we can think of trim sheets as being centered around various use cases for these materials such as apartment building country barn or egyptian architecture there are endless ways to construct these trim sheets each with endless possible uses it's going to be up to us to determine what our end goals are for these resources which will directly determine how we go about creating them you

Channel: FlippedNormals Marketplace

Views: 29,343

Keywords: flippednormals, tutorial, training, cg, games, film, morten, jaeger, henning, sanden, vfx, marketplace, curated, career, trim, sheets, trim sheets, game artist, AAA, texturing, game textures

Id: uUJShalzWy8

Length: 5min 32sec (332 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 07 2020