Environment Texturing

[Raane]

If you're making it for games then you can take hints for the hows by the way games do it. It'll likely have walls, roofs, ceilings and floors. These can be done with just planar mapping them and creating planar maps. You will probably want to use want to use thirding (http://www.poopinmymouth.com/process/tips/thirding.jpg)to improve how it looks and texture size usage. This kind of bounces back to the actual modelling. If you're making a model you will want to be working from a scale, if you can, hop into hammer or unreal ed and check out their units system and textures. There is a height (specifically in HL) where the character can jump up to, a height where they can crouch jump to and a height where the player can fit crouched. Bear these in mind, but always provide a little leeway. It will also behoove you to try and keep the pixel sizes constant throughout the level. Try not to make the wall fullsize but use a squashed down version of the same wall for a knee length barrier or stretch the wall texture out to the size of a building. For a standard building you might want to make a single storey a 512 map, this means you can have a main 512x512 texture, with windows etc, which is repeatable in both directions. Then, as per thirding you can have a same size ground level texture with dirt which tiles horizontally and a roof level texture with water leakage or coving which also tiles horizontally.

While you're doing this, keep an eye out for other parts of the level where you can use repeating textures, like if you have a long length of piping, it's viable to have a single texture which you can apply along it's length repeating, though for pipes it's better to make a longer texture so the repeating isn't as easily visible.
After these architectural pieces you will have fiddly bits which would do better with a more detailed map, like light fittings, piping and the like, stuff which might qualify as repeatable props in a game. These you can texture and then use instanced throughout the level and potentially other levels (prime example being the ever-present game crates). Always stick to the rule of twos as ever.

That's part of my understanding of it, I'm sure other more experienced folks will have corrections and other additions.

[urgaffel]

An alternative to thirding is to use decal textures. For your example of a street I'd use a generic tiling asphalt for the road and then use decals (small textures with alphas) to add detail such as the lines and cracks etc. Same goes for building walls and ceilings. Use a small tileable brick texture and then use decals/overlays to break up the tiling. Works great if you can use a second or third uv-channel for your decals...

[Vertex Groover]

Personally, I use decals, as i can usually get more out of them when i comes to breaking up the tiling in the geometry. Although Thirding has its uses as well. They're both good methods to learn if you want to head down the environment path.

Best thing to do is create a small enviroment peice, like a simple building or area and post it in the forums, the crit and direction you (should) get will let you learn quicker and help you in future projects.

[DingBat99999]

Don't decals depend on the game engine? For example, can you use decals in UT2k4?

[Raane]

I think decals are almost a given for game engines, that's generally how splatters and bulletholes are done. I did mean to put decals up as an extra tool but my stomach was rumbling so i truncated my post :P

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