Creating a Next-Gen farm

“Creating a Next-Gen Farm ” by Daniel Vijoi
Moving on, here are some of the most common modeling mistakes:

After modeling is complete we can finally move on to unwrapping the UVs. This stage will not result in a final layout for the UVs, in stead we’ll focus on creating correct UVs for all the polygons. For example, if the project requires 128 pixels per meter, than a 4m x 4m area will require a 512×512 texture and a 2m x 4m area will require 256 x 512 pixels. The brick wall in our scene has a height of 2 meters, so it will require 256 pixels for its height and some extra ones for the thickness. Being a long wall, we’ll have to us a lot of texture space if we are to keep the resolution rule and to avoid tiling the texture too much.
This next image shows the unwrapped UVs for the house and water tower. By using a checkered texture, we can see all the polygons have the same texture resolution. These UVs will be moved around in the texturing phase after we found out the best layout for our textures.

4. Layout, texturing and UV
Even though we refer to it as „UV layout”, the layout in fact refers to the way the details are arranged on the canvas in Photoshop. The easiest thing to do is draw a „layout” on a piece of paper to try and find the best possible way to arrange the different area by using the smallest texture size possible. Having correct measurements of the geometry is critical to ensuring the proportions of each area on the texture are correct. So, the larger the area on the geometry is, the larger the allocated texture space has to be. For our asset, the predominant details are the brick wall, the plank wall, the roof and the wall of the shed. Details like the doors, windows and stairs will also be included here.
Starting from the left of the image above, you can see increasingly finer details being added tot the height map. The image on the right shows the fine details that have been converted into a separate height map layer. Each height map layer can be converted to a normal map and then the layer blending mode will be set to overlay. Layers that need to be more accentuated can be duplicated so the effect of the overlay blending mode will be more pronounced. The intensity of each layer can also be turned down by decreasing the layer’s opacity. Make sure the details are defined using the largest grayscale range possible. This will increase the details’ fidelity on the resulting normal map.The height map generation process is very important as a proper set of height map layers will result in less work being put in the normal map layers resulted.
Normal map
The image below shows the step by step process of improving the normal map after it has been generated. Some areas had been accentuated by duplicating the area on a new layer and changing the blending mode to overlay. This results in sharper, deeper details that cannot be obtain directly by converting using the filter.

Better conversion results can be obtained by using CrazyBump as it uses algorithms to compute the depth of the texture when generating a normal map. It can also detect details based on their size and treat them accordingly. Usually, CrazyBump is better used on large details in the textures. Another use for it is that it can extract information out of pictures that have directional lightning. The results include occlusion maps, height maps, bump maps, etc. These can also be useful to further enhance the textures.

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