10. UV MAPPING BUILDINGS

One thing that tiled texture maps made (more) easy for me was UV mapping. Typically I would just perform the automatic UV mapping tool, and then try to divide out all of the different parts of the building. That is, I would set the brick portion of the UVs to one side, the stucco portion of the UVs to another side, the wood portion over there, and so on. Basically, that was as difficult as it got, especially since I was using square, straight architectural design. Then each UV family would get its own tiled texture set, and that would be it. If the bricks, for example, needed to be bigger or smaller, then I would simply adjust the scale size of the UV family appropriately.

Of course, using tiled textures like this, it is clear that I would get less interesting textures on my models than if I were painting individual textures. This was addressed a couple of ways. For one thing, I wouldn't try to scale the UVs so that the texture tiled more than a couple of times. This hid tile repetition.

One thing that I could have, and perhaps should have, done is lay out the UVs in a more typical fashion, and then paint over the tiled texture so that more interesting features could appear. Certainly, this is what any textbook would suggest. This would have given the buildings certain weathering effects to make buildings interesting. However, my limited talents preclude me from painting such weathering effects. (Whenever I try to paint weathering on some texture, it frequently comes out bad, and I'm not sure how to make it better.) So, to add faux weathering, instead of actually painting the weathering by hand, I might find some sort of grungy tiled texture, and layer it on top of the tiled bricks, or something like that. Then the bricks won't seem so clean. However, this technique certainly has its limitations (it's difficult for the weathering to appear where it should). All that said, I am not sure that I even applied this technique many times. To be sure, this sort of attention to texturing is where I could have spent more time.

  

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