Game Environment Texturing Fundamentals
Course info
Course info
Description
Creating textures for games can sometimes be a very involved and confusing process. In this course, Game Environment Texturing Fundamentals you will be texturing a game environment that consists of different materials. First, you will create low polygon meshes to be used as the base of your work. Next, you will UV and bake maps on to those meshes to lay the ground work for texturing. Finally, you will create your own stylized textures in Photoshop. When you're finished with this texturing course, you'll not only be able to texture the game environment at hand, but also have sufficient skills to texture different materials and environments in the future. Software required: 3DS Max, zBrush, Photoshop, xNormal Optional: Topogun.
About the author
Alex was born in Soviet Latvia. Since childhood he has loved to build and create, leading him to a love for architecture.
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Section Introduction Transcripts
Course Overview
Hi everyone. My name is Alex Jerjomin, and welcome to my course, Game Environment Texturing Fundamentals. I am a former environment artist at Microsoft Game Studios. Texturing is an essential part of game level creation. In this course, we're going to learn how to texture your own environments and props. Some of the major topics we will cover include creating of low polygon meshes, creation of texture coordinates, baking texture details, and painting texture maps for the game engine. By the end of this course, you will know how to bake and texture your own game environments. Before beginning this course, you should be familiar with basic 3Ds Max and Photoshop. I hope you will join me on this journey to learn texturing with Game Environment Texturing Fundamentals course at Pluralsight.
Retopology Fundamentals
In this module, we're going to cover how to create low polygon meshes. So before starting creating low polygon meshes, in this clip we're going to cover how to optimize the high resolution mesh. And if you're not familiar with this mesh, we have done that in the previous tutorial in Game Modeling Fundamentals, and before doing this tutorial, you should definitely check the previous one out. So, the problem here is that this mesh is quite heavy on polygons. We have 879, 000 points, which is roughly about 1 and a half million polygons, and this is not the worst case scenario, but in most cases, the other engines like 3Ds Max or xNormal, which we will be using, will not be able to work fast enough with that kind of resolution. So what we need to do is we need to optimize this mesh. So, it's quite a simple step. We're going to go to Zplugin here; we're going to go to Decimation Master, and we're going to click Pre-process Current. So what that will do is it will analyze the mesh and prepare it for decimation. Give it a little second, and now we're ready to decimate. So, we have a few options here, you can decimate to the poly count, or you can just use the percentage, which I usually do. And my rule of thumb is if the mesh under one million points, I decimate it to 20%, and if it's over a million points, I decimate it to about 10%. So, I'm going to go ahead and leave it at 20% and click Decimate Current. And so now this mesh has dropped to 175, 000 points, which is much more friendly with the 3Ds Max and xNormal. So let's go ahead and export this mesh, and in the next clip, we're going to cover how to create the low polygon mesh.