Making assets Pt1

This week is all about doing modular assets using 2k trimsheet. The requirement are as follow:

• Single 2k size trimsheet texture

• <3000 triangles   
  

• Dynamic visual effect (Challenge)

I have seen trimsheet before but rarely had the chance to do it in practice. (Now i do) I narrow down to some of the possible assets that i can do. One of which was the Blue Moon Weed scene in Frieren Anime. I came out with several plan on how to tackle.

• Research

• Model

• Trimsheet Textures

• Assembly in Unreal Engine
  

My initial plan is to recreate the layout in 3D, I watched the scene and screenshot whatever details I can find. The castle show different stone textures for the wall, door frame and the floor. The odd one out is the wooden door and the difficult portion is to plan out which area will be best suited when applying UVs over the trim sheet texture.

I searched for real life example of a round castle with cylindrical shape as a reference for texture later on and moved on to modelling. I modelled the entire castle and bring it to unreal to see check if it is good. The castle in the picture have about 2000 triangles while leaving about 1000 triangles more for more details.

On further research with example by Cliff Chen's post on trim sheet, I learnt how he break environment down into simpler piece. He also show example of wasteful space in the trim sheet. The goal is to minimise everything and keep it simple for use in the environment when assembled.

Following his example, I break down the castle into several common pieces that can be duplicated later. I searched for more real life photos and one of it shows the collapse castle. I decided to change the idea of a whole castle to a collapse one to reflect the age of an abandoned castle. Within the 3k triangles budget, I added the interior of the castle as well as the collapsed pieces. To replicate the uneven surface, I moved around the vertex to it will not look uniform.

As for textures, I gauge how much space my UVs will be by comparing it to my plane. Then refer back to the reference to see if there is anything I can add/remove to the set. I plan the trimsheet area with the end goal of it being capable of blending each other even when using the same texture. I know it can be done as my previous modular windows and surface textures sort of achieve that. 

The texture shown in the picture is my current workflow, at this point I am not finished yet. I first look for source of the pattern if substance Painter doesn't provide, level and paint it in Photoshop. For stylise pattern similar to the one shown in the show, I made 3 variation of colour + grunge.