Texturing building secret

[GrizzlyAir]

I’ve been doing this for 20 years now. Max and now 3DS Max. I have never been able to capture and wrap buildings so that they look nice. Objects, usually I can do, but buildings when I have just a few photos I’ve found on the internet, are a challenge. But you can give the same photos to someone else and the building looks amazing. There must be a secret to how they do it. Please share your tips and techniques for using pictures you found on the internet to creat a texture and apply it. Or point me to a thread or wiki that tells me. Please.

 

[GrizzlyAir]

 

[GrizzlyAir]

Here (above) are some objects that I’ve made, but my buildings never turn out as well because of how I end up stretching the texture.

 

[GrizzlyAir]

 

[GrizzlyAir]

And here is how my buildings turn out. Peavine Cabin in the Copper River Valley of Alaska

 

[GrizzlyAir]

Beaver Tribe Lodge for Ketchikan Alaska

 

[tgibson]

Those look nice to me. To avoid stretching the texture, use Bitmap Fit when you UVW Map (then select the texture in use), and avoid any command that changes the proportion of the texture after that. I only use Move and Uniform Scale (these are GMAX commands, but should be similar in Max).

 

[GaryGB]

Hello:

Regarding "Texture Editing for Realism", see:

https://www.fsdeveloper.com/forum/threads/texture-editing-for-realism.434303/post-712928


Also, one can study texture Material attributes in Arno's ModelConverterX (aka "MCX") for 3D MDLs to see other options.


Hope this helps as well.

GaryGB

 

[GrizzlyAir]

Thank you both. Those are helpful. I do use Fit, but since all I have are photos I can find on the internet and not direct face-on photos, I have to move the vertices around some on the map to make it sort of line up. I need to redo the front of the beaver lodge all together though and take that into account for sure.

 

[Aviasim]

As well as the link posted by @GaryGB:


Using "special" textures will greatly enhance the resulting texture, by "special" I mean Bump, Specular, Fresnal - or PBR which is restricted to P3D V4.
There are tools like CrazyBump that will convert a generic texture image and allow you to manipulate the individual Bump, Specular, Normal and AO. For PBR there is Substance Painter 2 and also Quixel which is a Photoshop plugin.

All tools will give you a live preview and will let you upload your own mesh for an almost live result. By "almost" - FSX/P3D graphic engines may give a different result to what you see in the editing software.

 

[stevo]

Thank you both. Those are helpful. I do use Fit, but since all I have are photos I can find on the internet and not direct face-on photos, I have to move the vertices around some on the map to make it sort of line up. I need to redo the front of the beaver lodge all together though and take that into account for sure.

Hi,

Don't move the vertices that's a sure fire way to mess up your mapping. The way you are doing it the texture should really be made to fit the uv mapping not the uv mapping to the texture. If your photos are not straight on then try using a perspective tool in your graphic program to straighten it. I use Photoshop, but I just had a look and the free software Gimp also has one which will perspective straighten a photo. Try a google search. I'm not sure what software you use, personally I use 3dsmax and for a simple building I would generally flatten the uv's (Flatten Mapping) and arrange them to fit on the texture sheet, To help in Photoshop I'd export a uvw template.

Just quickly tried the perspective straighten tool on this image (first one i found on a google search) in Gimp. I selected a portion of the wall...

in no time at all, this is what is gave me (i did have to scale the width down as it was stretched) but it looks ok, extra work would be required to remove the fence and signs.

A short post, but I hope that sends you in some direction

Stevo