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3DSMax9: How do you texture large complex buildings?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Aviasim
  • Start date Start date
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Aviasim

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Before I start I want to clearly note that I am using 3ds max 9.

Basically, I have a large terminal, rectangular shape with only one floor.

This is intended for an airport I am doing which I want to release for FSX.

The modelling is fine, it's finished, but the texturing on this building is annoying, Due to the wide faces, when I unwrap the UVWs and texture them, it does not give me detail that I want, far from it, and the detail it gives would probably only just manage to be good for FS2000 or something...ie, very blury and tacky etc. I have tried many sizes, 1024, 2048 and even 4096, its still no way near as good as quality like FlyTampa or FSDT!

Here is a quick screenshot of the terminal I am talking about, please tell me and explain your best methods for texturing buildings like these to give nice quality for fsx to be nearly or as good as FSDT or FT... by the way, I will be using the render to texture feature to bake in some basic shadows to give more depth and realism, so I can not do any tiling!

Term.png


Im seeing people like FSDreamTeam and Orbx, Aerosoft, Fly Tampa etc make much larger terminals than this and have awesome quality and sharpness with shadows and everything

If anyone could help me on this or point me to a direction to a place which can help, I will be very very grateful!
 
Did you set up fsx.cfg with this line?
TEXTURE_MAX_LOAD=2048 (or 4096)
How do you texture your building? I guess you unwarp and paint every single polygon with its own texture.
I think you have to use repeat texture as much as possible.
It is complicate to say, but I usually break it in to parts and do the texture for that part only. Not do all the building in one piece. The texture space is not enough to fit in without making it blur. Let's calculate that you want 1 wall 1 floor with 300 pixelx100 pixel/meter, the building this size may require more two or four 1024. If you use it for FSX only, you have to make it in one 2048.
 
Put all the roofs in a single texture, all the similar walls too. You mainly use the uv unwrap and box unwrapping for buildings. Sometime you can use a 2048x2048 texture and repeat it for all your walls to get very high resolution.
 
It's difficult, you have polygons enough to texture every one separatedly, but the baking could be problematic.
I have a problem similar but with a parking, I used juts one texture because this textures is painted, lines, markings,etc, I can't tile it, so the resolution is poor. though the textue is 2048. would be fine if I split in three or four parts
 
Heres what I tried:

Method 1:
First I downloaded all individual textures I wanted, Bricks, metal plates, windows, doors, tiles etc and each was their own 1024 texture. I then applied these to selected polygons, they was all tileable and looked decent...but no shadows, no problem, I cloned the terminal and and Unwrapped the UVWs, I then applied a white diffuse colour, added a skylight, turned on "Cast Shadows" and set it to 64, I then pressed "0" to bring up the render to texture, padding set to 2, "Lighting Map" and chose "2048x2048".

With this lighting map I opened in photoshop and got rid of the parts which did not have a shadow (white parts) so I was left with black shades everywhere on a transparent background in PS6, I then saved this as a PNG and used it for an alpha channel on a plain black 2048x2048 texture... I applied this texture to the cloned white terminal and sure enough it gave me the shadows etc only with this method it doubled my poly count. Finally I scaled the cloned terminal which has the shadow textures to 100.001..done, now this is gently resting on the walls of the original terminal and not flickering... Ok, I am still not happy!

I then decided to break down parts of the terminal to 1024x1024 texture sheets, nice, a little blur but text is readable which I suppose is good, now to finish the whole thing of like this.

term2.png
 
Very nice, good looking terminal.
I still quite not understand what you did.
Are you making another polygon just for the shadow?

I think it is better to do in photoshop. Make another layer and paste what you got from texture baking.
 
Last edited:
jtanabodee said:
Very nice, good looking terminal.
I still quite not understand what you did.
Are you making another polygon just for the shadow?

I think it is better to do in photoshop. Make another layer and paste what you got from texture baking.
Click to expand...

breaking it up into a lot of sections which i unwrap as 1024^2 px textures with baked shadows

Regards
 
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