Texturing & Workflow

At this stage in development I'm mostly re-creating assets again now. It is a bit tedious, especially trying to create similar visuals. A lot of the buildings I'm working on don't require improving model-wise, most are just huge blocks.

So I'm putting more effort into texturing, but again, a lot of detail is missed due to the fog, which I guess is both a blessing in disguise and a hinderance.

At any rate, the original models throughout the entire game were created on a grid and textured the same way. By my estimation they used a 32x32 grid. By creating models this way, they can severally condense textures into a single sheet, this allows them to reduce soo much waste and also to tile anything easily.

Here is a sample texture from the game:

The full size is 256x256, divide this 5 times and you end up with individual blocks (32x32). If a model deosn't use the whole sheet, other assets can have part or even share the whole sheet. This is a fantastic way to optimise assets and even their workflow.

The end result of the texture above looks like this:

Now because I'm improving quality throughout I can't just upscale these textures, well I could but tiling would become very noticable and I wouldn't be able to achieve the same level of quality I'm aiming for.

Instead, I'm taking individual models, optimising them, adding appropriate mesh details, like: window frames, side panels, vents etc (all which would been included originally in textures instead). This allows me to give models their own individual texture sheets of anywhere up from 1024x1024, which is 4 times the original quality, with some models having a 2k texture.

This is a UVW map I made from the model above, as you can see from the 256x256 texture, it's much different. There is quite a bit of black space on this particular one, but thats due to the size of the building and keeping each face to scale.

So with this, I then go on and find textures I think would suit and then begin layering and adding affects.

Using this texture as a base, I can now start transforming it to match my UVW map. I chose this particular one because the original model looks like it is made from large sheets of metal.

This is the same texure from above, just cropped, scaled and with some shading. Next I need to re-create the grungness of the texture:

And then add a nice opacity layer the break up the base layer, so it looks more natural:

Then add some more base layers for the other parts, like the door and steps, and add more gungle effects and shading:

Here is the process of textuing from start to finish:

The final model with this texture now looks like this:

It looks very close to the original I think, even a bit more realistic.

So basically that is it, this is my workflow that I use and will continue to use on the next 100+ models! Though I am aiming to only do specific models I know will be seen. Other models I can and will use the original PS1 ones, simply due to the fact detail are lost in the fog, so buildings in the distance are usually only silhouettes.

Objects the red arrows are pointing to are PS1 unedited models. The floor, garage, trash bins and building to the far right are all re-created.
Because of the area, these buildings will never been seen fully thanks to the static cameras. So I'm effectively optimising by not recreating them (they themselves optimised to removed extra verts / faces). Plus these models don't and will not have use for normal maps etc, so this is saving on memory too!

So, like I said before; some objects do benefit from the facelift and lend themselves to create a better quality game overall.