Hi everyone, I’m working with trimsheets for the first time and have a few questions:
How can I maintain a consistent texel density with my UV shell? My object often ends up being too large, so I have to rescale my UV maps significantly each time to fit the trim.
How should I use horizontal tiling if my UV island is too big for the ornament on the trimsheet? If the ornament is too small, should I make it bigger on the trim to give it more space?
This might be a silly question, but is there a way to tile horizontally to get more squares without stretching the UV island?
In terms of workflow, do you create the trim first and then model, or is it the other way around?
Trimsheet first. This is a workflow where the point is to make reusable pieces of texture. You create the models for the texture.
You won’t have a fully constant density. However, the fact that you are reusing parts of a texture means you should be able to get decent resolution even on the worst parts, so the inconsistency shouldn’t be that big of a deal.
You don’t need to fit the trimsheet exactly. The trimsheet should be made so it loops seamlessly sideways, so UV islands can spill outside the texture or be moved sideways and still work.
Also, if your face is shorter than the texture, you just take whichever shorter section of it you need.
A little bit of scaling might be needed for final adjustment, but you can get most of the way just by moving the UVs and allowing yourself not to fit the texture.
Something else that can help is to design the texture with trims of different sizes, so you have multiple options.
Your texture doesn’t need to be a square. You could make it a 2:1 rectangle. Either horizontally so you can make longer trims, or vertically so the texture can have more different trims of different sizes and designs.
@etn249@Okidoki thanks for your responses that’s been really helpful.
i’ve another question that is related to when to use tiling material or trimsheet:
Currently, I’m participating in the bimonthly challenge on Polycount and working on this environment:
Is it better to use tiling material instead of a trimsheet for the stone brick parts in the concept? I’ve tried to fit all of that inside a trimsheet, but it’s not enough. Should I then create a separate trimsheet for the detailed parts, like those on the columns?
Yes, usually a stone wall should use a separate, tiling texture. Trimsheets are better used for smaller features like wall borders or recurring details, but not for a large continuous surface.
Ahh… the “otherone” from polycount ( i’m there too ). Well… trimsheets can be subdivided as you like and so a “tile” is an undivided trimsheet…
As in everything else someone has to ask oneself which configuration fits my needs and/or do i need mutltiple?
So the partition of a tile to build trimsheats is somekind of optimization because you also could use dozen of materials. It starts with using tileable textures, continues with different but “connectable” tiles, possible reuse of a imple partition (1/2&1/2, 1/3&1/6, 2/8&1/4&1/8)… and maybe even in mutliple directions…
So here properly a “full” tile for columns, column like stone wall, simple stone wall, floor would be nice. Also for the carpet; maybe “only” mirrorable (also the detail of the arc).
And properly some trims with bigger areas for the bottom colum part, maybe window; a bit smaller for the steps and details above the arc and the railing.
So using the original concept suggestion in the category Hard Surface Environment from Olga Lihota from the polycount Bi-Monthly Environment Art Challenge :
). Well… trimsheets can be subdivided as you like and so a “tile” is an undivided trimsheet…