Koesj's Building Woes: Dingbats!

[Darf 1,439]

Well how I do it, for example, if you have 5 to 10 windows vertically on your texturemap from top to bottom, split the side vertically and make every floor start at a different point on your texturemap. If you still find that too much repetition vertically, you can always split your face in 2 at a random floor.

[Koesj 659]

Yeah I know, I've done it before and then moved away from it again:

If you're working on (semi-)open floor plan buildings I feel the vertical tiling option for windows is a dead end.

[Koesj 659]

Right, today's update, brought to you by "disable all custom assets except for these two babies"  Suddenly loading times were way better, and my new asset decided to show up for 200% res screenshots too. Patch seems to need some time to gel eh?

Yeah I like the coloration.

I'm trying to get a really subtle depth effect on the paneling going, instead of the old 'apply black and white on the heightmap, use a solid color line between the individual panels on the diffuse'. Apparently the symmetry modifier worked better on this model as well??? I don't know what I did to make it right half a year ago, but there seem to be way less flipped tangents.

 

Like I said, the service floor got a re-do. Looks pretty neat.

Instead of the fugly, flat two-color texture for those balcony trusses I've used alpha mapped geometry.

Heck, even my LOD test comes out pretty good at 256 instead of 512. It's way worse from somewhat closer by though, and this is at very high level of detail, so I might want to switch to 512x256 at least.

Out with the old...

In with the new!

Nightlights and troubleshooting remain to be done.

e: Also I went from 10.096 main and 300 LOD tris to 9544 and 218? And filesize stands at 3580KB compared to 4556KB right now on the Workshop? Yowza!

 

[boformer 3,169]

15 hours ago, boldlybuilding said:

I think I'm gonna have to rethink the way I'm doing Willis Tower. Using that trick with the alpha'd facades and separate window glass behind, I could use far less space on my texture while also having higher-res facade detailing and more variation in the windows and lighting, and it'll look cleaner!

Yes, I'm going to try that...

note that doubling the surface area of the asset is probably worse than doubling the vertex count.

[boldlybuilding 873]

2 hours ago, boformer said:

note that doubling the surface area of the asset is probably worse than doubling the vertex count.

How so? More texture being rendered/shaded?

My main reason for possibly doing this (I might still be able to just not do the transparent window thing) is to save texture space so I can have larger, sharper-looking window frames/facade details, but also fewer of them (as more repeats were needed on the texture for light variations), but more/easier variation for the window glass and lights while using less texture space for that. I have a lot to put on the texture, so otherwise I'd have to consider possibly upping it to 3kx3k like the creator of that Sky Tower did.

[boldlybuilding 873]

6 minutes ago, boldlybuilding said:

How so? More texture being rendered/shaded?

My main reason for possibly doing this (I might still be able to just not do the transparent window thing) is to save texture space so I can have larger, sharper-looking window frames/facade details, but also fewer of them (as more repeats were needed on the texture for light variations), but more/easier variation for the window glass and lights while using less texture space for that. I have a lot to put on the texture, so otherwise I'd have to consider possibly upping it to 3kx3k like the creator of that Sky Tower did.

And if doubling the surface area is indeed bad for some reason, that's bad news for my World Trade Center  The 3D columns on the towers and most of them on the lower buildings don't just stop at the windows, they go all the way through the buildings to the other side, to save on the tri count. So in those cases, their surface areas aren't just doubled, they're... something in the range of a few hundred-led. Most of it isn't directly visible, so I don't know if that helps, but it's there.

If it's not much worse though, I don't see why I shouldn't continue. I might test it to see what happens, but I doubt there will be any appreciable drop in performance. It's probably a case of choosing what works best visually and size-wise, but everything you do will cost in some way. Higher tri count, larger file size, bigger textures, or more surface area.

[Koesj 659]

It's an interesting question to be sure. I've been able to keep filesizes way down, but was it at the cost of increased load by doubling geometry? Have you got an inkling how bad this is when running the game @boformer?

In other news, I'm probably going to skip nightlights on my building's shaft. The texturespace isn't really there to do it easily, and an 'overlaying windows' approach only gets you so far when there's 55 stories @ 7x5 cells to be filled  

I tried doing one third of the tower with nice, horizontal strips of overlapping window illumination and this gave me an instant texturing headache (how to fit all this into 140x40px??) and 751 tris before cutting them up to be in line with the diffused stuff underneath. Pah.

[boformer 3,169]

Every pixel that needs to be drawn (also transparent ones) increases render time.

That means splitting a face into smaller faces is better than adding another face of the same size.

From the Unity Wiki:

Quote

The performance gained from using extremely low-poly meshes (like under 500 polygons) is minimal if at all there. The majority of graphics cards have hardware transform and lighting, which means they can process ridiculous amounts of polygons per second. Additionally there is overhead for submitting a mesh to the graphics card to render, so being really thrifty on polygons is probably only making your game look blocky.

Note though that this does not apply to the low-poly LOD1 mesh. Cities: Skylines merges all LOD meshes into a single mesh (and all LOD textures into a single texture), which heavily increases render time. It is very important that your LOD has less than 200 (better less than 100) tris. This mesh is still visible when you are switching to area view!

The main problem of textures is the limited VRAM:

Quote

Keep the size of textures as small as possible while still looking nice. If your graphics card does not have enough memory to keep all the textures in memory at once, they will get placed into regular system memory and uploaded to the card during rendering. This can be okay as there is a lot of bandwidth available on newer computers; however, if you go too nuts your game will completely choke on computers with low amounts of graphics memory. There is no need to edit the size of textures in your image editor. You can edit the size that Unity imports the image on in each image's Settings.

Here are a few Hight-Density Residential assets for reference:

[Avanya 2,605]

So it might be better performance wise to model a window frame (8 tris for 1 window) and put on top instead of a face with an alpha mask? Interesting to know. I guess for large glass buildings the tris could become very high making frames instead of using an alpha mask. But using a mix of the two methods sounds like it would be better than pure alpha mapping. And I take it that growables with 2048x2048 textures are worse than a 1.5-2k tris growable.  

 

This info should really go in some guide or something so asset creators know  

[Koesj 659]

Thanks for the info @boformer, though I do believe it's probably for the best to continue this method with my large uniques at least. 

In other news, I pushed out 2 Prudential Plaza's retexture + RICO enabling. Didn't want to get sucked into an endless task like with 1k de la Gauchetières re-do, and I'm decently happy with it not having much night lights anyway.

[Koesj 659]

I haven't given up on 1000 DLG by the way, it's just a ton of work  

Shaft nightlights are go:

 

Here's the old one. Now you get why I wanted to go back to this asset haha.

[Avanya 2,605]

Looks great! You've really got those night lights figured out  

[Turjan 1,048]

Great work, as usual.

On 3/4/2016 at 4:30 PM, Koesj said:

In other news, I pushed out 2 Prudential Plaza's retexture + RICO enabling.

Regarding this: The numbers may need some tweaking. I don't see the number of employees rise above 100 ever, and the max number is set somewhere above 200, which results in a constantly displayed "not enough workers" symbol. All your other enabled buildings don't seem to have that issue.

[Koesj 659]

Did you already have the building on your map before it became RICO activated? If so, try a quick replop and tell me if the problem persists 

[Turjan 1,048]

53 minutes ago, Koesj said:

Did you already have the building on your map before it became RICO activated? If so, try a quick replop and tell me if the problem persists 

Well, sometimes the easiest solutions are the best. It helped. I also replopped all your other buildings, even if they didn't complain because their max numbers are not far above 100.

[Koesj 659]

There you go, I actually remembered encountering this slight issue myself  

[Koesj 659]

I'm doing some rapid prototyping since I don't feel like I've got the time to do a full asset at the moment. Still, trying out new stuff is awesome since I'm learning a ton. 

Today was all about working with different materials across different objects:

I yanked a brick texture off of the good old interwebs and tiled it across this 2x2c test asset's walls. With the help of AwesomeBump (site might be down) I was able to extract both a very respectable normal map from the diffuse and produce a spec map which accentuates the highs and lows a bit better. The problem with the latter though is that the game engine's MIP mapping produces a lot of artifacts when zoomed out or at oblique angles, as can be seen towards the right in the above image.

What I've seen a some other assetbuilders do is apply those different textures to different objects within the asset, and then bake them into a new full UV unwrap on a different channel. Looks like I'm able to do just that as well (took me longer to figure it out than to build this test haha) but I've gone a bit further and took tiling and AO bakes into account through smart (at least I hope so) instantiation and UV atlas layout. 

I'm learning at a geometric rate so my buildings might become self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th 

Here's what you can do with a cool texturing program like AwesomeBump btw, normals and spec (AO's possible as well) extracted from the diffuse, and it doesn't look half-bad!

e: Might as well show my stupid AO mistake on the windowsills:

[Cool_Z 1,547]

Isn't the normal on the brickwalls inverted ?? (I mean the space between the bricks should be going inside.).

 

Normals are very weird ingame.

[Koesj 659]

I think it's okay (vid is at its best at the end): 

Fraps doesn't capture its full glory, but it's definitely the bricks themselves being highlighted and the throughs down in the shadows.

 

[Matthias King 348]

Those are some nice looking bricks. For some reason, a really crisp brick texture makes a building really pop. I think good looking bricks at least half the reason I like some of the buildings I like in this game.

[Koesj 659]

Since I'm still totally, entirely, regretfully fed up with my final asset re-do, here's a WIP sneak peek of me putting my new-found masonry skills to use:

 

 

[Mr_Maison 2,426]

I like the fact it's simple yet detailed.

[Matthias King 348]

That looks very intriguing. What is it going to be, and do you have any more shots from other angles?

[Koesj 659]

6 hours ago, Matthias King said:

That looks very intriguing. What is it going to be, and do you have any more shots from other angles?

Sure, quick quick since I'm supposed to be doing other stuff.

Basically I want this building to be a relatively unassuming wall-to-wall office. One of the postwar big footprints ones that got parachuted down into innocent European city centers

In my mind it's a late 70's to early 90's modernist interpretation of historic architectural guidelines and styles (hence the straight lines coupled with classic materials). They've built a couple of these in my hometown and places like Hamburg are rife with them.

The twist is in its asymmetric footprint: 8 cells deep with a 60 degree and a 120 degree corner at the ends, corresponding with both Precision Engineering-assisted building or a regular 10x6 cell corner roadlength-wise (the building's only one degree off). The latter is shown below:

 

 

 

 

[Avanya 2,605]

Love it! Especially the odd angle - the game has way to few of them

[Darf 1,439]

Looks great, needs a bit of dirt and tarnish though, especially on the roof.

[Koesj 659]

47 minutes ago, Darf said:

Looks great, needs a bit of dirt and tarnish though, especially on the roof.

Definitely! I'm messing around with a simple grainy noise since the roof is all instantiated though:

 

[Matthias King 348]

Looks like a really interesting addition. Those bricks look sharp, though I have to agree about the roof. It looks too smooth. I don't know if that's exactly the right word, but it looks to lack some detail, at least from a distance. Granted, most cims will probably never even see the roof unless they're overlooking the building from a nearby skyscraper, but still, it looks very plain. Though I'm not sure what you could do to change that, which is not very helpful, I know.

I'm anxious to see how it looks when it's released.

[boldlybuilding 873]

For the roof, try adding some leaking effect to it to dirty it up slightly, just make it very light. Try these: http://www.textures.com/browse/dark/62276

[Darf 1,439]

Yeah, if you make that roof texture a little bigger horizontally, you can put some more variation in it. If you put the most visible details to the side you can avoid repetition and still have a detailed roof.