Exurb's Main Street Americana Collection | Custom LOD Creation Guide Released

[Ronyx69 2,413]

As said you can lighten the alpha background.

For my signs I duplicated the sign multiple times with about a 1cm gap, so it looks like it has depth, even though it's just a bunch of copies of the same plane.

You don't need the diffuse to have a background, it can be just a solid color with a bit of texture, and you can add some detail to the edges with bevel maybe.

You can download the entirety of bauhaus source files if you want as well: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B6Ccf1N5h5f7b3FIYUZvUHRJbjg

[Exurbanite 103]

Just released a guide on making custom LODs using Blender texture baking. Hope you can gain something useful from it. 

[Lost Gecko 481]

Great guide! pretty sure the black spots created by LOD faces not directly on the mesh can be taken care of with the "distance" and "bias" settings. Sometimes it's a bit hard to find the right values to solve the problem but it works. Thank you for this guide!

[boformer 3,169]

A note on normal maps: Depending on the building, I would let Blender generate those as well, especially if you have complex roof shapes. The generated normal map is based on the angle difference of the LOD and detail mesh, so that the shadows of the 2 models are matching.

[Exurbanite 103]

@Lost_Gecko Thanks for the tip, I'll edit the guide to include this when I can. I want to prevent putting out faulty information.

@boformer Interesting...so to bake the LOD normal map would I just choose "Normals" instead of "Textures" from the Bake Mode menu? 

[boformer 3,169]

3 hours ago, Exurbanite said:

Interesting...so to bake the LOD normal map would I just choose "Normals" instead of "Textures" from the Bake Mode menu? 

I think so: https://www.katsbits.com/tutorials/blender/bake-normal-maps.php

It's also the best way to create a good looking normal map for the detailed model.

[Exurbanite 103]

Just thought I should make a little status report. I took a short break from asset creation to recharge and deal with upcoming IRL stuff. I'm getting back into it with a little redux project: False Lucidity's Americana houses. These houses are among my favorites on the workshop since I love making old American towns, but they have some major issues..namely the fact that they have no custom LODs and that they are grossly overscaled. Basically I'm doing a lot of mesh cleaning, rescaling, limited texture replacement, and general optimization; I figure that I can reduce the diffuse map sizes alone by at least 50%. I also plan to make two or three variants of each house (different colors and mirrored versions).

What is nice is that he has provided Google Drive files of the original asset resources...there are even a couple houses that haven't been released yet. Below is the neatest one IMO.

Spoiler

I'm also thinking of making some detached garages to match paint schemes. 

Lastly, I've been working on a mindmap just to flesh out ideas and let those curious to know what I'm up to. 

[boformer 3,169]

Glad to see you back! The model looks like straight out of a Sims game