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Hi.

I've just started making levels for my FPS that I will be coding as soon as ruccus's new tut comes out (can't wait ), but I'm having a really hard time getting the textures to look right.



I made this level in gamespace, the player enters through the tunnel in the top right corner, and then they're in this circular area. But when I texture it, it stretches everything and looks horrible!

There are very few ways I can think of to resolve this issue. Which one do you guys think is better?

1) Make a giant flat plane for the ground and texture that. It's only two polygons so the texture should stretch nicely but it would be impossible to make curved grounds. I do not want my game to be 100% flat when this is my first large scale 3D game and I want it to be true 3D. Also, would making a huge plane badley hit the framerate?

2) Try to make the polygons all the same size so the texture stretches better. DBP appears to be trying to make the textures seamless aross all the polys (at least in my other levels anyway), which is good, but right now having some polys huge and some small stretches the textures too much. With me having gamespace on one computer and DBP on another, fixing the poly sizes by trial and error would be a very annoying process trying going back and forth trying to make it look just right. (Especially with my sister or brother on one or both of the computers often)

Also, should I have the whole world as one big .x object or a bunch of smaller linked .x objects? So far I've only used one object scenes and they tend to cut my framerate in half even though I only have about 500 polys in them at the moment. It is very impossible for me to make different parts of a level textured with different images if they're all the same object, but won't making the world a bunch of mini objects have noticeable seams? (or would it be a real pain to edit)?

I can upload pics of my other two levels if that helps.

You should be applying UV mapping to your object in gamespace and texturing it there, not texturing your level in Dark Basic. Trying to texture in Dark Basic will completely destroy your workflow.

modal it in separate peces outherwise you will need ENORMOS textures.

Yes, model the thing in limbs as hessiess says so that you can apply different materials to different limbs, each with its own tiling texture. That way you can avoid having an extremely large texture map with all those pesky little pixels in it, and it will have to be large so that you can get your texture to tile enough on the texture map to look right in game.

I find that when making details, like a stone wall on grass would have tall grass at the bottom, then you can do one of two things:

1) Have a small part of the bottom wall be a separate group, and get a copy of the stone texture then draw grass on it, and apply it to the wall-base group.

2) Make a transparent, translucent, or opaque image of grass running along the bottom of the image so that it tiles; then make a face that is just off of the wall but runs along it and texture it with the grass. If it's transparent or translucent, just use DBP's transparency command to get it to look right. Although I find that DBP's transparency command does not always work right with translucent images, so what I would recommend is that you have an opaque image with grass on a black background, and make an alpha-map and apply a shader to the grass-trim limb for transparency.


You can use decals like the latter up there to make more than grass trims. The paths in Hyrule field in OoT were decals.

Thank you so much guys!!!

I used the UV mapper and now my level looks a lot better (see pic below), the cubic projection does a great job texturing my level and requires very little manual editing. The only thing I'm not sure of is how to make one object a limb of another and how to make the texture between the two seamless.



I was wondering how to do detailing like making paths on top of grass, and decaling is a great idea! But would multitexuring do the job too? (I don't want extra polys eating my FPS, or does multitexturing eat FPS more?)

I've been having a couple problems with gamespace too,

How do I delete infinite lights? (That's why the picture is so bright, the lights are invisible )

Whenever I press 'Render Scence' instead of rendering it draws everything in wireframe. How do I fix this?

If you want to multi-texture the paths on it would seem to me that you'd need a large image file to represent the textures that need to be drawn... On top of having to use a pixel shader to draw the textures to the ground. With decals it's up to you how many polygons you use in them.

Making limbs is different for every editor. If one part of your level has one texture file, and you make another part with another texture file, then you have two limbs in your scene.

the easist way to make a texture seemless is to make it big enugh so that it dosant haft to tile, atlest not within a short distance.

@Image All

Ok, thanks I'll use decals then. Shader scare me.

@hessiess

My textures are 256x256, I'm sure that's big enough because I don't get pixelization when I load them in DBP. I'm talking about seamlessly linking limbs, if that's even possible. See pic: