Components and unique textures
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I built a stone wall, brick by brick with components, thinking to save some memory given that I am using an aging 11 year old system. It works fine but then it becomes apparent that there is a repeating texture when you look at a large span of wall. Is there a way to use instances of components but offset the textures randomly? By making a tileable texture with small offsets you could break up an patterns and the instances would look unique.
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To get things rolling and to eliminate the obvious: Is there a reason you needed to build every brick and couldn't just build a wall and add a brick texture?
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Actually no. I'm just learning. I saw an article where SketchUp was used to design a large game world (or maybe it was a concept for an animated film?) and they used large amounts of basic 'building block' components repeated throughout to keep the file size reasonable while creating a huge world. It seems like a good way to build because 1- I have an old and slow system and 2 - I would be interested in designing for indie games and animated films and I'm guessing this issue of mesh(?) file(?) sizes would always be a concern so I want to explore building like this.
I have random ideas but not sure what is possible. For example I might be able to create some simple 'detail' components like moss, cracks or even little stones and use the Component spray to spray on certain bricks to break up obvious symmetry. Or maybe it is possible to overlay a smaller detail texture over the wall in a seperate component and either cast shadows or use something like Photoshop blend modes (assuming SketchUp has some similar system) or texture with transparency to add variability to the surfaces? As I said I just don't know what is possible.
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Burt, building the wall with brick components is better than drawing out the wall with a lot of lines as far as file size goes because it keeps the entity count low. It may not be that effective at keeping file size down, however if you need to add a large number of different images as textures to make the stones look unique. The file size you save in entity count may be more than offset but the number of images you have to add. It would probably be better to use a texture image of an entire wall on a larger surface.
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Burt, if you're nursing an aging system, then you're going about it from the wrong direction. What you ought to be concerned with is not the file size per se, but the number of faces and edges within your model. This is obviously going to be far greater if you build something brick by brick than if you simply built a wall and painted a brick texture onto it.
You could use a very hi res brick texture...so large it showed no repeat even if you used it for an entire factory wall...one that blew the filesize up to several Mb; and you would be able to navigate it far more easily than some small file of just a few Kb that made the use of many repeated components. If you doubt that, see what you make of this modest little file I salvaged from a very old thread of mine on Google Groups called Geometry is Everything
Be prepared to hit Ctrl Alt Del and kill SketchUp.
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Ah, I didn't understand but what you say makes sense. Guess my idea to make 1/4 bricks, glue them together to make a full brick and then make a wall would have been disaterous.
That old thread and the file (which did choke SketchUp) helped make the point.
I did test one simple thing which hadn't occured to me -make the 4 sides of the brick the same size, position the texture on each side slightly differently, and then just rotate the brick so you have the appearance of 4 bricks.
Anyway I'm off bricks and I guess those tiny components I made of broken bricks and sprayed around was probably not a good idea either.
Thanks very much for the responses.
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If you're after just standard house bricks or building blocks, might I suggest the free Acme Brick Masonry Designer.
It will generate brick patterns for a wide range of brick and mortar types, in whatever size you want...all with no obvious repeat pattern. This one is 20x30 bricks.
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Thanks Alan. I have pretty good Photoshop skills and for a while was active on an indie game forum where I started a "Texture a Day" thread. I like creating textures but my 3D skills are lacking. It seems more jobs require 3D modeling and texture design using 3D and not a lot of call for Photoshop alone.
I really want to get competent with modeling asap as I would like to do some side jobs. I may take some classes if I can swing it. This thread at conceptart.org is what made me look at SketchUp http://conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=173014 and I have since found an increasing number of concept artists using it for game, animation and even comic books which are areas that appeal to me.
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