Texture Workflow Update

After discussing texturing with Robin he enlightened me on a much more efficient texturing workflow where you create material texture maps that contain the materials that you will need throughout your level - and in such a way that allows you to have them as large as possible or to tile well yet still give variety. You then unwrap to the texture map, aligning the faces with their matching materials until you get the desired result (though pre-planning makes this more efficient). This allows you to have potentially higher resolution textures as you are using 100% of the UV space, and you are using far less maps because you are re-using them for various objects instead of creating object-specific maps that have lots of unused space and will only be used once. 

Of course there are times where you'll need a more unique map and i am still figuring out how to most efficiently use the technique, but still so far i can see the benefits.

Below are some examples - though still needing refinement. I recreated the market stalls and well to test the technique however the other objects that have already been unwrapped may be left as before, as i still have plenty other objects to texture.

I can use the marble and wood textures again throughout the level, for the larger building (marble) and also for the window frames and rooftop shelters (wood).

New textured assets using this workflow below. I'm still getting used to it is very different to how i would normally approach texturing. So some of the objects are a little basic - i need to talk with Robin to see how to make objects more unique using this process as i would normally paint and add in my own details per object. Also some assets are basic as i need to see how they look in the level before i can refine them. and of course these are still without normal maps.

I used to use Ndo for my normal maps on my previous course and it was an immensely helpful tool. I've now purchased Ndo2 in order to make the most of normal, occlusion and height maps for this project. To get back into the Ndo2 workflow i am going to do a few random tests, they will be mostly sci-fi based so that the objects can be sold on the stalls. One example is below, the mesh is only a 6-sided cube using a normal and height map, an occlusion map for diffuse as i haven't created one yet.