General Texturing

There is no right or wrong way to lay out a texture.
You can unwrap every polygon and give it it's own space on your UV unwrap but that is a huge waste of space and just not needed for most assets.
However, as I started texturing back in 1995 a 32/32 sized bit map was a big deal and I am always looking to get the most out of my textures.

Do more with less better.

You can of course make the best/largest texture you can for each asset no matter what the size or where it would be used on your route, however your memory footprint will become a huge problem, as is seen on many freeware projects where the user has ticked the set object filter tab and added loads of different packs from many different creators.

My advice for route builders, only add what you need, or even better, set up your own provider product and make (or ask someone to make) what you need. This way you are in control of what gets loaded.
As a route builder you have to think about the trade off between detail and performance.

Asset builders, give some thought to what you are building and make sensible packs (if you intend to share) that contain a selection of useful and relevant assets that can share textures.
Of course not all assets can share textures but often you don't need to use a high res texture to get good detail.
Buildings and assets that are track side tend to get more detail and texture allocation than those further away from the track.

Generally it is best to have 1 asset 1 texture and 1 material. as that is 1 draw call. However it is rare where you can get away with this for most assets.
For the majority of my assets I use a texture layout that I often refer to as a ‘layered cake’ method because of the stacked horizontal strips of texture.

This approach allows me to tile the texture in the ‘U’ direction allowing a higher texel size.
For scenery assets I often make the texture before i make the 3D model. I think about the building I want to make. I often make these textures 1024/512 pixel size.

Example of farm building:

I have a photograph of a building I want to make, it is made of stone and has a tiled roof and a side building with a corrugated steel roof. It also has a selection of doors and windows all painted green.

I make the wall material and the 2 roof materials along with a thing structural support type material for beams and put this into 1 texture.
Note, it is also wise to not mix wall and roof textures on upright and horizontal surfaces if you plan on making winter variations.

So, once I have made my base texture I then make my simple building.

This building is all tiled in the U so can be as long or as deep as you wish.
However, you can see at the end there is a visible join where I have added the apex section. To get rid of this I sliced the end section and shifted the mapping in the vertical. This method can be used to make your building taller, shifting the mapping in the U slightly on each layer can also help reduce and visible tiling.

I then mirrored the front and side to have a textured building shaped box.
Now that I have my basic shape I make a second texture, this I call my detail texture

The detail textures I often make 512/512, however it does really depend on the size of building and how many different types of buildings you want to apply these textures too.

Once I have my selection of doors and windows I cut my doors and windows into my simple shape.

I add elements for window and door supports.
These 2 textures can then be used to make a whole selection of farm buildings.

I then unwrap and shadow bake the whole object and use the trainlightmapwithdiffuse material (explained earlier in this blog)

Changing one of the textures can then give you a whole new building:

Changing 2 textures can make it feel even more different and of course you can mix and match and make many different shapes of buildings with the same textures:

Each building I would make it's own shadow map of about 256/256 pixel size.

So for a small cost of textures/polygons you get a wide and varied range of detailed buildings.

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