Unwrapping the Building Assets

I had already created a series of building assets for my UDK level, but again none of them were optimised or textured. Each asset had challenges in their own right by trying to keep texture scale and detail consistent across them. The first building I unwrapped was a small stone house asset, when first applying a UVW Unwrap modifier and flattening the UV's it looks a bit of a mess, and it required a great deal of work to stitch the elements together and lay them out in way that made it easier to texture.

 

Game design is an iterative process and as I've created and textured more assets, I've found things that work and things that don't. Recently I went back and re textured the roof tiles and wood elements of all the buildings, as for all it looked OK on the smaller assets, the roof tiles didn't fit the larger structures, so these were changed to keep the level design consistent.

This is my first 'colour pass' of this building's texture, eventually I'll over-paint them to give a more stylised look, but also age the building with dirt and scratches.

 Rather than using nDo and dDo to create normal maps I decided to start sculpting the details to bake the normal map, and ambient occlusion to a texture in Mudox, I could also over-paint the first colour pass using the paint tools. 

I've done quite a few buildings already each with their own challenges, but there's still loads of assets left to create, perhaps I'm being a bit over-ambitious again?