I'm making a level for my game. Its not an open world game and for this level I'm simulating trucks going around the level. At any point in time there will be 25 to 30 trucks in the scene. 

Its not an open world game but the level is Sandbox. Imagine Hitman (the latest one). You do your thing and things go on in the world completely independent of the player.

I'm doing the art and programming for this game. I would say my 3D Modeling skills are intermediate. I made these trucks but the polygon counts for each of these trucks are close to 140k.

I got curious and bought GTA V (It was the closest game I could think of and had trucks and open world gameplay). I installed OpenIV and checked out the in game models. They look really good in the game but they are all close to 80k on an average and from my understanding 512x512 textures.

My truck looks like crap even with 2k textures. So I've split the truck model in a 2 files and using 2k for each file (Front - 2k and back-2k). This is starting to look very expensive.

I'm using unreal engine and I'm sure it can handle but I want to do this right from the ground up to avoid having to downscale everything at the end.

GTA V is from 2013. Is it ok to have 140k per model with textures that are (2k+2k) in 2019?

Any thoughts on this?

I am no expert but I am guessing that you should look in to normal mapping. Also I am guessing that you could have several models of the same truck. A very high mesh resolution when you only see one or two trucks on the screen (close view) and then a lower mesh resolution when you see the trucks on distance and thereby causing more trucks to be visible.

Just a thought

/Kim

36 minutes ago, kikr4000 said:

I am no expert but I am guessing that you should look in to normal mapping. Also I am guessing that you could have several models of the same truck. A very high mesh resolution when you only see one or two trucks on the screen (close view) and then a lower mesh resolution when you see the trucks on distance and thereby causing more trucks to be visible.

Just a thought

/Kim

 

Thanks! I forgot to mention. I have 4 levels for LOD setup for all these trucks. I’m making use of LODs to switch models based on distance but still want to know if displaying a 140k truck with 2k+2k textures (2 or 3 of them at close distance) would impact performance in the long run.. 

Also, the 140k count is after I normal baked all the details like screws and grill.. 

How rockstar got away with using 512k texture maps for cars is beyond my understanding.. 

Any other suggestions? 

If your truck looks bad with 2K textures then it could most likely be the way your workflow is set up, but I wouldn't know without seeing more.

Are you maximizing your texel density?

Are you factoring in parts of the mesh which can be mirrored and don't require double the UV space?

Are you making re-usable materials and applying them across your meshes so you're not creating a bunch of individual texture set packages for each mesh?

Did you look into smaller textures but tillable with masking and blending?

Did you bake your high poly meshes onto your low poly meshes and ensure you're reducing your low poly meshes to the maximum capacity?

Beyond that, have you looked into streaming assets?

3 hours ago, Rutin said:

If your truck looks bad with 2K textures then it could most likely be the way your workflow is set up, but I wouldn't know without seeing more.

Are you maximizing your texel density? - Yes

Are you factoring in parts of the mesh which can be mirrored and don't require double the UV space? - No. This could be the key.

Are you making re-usable materials and applying them across your meshes so you're not creating a bunch of individual texture set packages for each mesh? - Yes

Did you look into smaller textures but tillable with masking and blending? - No. I’ll research this.

Did you bake your high poly meshes onto your low poly meshes and ensure you're reducing your low poly meshes to the maximum capacity? - Yes. My low poly version is 140k. High poly is close to 1.5 million

Beyond that, have you looked into streaming assets? - Will check this out. Thanks for the pointers . 

I haven't had the chance to checkout mirroring to save UV space. I know that placing 2 UV islands on top of each other will use the same texture but wont this cause all sort of errors in baking? Unreal will throw a lot of lighting errors I assume. 

1 hour ago, ashyankee said:

I haven't had the chance to checkout mirroring to save UV space. I know that placing 2 UV islands on top of each other will use the same texture but wont this cause all sort of errors in baking? Unreal will throw a lot of lighting errors I assume. 

You never bake with overlaps. You off-set to the next UV space, then bake, and then revert the off-set prior to using the texture. I've done this on commercial projects just fine, and even in UE4.

Also, you can save on textures if you're creating actual materials and using masks to direct where they are applied. Then it wont matter about the 2K resolution as these materials will tile and blend in.

I tried this. I created a model in maya and mirrored it and moved the mirrored uv islands to the next UV space and baked in substance painter and then exported to unreal engine and it all worked fine. However, you said I need to revert the offset. Why do I need to offset it back to same uv space? It seems to work fine when I have the islands in 0-1 and 1-2 space. 

17 minutes ago, ashyankee said:

I tried this. I created a model in maya and mirrored it and moved the mirrored uv islands to the next UV space and baked in substance painter and then exported to unreal engine and it all worked fine. However, you said I need to revert the offset. Why do I need to offset it back to same uv space? It seems to work fine when I have the islands in 0-1 and 1-2 space. 

I revert it back by habit because of UDIM usage sometimes. If you don't use UDIMs it wont matter. It's also a good practice not to place UVs outside of spaces being used.