Modular Building Methods and Material Slots

Development World Creation
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1

Hey hey !

I really hope I`ll get some help, because this have been over a year now that I`ve been experimenting with different building and texturing methods.

So long story short , I am building different, rather large districts and sectors of a post - apocalyptic , sci-fi city and I am using a mixture of modular ( walls, doorframes, windowframes etc, unique walls ) and instanced full-building - building method for my buildings.

First i was using multiple 2-3 material slots on each modular wall pieces, than after an extensive research , most of the answers ive got was to minimise the material slots on every wall to 1. So then i shifted my approach to trimsheets and atlasing, but then i realised I will need a lot of unique meshes as their UV layouts will be different everytime.

Now after a year what im getting from a lot of places is that I can and should be using 2 material slots for instanced wall meshes to differentiate exterior texturing from the interior.

So im a little bit confused due to conflicting answers . Id appriciate some help on this if thats okay, and i really hope im writing this question to the right forum lol

My other problem is texturing control. While i appriciate PBR materials, they dont give you that much control than a trimsheet, but obviously they look much better and dramatically reduce the number of unique meshes .

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For modular walls with diferent params on interior/exterior, I usually just map the UVs for interior faces in negative V range and use an if node in mat to check if V is negative, output 0 or 1, then use that as a lerp to blend 2 material attributes. Just be sure texture samples are set to wrap so the inside walls don’t clamp to one row of pixels on edge of texture lol.

To keep texture tiling consistent, I also mirror the U on inside faces and multiply green channel of normal by -1 in material attribute set plugged into the blend from the if.