Hi,
Ill try to answer your questions but I am going to have to stay brief on some of the questions due to time pressure.
** What are the suggested texture sizes for certain base mesh items?**
I use 2k as standard for almost everything. 4k for anything really big, important (items you hold upclose for example), or used all over (the building pieces - used so much it is worth the investment in memory for a large texture).
** Are there sizes that are generally too big or too small?**
Texture wise? I find 8k total overkill, and of course 256 or such would be much too small for most things. But your question is quite open. Hard to answer.
**
Are there exceptions to the above rules?**
There are always exceptions. Really big stuff far away in the distance would not need a big texture of course. A game that has a wide variety of textures (mine does not) may need to opt for a generally smaller size also as otherwise it would add up too much. You can probably find many more exceptions.
** In the video where you briefly described what you did to make your meshes, you showed a texture sheet and said you built your meshes based on that. What did you mean?
**
I think I show that somewhere. I mean that I began by designing a texture, and I made the texture first. And then I figured what kind of meshes I could extract out of the texture. Most people first model and then texture it. I do the opposite, in line with the Lego like level building approach.
** Does that texture sheet hold the materials for all your base items?**
It holds all but the walls and floors. It holds everything used by pillars/bars/beams/etc. The floors/walls/ceilings are tiling textures.
** If the above is true, does that mean that you have to individually place the uvs in the correct locations for each iteration of each mesh?**
Yes, but once you made one mesh you keep the uvs, and you just modify the mesh with the uvs already present. For example to curve it you don’t need to change the Uvs, you just bend it and that is that.
** For meshes that you have duplicated and stretched or otherwise modified, do you have to re uv unwrap those and re-match the proportions to that texture sheet as well as the other meshes already unwrapped??**
I only scale meshes to a maximum of 1.5 or such the original scale, so the stretching is not too obvious. If I need more I will make a new mesh, or a new material.
** Could you explain why tossing on new textures onto meshes that weren’t made for them doesn’t result in stretched or distorted textures? (that was a big surprise when I saw nothing ******** up texture wise in the video)**
Because it are tiling textures. It will tile anyway. And if you want to get this super correct, look up the old texturing guides for brush based games. If you divide your textures up according to certain rules, and all your textures stick to those rules you can switch materials around even better.
**
Could you briefly go through your process of tessellating and displacing a plane using a height map?**
I think this is shown very quickly in the first free video. It is basically just a plane, tessellated (just a setting), and then I just displace it using the standard Max modifiers. It is very straightforward.