This is something I’ve been stuck on for a while now, I’m trying to create a city in the 1800s but I can’t figure out how to create shop windows that look right. There’s a material in the Showdown demo which is perfect, but you need an image texture and I can only find images of modern shops on sites like CGTextures. I’ve tried modelling things like jars and pottery by hand, but that causes too much of a performance hit and will be too much work for a whole city.
My first suggestion would be to create the image texture yourself by creating a few shop windows in Unreal and then rendering them out with the HighResolutionScreenshot tool. That should be the easiest (and best) way to get the results you want.
Yeah, that could work. The only thing I’m worried about is the time it’ll take to do all that, most of the windows in the city will have to be covered up somehow. Is there a way to use the HighResShot without everything being distorted?
I considered that at first, but there are some problems, one being that the game won’t be in black and white, and another being that photos back then weren’t taken to use as textures:)
I’m not entirely sure what you mean by distorted. I’ll assume that you want to take orthographic images instead of perspective images. That being said, I don’t believe orthographic rendering is supported by the HighResolutionScreenshot tool, in which case you would want to set up an orthographic camera in a scene and take a screen capture from it.
If you know how to model you could go and try to create it yourself using some tricks. For example you could model only a few asssets (a few different jars and pottery as you mentioned) and then arrange them differently for each shop, creating slight variations using the same assets. If you are really concerned about performance (I think you shouldn’t tho, engines these days can spit out a LOT of polys, the lighting, the materials and the AI are the performance killers) you can take your modeled shop windows and use Render to Texture (in case of 3Ds Max), basically you want to create maybe a normal map that you can use, however, depending on the viewing angle and on the distance from the player it can produce quite poor results.
Good idea, I think I can do that in Blender. Performance is a problem for me because most of the buildings are already 300k+ polys and I’ve got an old GTX 650.
