Creating the Texture

This doc goes over creating a Trim Sheet texture you can use to create many assets...

A little more planning needs to go into the texture due to how it will be used on the asset.

As noted in the previous category of Tileable Textures materials have the ability to tile a texture horizontally and vertically. As we don't want to use the entire texture for one type of surface, we need to break up one axis and tile the other.

Trim sheets can be a mix tileable textures to single elements and everything in between.

We will look at making a single texture for many crate assets.

Texture layout

The first thing we can do is design the layout of the texture for our asset needs. Note it is not just one asset, but many. Designing a trim sheet to be used in a modular asset design is fantastic for optimization and saves time overall as you can easily make many buildings with the final assets.

In the case of crates, the following would be a good starting point :

• Wood slats + Wood Ends

• Tileable board section

• Larger damage such as chips or dents

• Metal section with Bolts, hinges, and padlocks

• Common Crate decals like arrows, 'Fragile', etc.

• Small area for Palette texturing functionality

With these in mind I design the base layout, considering tileable texture and non tileable textures.

Creating the texture

With the layout decided, we can start making the texture itself.

You could of course use realistic textures in a similar fashion. A common approach would be to take realistic textures and place them together in the trim sheet. Good, free, PBR resources for textures include :

• AmbientCG
• Polyhaven
• CC0 Textures
• ShareTextures

Note that with PBR Textures you will need to line up the different textures correctly such as Diffuse, Metallic, Roughness/Smoothness, and Normal.

Normal Maps

Normal Textures are textures that allow the game engine to see bumps in the texture purely using the texture. This allows a game engine to display significant levels of detail in an asset such as chips, dents, stitching, cuts and grooves, without having to use polygons to do so.

Normals can be used in both realistic and stylized assets, but we will look at creating custom normal maps in later tutorials due to their complexity.