Trim Textures: Making Of

Español

I was tasked with the texturing and modelling of the exterior of our Tomb Chaser DCL game so I decided this would be a great example to try in production and, killing two birds with one stone, also show one of the techniques I've larned just a few months ago.

The Mission

---

To show you how I make Trim Textures to use in the environments we make.

Resources

---

• Zbrush 2018+
• Maya, or your 3D software of preference
• Substance Painter 2018.2+

Planning

---

So first we need to plan how we are going to make our Trim Texture. Because a texture can only be 1:1 proportions (not really, but for this example we're going to go with that) we are going to make a regular 1:1 plane too.

Let's now divide it into different sections. It's more of a guide on how we think we're going to able to take advantage of every pixel in the texture, but this can be changed later so just go with something that works for now.

Then separate every section so it's its own mesh

Sculpting

---

Let's import our plane into Zbrush and start blocking out all the different sections we're going to have.

Let's block out all the different bricks we want

You can now Subdivide each section with the smooth disabled so we can have even density

It should look something like this once the detail pass is done. You can take advantage of Alphas, Brushes and Booleans and any other tricks you want to make this process faster. When you're done, it's time to bake!

Baking

---

You can use xNormal, Marmoset or even Painter to bake your high poly into your low poly. Make sure to use a plane that has all the UV Space from U(0,1)-V(0,1) in use for max efficiency.

Texturing

---

If you have baked in Painter, you can start painting right away. If you've used something else you can import the bakes into Painter, and then start texturing to your liking!

​Be mindful of the style and type of Trim you're making. It's not the same to do something stylized and doing something realistic (althought this should've been noted in the sculpting process too!), but things like dirt, cracks and just sheer surface detail depend a lot on the style you're going for. It's an exercise of layering and trying to get the right amount of detail where it matters.

This is what it looks like for me after texturing. It should be noted that after implementing it we decided it was too bland and realistic and my coworker Laura changed it up a bit to make it more saturated and colourful.

​After this was done, we exported it and started making the exterior and some props with this texture.

Conclusion

---

Creating trim textures is a very simple process and it allows for a level of detail that is very hard to get with other regular texturing techniques like unwrapping every UV island by itself.

Hope you learned something today that you can implement into your own workflow!
​See you around :)

---

​Alex

3D GENERALIST

​Alejandro Bielsa is a junior 3D artist working at Polygonal Mind's in-house team. Passionate about videogames, vivid tutorial drinker and cat lover.

Twitter