Books

Although I have already created the piles that were to clutter up the room, there were still many spaces on both the floors and various shelves. These areas were too small to dedicate creating another pile for. Instead, we opted to fill these games with books and individual misc art supplies. I started with the books, although I did not have to start from scratch. Another group member had already modelled a couple of books, which gave me a started point. The shape was there, however I thought that the models were unnecessarily high poly for such a small asset, so I got to bringing the poly count down.

After this I needed to UV. Though this time it would be slightly different. The best way to create textures for a variety of books without using a large amount of materials was to instead create a texture atlas. The solid square shapes of the books would also make this incredibly efficient to package within the atlas. In Photoshop I was able to package 8 book covers onto this atlas, still leaving space for the side pages aswell as the pages visible for the open book varients. These all fit onto a 1k texture. I hadn’t previously used texture atlases in my own work, but the process seems quite efficient, especially when dealing with assets like this.

I found that I had to rework my UV’s so they could fit all of these new textures, mostly the sides of the pages of the open book. This was because the pages’ geometry were in a curved shape, while the texture was completely straight. To have these line up I needed to move the vertexes of the UV so that they held a straight shape. I eventually got it to work providing me with a pretty good result.

These books were successful and the group wanted more, mainly to have larger thinner books that were also present within the reference images. I used the same models as the previous versions, though the main changes being that they were flattened and stretched. I ofcourse needed to make a new atlas for these books. They were larger objects and so would require more space on the atlas to maintain the 10.24 texel density. This time I could only fit 4 different books on the 1k texture.

With both done I could then bring them into substance to add additional values, such as roughness and height information which would be essential to fit with the rest of the scene and it’s standard of quality.