[ART] Texturing a custom terrain

[Rapture]

Here is a Maya specific tutorial, but any retopology tutorial from any 3D program would work since they use the same principle (That I am aware of). The buttons/options may vary slightly though...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSdDSbQn1Hg


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But to explain it from a Blender point of view...

(1) I have this high poly mesh, but the polygons is to way to high to be realistically used in a game.

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/32/...logy1.png/


(2) To start retopology, you want to make a plane (Make it whatever way you do in Maya.)

Spoiler below!

(3) Then turn on your "Snapping "and look for a option to change the snapping to "Faces". This way moving the vertices of your plane will attach itself to the closest surface.

Spoiler below!

(4) Now take your "Plane" and attach all 4 sides to the tree, make it as squarish or rectangular. Avoid making skinny triangles since it screws up the texture and will make animations look bad.
Duplicate/extend, whatever you do in Maya to make more vertices and make faces.

The point of this is to grab as much detail as you can while keeping the "Tris" count low. Justification for different "Tris" sizes depends entirely on the object, (e.g. How important it is, how big it is, whether it's a static or entity prop, a NPC, etc...) and what the game and/or engine can handle.

Amnesia to me has a norm for 500-1000 tris for grabbable entities, 5k for enemies, and static_objects fluctuate (Anywhere from 50 to 3k normally). Look at current models in the Level Editor and look at their "Facecount" if you want to know what ballpark your retopolgy should aim for.

Spoiler below!

(5) At the end of this, I got 3148 tris. My justification for this high polycount is the base because of the 5 holes I made at the base which ate up a lot of time.

I screwed up the UV's on the lowpoly model (Middle) so the normals are a bit fucked up near the branches. But that won't be a problem with your model since it's a basic terrain.

Spoiler below!