Early Texture Test: The Wippet

Recently Adam designed and modelled a wrecked vintage car as an asset for our street level environment:

As you can see, Adam has been considering efficient UV mapping, dropping in a grid texture and trying to achieve nice even squares using planar projections. The resolution of the hood however was inconsistent with the car body. Also, discussing efficiency within the game engine with Matt, it was brought to our attention that instead of having everything everything separate like the car doors, seats etc... it would be much more efficient to have everything on the map. This meant everything needed to be unwrapped before he textures could be painted, a role which I took on while Adam got to work unwrapping the WOSD:

I thoroughly unwrapped most of the elements, although for the smaller assets like the headlights, wheels and engine in the hood, I simply picked a plane that showed the most predominant faces, object selected and planar projected from the camera view. This is quite a small asset, and I didn't want to clutter the UV map with tiny unwrapped assets that the player wont see in detail. Any subtle stretching is either on parts with low detail textures anyway, or out of the general view of the player:

I grabbed some reference for colour and style:

My aim was to create a rusting yet vibrant feel, inspired particularly by the blown out oranges in the top right image:

I created a layer mask that masked out everything external to the UV outlines and worked loosely with a blend of rust phototextures and custom brushes. For the chipped paint effect I added a mask using a particular texture brush to give the illusion the paint has been scraped away. I was originally going to paint out the details, but decided to experiment first with the 'Backwater Gospel' outlined look:

This final image showing the engine in the hood of the Whippet, gives a good example of how a small asset doesn't require intricate detail, so can be simply planar projected and assigned a basic texture.

I have shared the stylised outlined approach to the group, and it was met with fairly positive response, although the final style of the game may still be subject to change.