Might be either caffeine or urge to create...

[Blue Monkey]

The opera house stage with textures. Need to tweak the roof textures. UV texturing for the roof is the trickiest part.

It's going to be quite a bit smaller at Civ-level so the texture oddities probably would be inconsequential anyway. But I do intend on using this same model for other games.

Sometimes where you split the seams to skin for the UV map can cause differences during rendering even when you are using the identical texture.

 

[Ogedei_the_Mad]

A mistake I made with the UV Map was that I did a mirroring operation for both axes. What happened was that the textures on the other half of the roof flipped the other way. Next time rather than mirroring both axes, I'll just do it for the full front face and then one full side face. Anyway, fortunately it's hardly visible at Civ level. This is how it looks closer up.

 

[Blue Monkey]

A mistake I made with the UV Map was that I did a mirroring operation for both axes. What happened was that the textures on the other half of the roof flipped the other way. Next time rather than mirroring both axes, I'll just do it for the full front face and then one full side face. Anyway, fortunately it's hardly visible at Civ level. This is how it looks closer up.

That sounds like a problem with the normals (mapping). Sometimes mirroring without renormalizing will make the textures flip.

It can even mean that the texture ends up skinning the inside of the model. Looking from the back side of the texture map shows as invisible, like looking through a one-way mirror. If the texture on the opposite face was also facing in, it would render, but at a distorted angle.

If it is a problem with the normals, the texture map is fine. The correction needs to be made in the model. Renormalizing is simple. There should be a one-click solution - maybe from a drop down menu. Where you find it depends on what software you are using.

 

[Ogedei_the_Mad]

This is done in Blender. I honestly don't know 75% of what Blender's functions do, given its unwieldy interface. Which program do you use?

 

[Blue Monkey]

Been a few years but used Blender in a professional setting (game subcontractor start-up) - mostly as a level (map) creator but did have to make a couple of object here and there. Embarrassing when you build a model, can't figure out why the texture is messed up & your boss says "In Edit Mode select all, CTRL-N". Blender.org documentation on Blender v. 2.78 renormalization. As shown there you can select and flip normals for parts of the model, but I always found it easier to select the whole model and recalculate. This would probably be the simplest way for models at the level of detail used for C3.

There are plenty of tutorials on youtube - don't know any specific one to recommend. As you poke around various written and video resources you'll see lots of references to Normal Maps. You don't need to worry about normal maps. They are more used to add details without increasing poly counts for high-rez game assets and not necessary for the buildings rendered to flat images you are doing. The normals themselves (part of the inherent geometry of the object) are all you need to be concerned with. Taking a look at this thread might give some hints to other (possible) problems with your mesh.

Agree completely about Blender's interface. They made a design decision early on to make the interface itself highly customizable so each artist could optimize their own work flow. Which makes the "out of the box" version confusing or at least clunky for new & casual users. There are places to get and adapt other people's screen layouts - never found one that seemed like what I wanted. And the workflow was intense enough that I didn't have time to create one for myself. Suspect that lack of an intuitive interface was also a question of how best to spend a small team's limited time. Autodesk (Maya, etc.) has the $$$ to have a full-scale UI team.

Hope that something in my nattering on helps.

 

[Ogedei_the_Mad]

I've finally found a better way to texture things. Takes a little longer, but far less the problems I had prior.

 

[Kyriakos]

I've finally found a better way to texture things. Takes a little longer, but far less the problems I had prior.

 

[Blue Monkey]

I look forward to seeing the results

 

[Ogedei_the_Mad]

Dabbling in Heian Period (794-1185) architecture. After this one, I'll put together a compilation of what I have so far. Still not sure how to do the wonder splashes in Blender - I use Cycles Render for basic texturing since the results are far better, but it has too many features. Then again, if I use regular Blender Render the results look too awkward. Might try exporting the file into Bryce 7 and doing it the old fashioned way.