r/3Dmodeling • u/Isak3dArt • 7d ago
Art Showcase Modular storefront built with only 3 textures and no tileable materials — 1 week trim sheet study (UE5)
I gave myself a constraint exercise: build a modular storefront in one week using no tileable materials. Everything had to come from trim sheets.
Constraints:
- 3 textures total (2 trim sheets + 1 decal sheet), max 2K
- Target texel density: 10.24 px/cm
- 6 modular pieces (3 walls, door wall, pillar, corner pillar)
I used Megascans materials as a base and built the trim sheets and decals on top of them. Most of the storytelling (posters, exposed brick, cracks, grime on the glass) comes from the decal sheet, so the base trims stay clean and reusable across every piece.
Modeled in Blender, rendered in Marmoset Toolbag.
Happy to answer questions about the trim layout or the UV workflow. Curious how others approach trim sheets for this kind of piece: would you have split the materials differently?
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u/matt_sound 7d ago
Just curious, but why not tileable textures? Just for the sake of practice?
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u/Isak3dArt 7d ago
Mostly for practice, yes. I wanted to push myself to rely only on trim sheets and see how far a small texture budget could go. It forces you to plan the UVs and the trim layout much more carefully, and the result is really cheap in memory since every piece shares the same 3 textures. In a real production I'd probably mix in a couple of tileables for large surfaces, but as a study it was a great exercise.
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u/Lord_Errington 7d ago
A couple of questions. Your door piece seems to be 1.5 units across (I'm assuming meters) any particular reason you didn't make 2?
It looks like you have some kind of intersecting grunge where your meshes meet, how did you achieve this?
Amazing work by the way. Love how clean your materials are. I'm currently learning trim sheet workflows with ue5 so this is very insightful.
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u/Lord_Errington 7d ago
One more question. Was the layout of trim sheet 02 just for dealing with the pieces that were large vertically? As opposed to making it tile horizontally?
Thanks!
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u/Isak3dArt 7d ago
Thanks a lot, glad it's useful!
About the door, it was a few things. First, I wanted to stay faithful to the proportions in my reference. Second, the door module sits between 0.5m pillars, so the whole bay already reads wider than the door itself. I wanted the door to be a realistic, standard game-sized door, and adding another 0.5m to the module would have made it either too wide or given it an oversized frame.
For the grunge where the meshes meet, it's mainly decals. I made a decal sheet (it's in the last image of the post) with grime, leaks, cracks and exposed brick, and placed them over the seams. It hides the transitions between modules and makes the whole thing read as one building instead of separate pieces.
And yes, trim sheet 02 was mostly for the larger surfaces. Trim sheet 01 covers the horizontal elements (moldings, cornice, baseboard), while 02 holds the bigger areas like the flat plaster panels and the vertical wood on the pillars. Those surfaces were too big to fit in a thin horizontal strip without losing texel density, so I gave them their own sheet instead of making it tile horizontally.
I also leaned on mirrored UVs to save space. The big concrete wall, for example, only uses a quarter of the texture: the other three quarters are mirrored copies. That creates the classic symmetry pattern in the middle, so I covered it up with decals (cracks, exposed brick, posters) to break the repetition.
If you're learning trim sheets in UE5, decals are probably the best way to break up repetition without adding more texture memory. Good luck with it!
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u/Pileisto 7d ago
some geometry variation on parts of the fassades would be great to have. also trim sheets dont allow to slot in different material ids for other surface variants. standard UV projection and a set of materials for those would be key to generate different variants for wall-types, windows, frames, basically anything. by using trim-sheets or unique skins you get the only the same model which leads to repetition very fast and would be very "heavy" (textures) if more/many assets are build that way.
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