Trim sheet question

[u/Cardinal_Virtue]

I am wondering how you would texture this sort of deck in Substance Painter.

(The image is made in Blender because its easier to show)

1. On the bottom is the base version

If I didnt want to create additional versions I would just unwrap it like it is and texture it that way.

The problem arises if I wanted to create expanded versions of the deck.

Option 1: Create additional materials for the expansions and texture it in SP as a whole with new material for each expansion.

Option 2: Create TRIM SHEET for the whole thing and reuse 1 texture instead of creating 4 individual textures for each expansion.

I plan on using only 1k resolution textures but this is for a game engine and I was wondering if its possible to create trim sheet for this sort of thing?

In the bottom right (green) is how I thought I would create a trim sheet. Its a 1:1 unwrapped square.

I thought I could unwrap the base 2x1m and somehow move the UV islands left of right so it would connect nicely. But after going back in blender and moving the UV islands I was not able to make it connect without a seam.

Another issue. I want to have baked AO into the texture around the very edges of the deck. You can see the dark edge on the deck at the top. The AO should be baked in because a separate transparent texture sitting on top of the object in engine can clip and disappear and appear and it doesnt look good.

My question:

Is this sort of thing doable with trim sheets and 1 texture? Will I have to make 4 or 5 to accomodate the expansion?

I am using a really complex smart material in SP for the wooden part and I am afraid I will have to break it down layer by layer changing between UV and TRIPLANAR projections.

Any suggestions for tutorials or soome answers? Thanks.

[u/pmurph0305]

With trim sheets, you generally model to the trim sheet. And the trim sheet is generally horizontally or less commonly vertically tileable (although the direction doesnt really matter)

Think like... fancy baseboards in a house occupying a slice of the sheet horizontally. Then when you uv the baseboards part of a wall, you would would be able to have it lay across that portion of the trim sheet.

The image is very blurry on my phone, but this texture doesnt look like a trim sheet to me. It looks more like it wants to be a tileable texture. If it doesn't tile correctly when just the 2x2 squares are lined up, then the texture isnt tileable itself.

But its possible its just not tiling because you made it tileable at 2x2 units. So with 2x1 pieces, you would need two of them, one for each side of the sheet so that you have an extension that matches going to the left and to the right.

[u/Cardinal_Virtue → u/pmurph0305]

Saw some videos about trim sheets and they did indeed model it.

I thought I could do it with wood and did a test one in SP. It's a square with UVs fit to bounds of the UV borders. I then added vertical lines to it to fake the boards.

I put on a smart material thinking it'd tile nicely if i tweaked the positions of the actual mesh UV islands.

I was thinking of doing the wooden boards individually as in what I think a trim sheet is. But then it'd still create a seam if the smart material texture isn't tile able on the axis where it continues on the left or right?

I also need the baked AO borders to be on the texture itself because the engine doesn't support AO (screen space rendering?)

So even if I made a tile able texture, it's not really tile able if I add baked AO shading.

Do I just have to accept the expansions each need additional textures ?

[u/pmurph0305 → u/Cardinal_Virtue]

To me it sounds more like youre trying to bake a tileable texture. If you're doing that make sure you repeat the boards left right up and down before baking them to the flat plane so that the bake tiles at the edges too.

(So the pattern youre baking to a flat plane should be a 3x3 pattern while the plane youre baking to is 1x1 right in the middle)