I'm working on the textures for my models at the moment and I'm not sure if I've done something wrong. I have some pretty large UV maps (4096/4096) with the polygons of each mesh spread out across the square, where as the texture files I have seen, both from the original game files and from the mods I have downloaded are just flat textures. Am I doing something wrong? does anyone else even bother to UV map their meshes? Is there a more convenient way of adding textures to a mesh?

can you post a screenshot of your UV wireframe?

[img]http://dl.dropbox.com/u/29928887/PublicImages/Bridge3.jpg[/img]

You don't make a single texture for a whole architecture model. That works for armors and weapons maybe, but not for large objects like buildings. Instead you split up your building in different parts depending on the material you intend to use and UV map it for the texture you use. If you used a single, huge texture for every large object even 10gb of vram wouldn't be enough to hold all the texture data.

But what about Rage!?

yeah, you want to organize your UV's so that you make the best of repeating tiles, fitting an entire architecture model into a huge 4k texture map is extremely inefficient and a major resource strain.

you might be able to get away with a single texture sheet for a completely unique building that shares no visual likeness with anything else in the game (and even within itself, i.e. has no repeatable texture whatsoever). but even if that were the case, you should pack your UV shells much tighter. and not leave so many gaps of unused space on the texture sheet.

remember, you can resize the UV shells according to importance. the stuff that needs higher detail can be enlarged, where the stuff that doesn't need so much detail can be shrunken down. also rotate and pack them next to each other without overlapping (unless it shares the same texture, then it can overlap). it's sort of like playing tetris except more of a headache lol

also, modeling-wise, i noticed you have several n-gons, t-verts, and extremely elongated triangles. you may need to fix those or else they may cause problems.

Take a look at some of the vanilla assets in NifSkope, right click a shape and do Texture>Edit UV.
Most architectural UVs are scaled large to best use the textures and tiling. Objects are split up for modularity and texture assignment as well.

What about it?

This isn't Rage.

Okay so it looks like I have to completely rethink my Textures, can anyone suggest some tutorials for texturing for nifs/gamebryo?

you can google search general tutorials on texturing. it doesn't have to be specific to gamebryo, since the same principles apply universally. the only thing off the top of my head that is engine-specific is the green channel on the normal map must be flipped to Y-

If you are using max, it is already Y- by default. but some 3D editors create normal maps with a Y+ green channel. if you are baking normals with xNormal (what I recommend), you can set the Y- in the render settings, same goes for the nvidia plugin.

http://wiki.polycount.com/CategoryEnvironment

Thanks a lot for your help guys and gals, I shall get to work possibly tomorrow as I'm off for a drink with the guys after work, can't wait to show you what I can come up with.