Now, you talked about separating the geos. Why do we separate into that many pieces?
TL;DRGeometry is split into many pieces so each part gets four texture mask layers stacked on a base, allowing more complex materials and faster texturing.
I took this one pretty far in terms of separating it, partly because I wanted to make the texturing side just faster. What that means is this yellow part, if I wanted to texture it, looking at the concept: oh, it's kind of like an exposed metal, but it has some edge wear and stuff like that. By breaking out just this piece, I get four channels for it. So base layer would be like a brass, and then I can start to build up other materials on top of it. So the further we break the stuff down, the more complicated we can really go with the actual texture.
So each colored area gets four layers, including a base.
Yeah, like four masks. And each mask could be for color, tweaking the material. Each mask has the full gamut of what we can do.
So each part allows you four levels of customization to it. Painting, for lack of a better word.
Yeah, the way to think of it is we're using an RGBA, and the alpha is the base layer, and then we're just stacking up materials on top of that. So it goes alpha, then blue channel, then green, then red. And with that, there's the methodology of: whatever's taking up the most room, try to leave that for the alpha channel. So you're continually getting smaller on the actual texture coverage as you go up that chain, just because it's an easier way to work.