Yeah, i really like these three buildings, but i took them into the editor and readjusted the stats and customized the landscaping. They work well together for modular expansion of a university without relying on Campus DLC features.

With a hundred student capacity, the upkeep of 1920/week is extremely high! The in-game university upkeep is 1920 but student capacity is 4500.

Can I buy you the Campus DLC? Consider it a gift for the wonderful assets I've been using.

@EndlessFtw If you use Discord, I recommend you to join the C:S Creator server. Most of the current creators of the game are there and we will help you if you want to learn to become part of this community. https://discord.gg/RRGYkmN

Anyway, to whoever is concerned about the file size, I have made some optimisation to the texture. It is now 5mb (4mb reduction).

I mainly using Maya, so the function name or button may defer, but the concept is generally the same.

Yeah, auto generated unwrap will never really work most of the time.

I do the manual way, Planar mapping (for maya). What it does is it map the model from a "plane". So you got a cube. You planar map it from the front. You will get a nice front and back planes UV (stacked) but no sides. That result is expected, because, planar mapping from the front, the sides are stacked. So i do it again for the sides. So i got the sides as well. Then repeat.

Definitely time consuming. But by going manual, you have more control.

Roughly plan out how you are going to approach your UV based on what you need.

You have alot of island of the same concrete texture? Why not stack them up on a universal concrete texture island in your texture file. Bam! Alot of UV space saved, and you can scale your UV island up now to capture more resolution because of the UV space you just saved. 👍

@ Ali Cafe Hao YEAH! Thanks! I was wondering how you do the UV mapping on the software you're using.

I'm using Blender to map some model exported from Sketchup. But, UV maps generated by unwrap or smart unwrap function never make sense (random pieces of shapes with a few easy to interpret islands). I tried whatever projection thing I can find, only to get distorted islands.

I tried marking seams and hoped that would have generated nice islands like in some Youtube videos, but it never did. 1:2 (eg 1024x2048) maps never worked for me either, as some pieces will be stretched in the wrong directions due to random rotations of the islands. The moment I use the "pack island" function, everything just scale differently.

Clearly, I must have got something wrong...

Now, I'm just trying to figure out if I can anchor a few stacked piece nicely to a corner of the map and let "pack island" function place the other random pieces around the map to get a half-baked/stacked map.

My work flow is finish the main model first, then dive into UV.
That why i can pick and know what textures are stack-able and where they should go in the UV.

Not the most optimum, but i find that works for me.

I sorry if I mistook you as being aggressive! I have tried posting on reddit (r/citiesskylines or the modding subreddit) to ask for help and to find out more on how other people do it so beautifully, but I received hardly any replies at all.

Since you're here, can I just ask how do you go about doing the texturing (your workflow)? Since you said it doesn't actually take that long, I might want to learn a few new tricks from you! :D

Any reference materials (youtube videos, etc.) would be appreciated!

I do want to recreate relatively well optimised and good looking structures, I really do. But it's hard to find materials that I can understand and integrate into my workflow.

Considering what you said, you might be doing something wrong, because I can assure you this building can take like an hour to fully texture by hand at maximum. Think we all do this as a hobby too, this is not a job (I wish!), so that doesn't tell us anything anyway, we know we're here doing this because we want to.

BTW, it's good to write down stats and assuming texture is too big, but think that even if you didn't we can guess by the 9MB.

I tell you again to reconsider how you make assets, looks like a good job screwed by not texturing properly. Fixing that would improve amazingly all assets.

If you want a bit of motivation, check how my oldest assets looked and how big textures were compared to what I'm currently doing, you will see why it's worth.

And hey, I say this in a friendly way, in case I sound aggresive, it's not at all :D

And yes, I appreciate your concern and do want to improve on that if I could feasibly do that.

In any case, I'm at least upfront and transparent enough to state that on the description that I used larger textures. I could have simply hide those information if I want to fool people to downloading the stuff.

Its not actually white faces by the way. Was supposed to be rough white coloured concrete. It's too low res in the end to show up cleanly.

I cannot tolerate doing manual jigsaw puzzling for two thousand pieces and having to figure which goes where and what can be stacked on top of another, and...

... only to have something wrongly overlapped and having to click repeatedly on Blender to hunt down that single triangle piece that could be anything. Sitting for 1 week to do a frustrating jigsaw puzzle is nowhere near as enjoyable.

I do this as a hobby, for recreation. Not to get so frustrated that I wanted to throw my laptop at the wall due to some mistake during the mapping...

I did get so frustrated that I gave up for a few months. And that was for a bunch of relatively simple <2k tris models.

That's why I said I am still working on that compromise method/workflow. I haven't got that eureka moment/breakthrough yet.

Don't do that. Always manually map your textures. This building is literally white faces with some small parts of detail, 2k is way too much and not required at all. Looking at your WS, looks like you could for sure do better, and everybody would win.

It's a consequence of the method I use to generate the texture. I don't manually UV map for the textures. I simply bake them in Blender. I tend to go for the larger texture so that the texture don't appear to have shit resolution.

I am still trying to figure a way that mostly utilise the baking method while having a small bit of manual UV mapping for better optimisation.

Manual UV mapping is a pain in the arse (think of it as a jigsaw puzzle) and I would never have made anything >2k tris if I didn't come up with the baking method.

Are 2k textures really necessary for this? It looks like 90% of it is solid colors.