Theoretical Guide for Building Textures in Farming Simulator 25 (Building Shader)

In Farming Simulator 25, buildings play a vital role in creating a realistic and immersive farming experience. But what makes a building truly unique and visually appealing? The key lies in its textures. Yet when it comes to creating or understanding these textures, many players can feel overwhelmed. That’s where this guide comes in. Entirely theoretical, it won’t teach you how to design textures, but it will allow you to grasp the fundamentals and explore their importance in improving your projects in Farming Simulator 25.

The 4 main textures of a building

Each building uses four main textures to create a realistic and immersive visual rendering. These textures work together to give the building its unique appearance.

Diffuse map

The Diffuse Map determines the visible colors and patterns of a building. It is this texture that gives the building its general appearance under normal lighting, without relief or shine effects.

Specular texture plays a key role in adding subtle but essential details to materials. It gathers several important pieces of information. When working with a Specular Map, it is important to know that the information is not limited to strict white or black. It works in grayscale, which allows to represent intermediate levels between two extremes.

Specular map

Specular texture adds realism by defining how a surface reflects light. It uses grayscale gradients to vary between matte and glossy. By working on the RGB layers of the image, each channel can contain details that enrich the reflection and shine of the material.

• Red Layer: Smoothness
  Controls how smooth and reflective a surface is. If you download a material from the internet, it may be labeled "Roughness". In this case, simply invert the colors to get your smoothness texture.

• Green Layer: Ambient Occlusion (AO)
  Represents shadows generated directly by the texture, not by the 3D model itself. It is used to add visual relief by simulating shaded areas.

• Blue Layer: Metalness
  La metalness describes whether a surface reacts like a metallic material or not. (In this example, the pavers are not metallic).

The result of compiling the three layers will form your specular texture, ready to use.

Normal Map

A Normal map texture is used to simulate reliefs. It contains information about the direction of normals (surface orientations) at each point of a texture.

Parallax Texture

It is a texture used to simulate complex relief details, such as deep crevices or irregular surfaces, in a very realistic way, without adding additional geometry to the 3D model. Unlike a Normal Map which only modifies the lighting and shadow on a surface, a Parallax Map creates the illusion that the surface is actually deeper or higher, by dynamically adjusting the viewing angle. In the game, we will call it the Height map.

The texture of Mask

The mask texture uses a second set of UVs on the 3D model to overlay details on the main texture. The faces of this unwrap should not overlap. As with the specular, each RGB (red, green, and blue) layer of the image contains specific information to improve the final rendering.

• Red Layer :
  It represents vegetation, moss, which is often found at the bottom of buildings, especially wooden ones, due to humidity and rain. This type of effect gives a more natural and worn appearance to the structures.

• Green Layer :
  It is used to simulate ambient occlusion (AO). It represents areas where ambient light does not reach, such as in the recesses or corners of objects. AO has no effect under direct light, such as from a lamp.

• Blue Layer :
  It is used to add earth dust to building surfaces.

The result of compiling the three layers will form your Mask texture, ready to use.

Texture Sizes in Farming Simulator 25

Textures in Farming Simulator 25 (and most games) follow dimensions based on powers of 2. The most common sizes are:
1024 x 1024
512 x 512
256 x 256
Each individual texture takes up memory and requires multiple calls to the renderer to process. For best performance, it is best to pack multiple textures into a single image, while respecting the power of 2 logic (e.g. 1024x4096 or 1024x2048).
This process, called Texture Atlas, involves combining the textures of multiple elements of the same building into a single file. This reduces the number of calls to the rendering engine and improves the efficiency of the game.
Optimization tip: To improve performance, reduce the resolution of the Specular Maps and Height Maps to half that of the Diffuse Map (e.g. 1024 x 4096 for a 512 x 2048 diffuse).

Location of textures in Gaints Editor

Parallax is not mandatory. If you don't need this texture, stay on None in the shader variation.

Here's a diagram that summarizes everything we've just seen regarding building textures, their role and how they interact in Farming Simulator 25. This will give you a clear overview of the concepts covered.

What is Materialize?

materialize is a free and intuitive software that makes it easy to create textures from a base image, usually the diffuse texture. With its simple interface and automatic tools, it allows users to create normal maps, specular maps, height maps, roughness maps, and much more, without the need for complex professional software.