Texturing vs 3D details

I wasn't very involved the past days weeks. I had to work on another game project and also do things i never did before. And everything new to you is very tiring... The new routines are on the road. There is still a lot of work to do but it will be usefull for Alone in Space in the future so... That's not a time waste!

As I could enhance my 3D skills recently, I was adding more and more details to my 3D models. More and more faces for better rendering. Things like my last spaceship. But hey, I have to create 3D models for buildings, and there will be a lot of them. So If I continue to add details, the game will be unplayable because of big lags due to excessive details.

So I though about how I could get betters visuals without adding details. The answer is simple : textures and shaders. Up to now, I was using plain textures on faces. That's nice but huh... May be too much simplistic. Working on textures is the first step.

The guinea pig for this experimentation was the Command Center. I restarted something weeks ago but that was crappy. I started from 0 and here is the model without textures :

That's really simple. There is a lot of faces as it is a half sphere like shape, but the overall structure is quite simple. From this, I worked on texturing it to add details. Here is the result :

That's very interesting and also satisfying : not a lot of polygon, but still a nice looking structure. I'll have to gather more detail textures so this will be quite hard (I only use free textures for now).

Hard but not impossible.