If you are not familiar with uniquely baked assets it is recommended that you become familiar with that process before attempting to create a trim sheet. Other than the details above, the baking process follows an almost identical process to uniquely baked assets. Some programs will give you a visual representation of your baking distance and others will give a numerical value, either way just try some different values and see what provides you with a good result! The First thing we need to keep in mind, we need to make sure that our baking distance or cage is large enough, so in this case our is a plane above our low-poly which will capture all the information in between the low poly plane and the furthest reaches of the bake distance. Remember orient the plane UV’s upright otherwise your going to have a 180° or 90° rotation on your trim.

Ensure the UV’s are assigned perfectly to the 0-1 UV space to ensure proper tiling. It looks more complicated than it is to get started with baking, you just have to have the “high poly” version of your trim laid out above a simple plane. It doesn't matter how you create the high poly for the trim sheet, either by traditionally modelling the high-poly in your favourite modelling package, or doing an additional pass in a sculpting package like ZBrush to add some more edge wear and damage. We need to create the 3D form of our trim if you haven't already blocked it out in the planning phase and bake that mesh down onto a plane.

This is a topic in its own and will be covered in its own deep dive. If you want to be more technically correct your trim sheet should still try to follow a Texel density goal. This also makes it much easier to create trim sheet variants which share the same layout and allows you to switch out trim materials and turn a wooden shed into a metal shed if you had two different trim texture sets/palletes. If you create your trim sheet in sections with consistent sizes and proportions you can more easily switch out sections and plan them out easier. In general your trim elements should be proportional to each other at the very least, this means your elements will at least be consistent with each other in detail. As an example if you have a thick wooden beam which is 50cm wide in your desired scene you will need to add a space on your trim sheet to accommodate for that. Before you start, consider the largest element of your scene the trim sheet will be needed to texture. Once you’ve created your square, start to split it up into sections/strips which you think would suit your environment. This differs from a standard UV layout where none of your UV shells generally overlap or are placed outside the 0-1 UV square due to workflow requirements. One of the main differences with trim sheets are that your assets uv’s are likely to overlap and extend further than the 0-1 UV space using a trim-sheet workflow, this is because the texture is tiling in either the U or V direction meaning your texture is perfectly fine if it exceeds the UV bounds in the tiling direction.

‍ What makes them different to other textures? This can be made even more reusable by techniques such as adding a paint layer onto the wood through the in-engine shader graph. It can be really surprising how diverse of assets you can texture using the same trim sheet, such as the previous image where a large section of the scenes assets are made using one trim sheet, excluding a few tiling materials. Some other benefits of the Trim-Sheet workflow are the textures can be used across a project to texture and detail many assets consistently and quickly, This can be a good way to ensure assets across a team stay consistent in quality. Trims are a great way to quickly add detail to your model without additional modelling and extra geometry.

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