To see the detailing of my jeep texturing, browse to the lower half of this post. The initial texturing process of my park bench is far more simplified than the one of my jeep but also brought different considerations such as the directional grain of the wood.
Park Bench
So, my bench which was an incredibly simplistic model that didn’t have a metal frame this was initially composed of a single wood material.
I’ve seen many threads discussing how to get the directional grain of the wood correct on meshes like this, so I knew how to address this.
In the below image the back grain should be flowing vertically but by simply adding the smart material this was flowing horizontally.
Within Quixel per smart color ID, you can manipulate numerous values and one is texture direction and offset. By changing this I fixed the grain on each segment respectively; the back, the front legs, and the seating.
In the below image you can see that due to an initial 1024 diffuse and normal map bake there are issues with bleeding and padding. Below shows a perfect break between UV islands where a gap is created.
Also shown to the left is a duplicate material ready and currently hidden.
Whilst this can be fixed in a handful of ways, such as going back to Maya and adjusting the UV’s, padding this can be quite irritating and may take several ‘rule of the loop’s’ to ensure you’ve fixed the issue.
Because of this, I decided to do a workaround that I came up with myself. Chances are more than likely other artists have also realised this workaround, but it works for me and isn’t particularly inefficient whatsoever.
Dynamask Editing
The technique is to add a second identical smart material to the mesh but not to a specific color ID; what this does is guarantees you a blanket material without any gaps.
However, this as you can imagine also doubles on the all your current texture map values and strengthens the look.
What I did was go into the Dynamask editor, advanced painting mode within Quixel. I then used the’Show Mask’ option shown at the top right in the below image. Following this, I inverted the mask as so the texture has no actual space on my mesh.
From here I then made sure my brush was ready to paint white (i.e. actual texture information) and brushed delicately over the below seam.
After some considerable tweaking in UE4 itself here is the result in one still point of lighting. For a lower 1024 mesh this is absolutely fine. When I first brought this in it fell victim to the common issue of bringing meshes from DDO to UE4 where the roughness feels completely wrong.
This is due to several possible issues:
- SRBG needing to be unticked within grayscale maps such as roughness.
- A need for tweaks within the material itself in UE4.
- Project settings – auto *TO FIX* needing tweaking / remove.
Jeep
This worked better than I could have hoped. From here I then spent time texturing in Quixel. The results of one type of material can be seen below, I’ll be using two completely different themes for my jeeps to keep things varied.
On a Wiley’s jeep seen below, you’ll notice there’s a lot of extra modeling potential. The majority of these cannot be done through means of normal mapping although some parts can, like the rear star or the number at the front. This is something I’ll do once I have the bulk of my level textured.
For now, though I am extremely happy with my first vehicle!
Wayne Marsden - Unit 70 