I would like to get some pointers on the best workflow for my use case. I am not a 3D modeller so I have been using Adobe Medium to create the sculpts then decimating and doing a smart UV unwrap in blender. This seems to give me a nice enough mesh.
My issue comes to texturing. Most of my sculpts need multiple materials on them, primarily a plaster material and a mosaic material. I have both these materials inside UE5.7.
My current thought process is to buy a material layering system on fab such as LayerCraft then use the Mesh Paint Mode > Texture Color > Paint, to paint where the mosaic should go and where the plaster should go.
However before I commit to this approach and make the purchase I want to make sure that painting the mask works well and it does not seem to.
Here is an image of one of my models, a door frame, when I paint a part of it sometimes other pars also get painted and there is a few weird looking parts to it.
I have also increased the Mesh Paint Texture Resolution to 512
Basically the bits I have coloured in in red in the below screenshot are the bits of the mesh I want to add a mosaic material to. Maybe texture painting is the wrong way to go about this. Any ideas?
Edit: I tried adding the Mosaic as a decal as you can see it’s not got very good results and I will likely run into the same issue with texture painting a mask. The problem is that the mosaic pattern gets cut off and there is a hard line between the mosaic material and the plater material. In real life the mosaic edge would be jagged and line up with where the mosaic tiles are this is obviously something that doesn’t happen with a mask or a decal.
For a starting approach with UE, your texture workflow makes sense to me. Still, before buying extra elements, I would suggest resolving the needs with the tools you already have.
Your process already includes Blender, which you can use to create the materials, and paint your textures. Please check the video guide below, on how to work with just base Blender:
Alternatively, you can modify Blender to operate like Substance Painter:
Awesome thanks, I’ll look into this. What’s the difference between texture painting in blender vs in unreal is it not the same process so I would run into the same issues with UV maps?
I wouldn’t get any plugins until you are somewhat comfortable in the material editor. The plugins won’t solve your problem directly, and sometimes make it worse by adding layers of complication to the already complex situation of learning base Unreal.
Your blending of different materials in unreal can be done using a lot of different methods. You can get the mosaic blend you want, but it would rely on a masking or height channel. Spend time building a few materials from scratch, watching some youtube vids. I recommend PrismaticaDev’s 5 min materials vids. You can do a lot once you get the basics, and the skills transfer over to blender’s material node graph pretty well too… very similar in a lot of ways.
In this instance, though, I would rely on Blender to put everything into one texture rather than unreal, unless you’re going for a specific look or have tech requirements. Using separate materials for each section creates a new draw call for each material and you could get into performance issues. (Unless you’re using Substrate, that’s a whole other thing)
Look into the ucupaint plugin for blender. It is a free plugin you can install in the preferences menu. There are good tutorials on painting using the tool, it’s a bit of a chunk to learn on top of blender but def worth it if you’re doing this stuff alot.
Your UV layout is what is causing your visual painting issues, I think. The UV seam edges are generally problem areas for artifacts and artists do a lot to hide them. I would re-map the UVs, by drawing seams in edge mode where you want the the mesh sections to separate and using the Angle based or Minimize stretch to map the parts rather than SmartUV. Make sure none of your UVs overlap. Generally, you want to use as much of your image pixels as you can.
While unwrapping, create a UV grid image (in blender, new image) and use that in your blender material to help you understand the pixels mapped to your model. Ucupaint has even more UV grid image tools.
Paint your textures at 2048 resolution, you can always use unreal’s texture window to reduce it in-game if needed.
