I try to understand how the design part in UE4 works in order to make my own game sooner or later.
I have searched a lot to get my information but I didn’t and so I am writing here.
What are the steps and which program do you use to create a static mesh and then the texture and what do you need to take care of?
What I am thinking how it works:
Static Mesh in Blender
Try to uses as few vertices as possible.
Use Triangles
Make UV-Map
Export (with specific settings)
Makeing the texture (the really hard thing I am trying to figure out):
If I did everything correct in the step before, I have now a good static mesh with a UV map but without any texture.
What is now the correct way to make a texture for this specific mesh? I thought of it like I will import the UV map (in some way) into a image editor (like GIMP) and then paint the texture. But it kinda feels wrong to do so (didn’t try it yet).
Vertex painting is just for modifying finished texture?
So, if you have any ideas for the second step, any good tutorial or the term I have to search for, I would be happy. I really don’t get, how do you get those square textures which fit perfectly the UV map. How is that usually done for each static mesh?
The ‘try as few vertices as possible’ might go out the window if you want to use vertex painting. This requires most of the time more vertices.
And also try to keep LOD’s in mind. UE these days has good support for different LOD methods, but you need to do some work yourself too with the models and materials.
There are a few ways to do materials. One is to paint the textures in substance painter. Another one is to use masks to blend several tiling materials. Get some example projects and see how it’s done and what way is best for you.
Vertex painting really only is useful if you want to change lets say the grunge of the material per individual mesh instance (or some other specific cases). You can control it by painting the vertex in unreal for each mesh instance. Most of the time it’s better to use a mask if the material is the same for all mesh copies.
I had a look on the “shooter example” but still, I just see the finished textures which (of course) fit to the UV map (e.g the weapon, the clothing). Will substance painter create such texture when painting on a blank mesh? For me, it’s kinda important to be able to change the textures later on, not to have one single material for one specific mesh but different textures for one mesh than can be changed during game play. That is why I am asking.
I’ve never heared about that “masks blend thingy”. Do you have a link which will explain this strategy?
For textures, I believe Blender has a tool for painting textures directly on the object in the viewport. Otherwise, you can use an image editing tool like Photoshop or Gimp to draw textures. You should be able to save an image of your UV mapping that you can open and paint on top of.
There’s also tools like Substance which is specifically designed for texturing, it’d take a while to get used to though since it’s a fully featured software and there’s a lot of things you can do.
It’s the texture for the player character. Do you think they made this with substance painter or with a image editor. To clearify, what is the usual workflow? Are there some advantages/disadvantages when useing one of those strategies about another?
Substance has a lot of extra features for texture painting that something like Photoshop doesn’t. It’s extremely useful for doing things like aged materials since it has tools for generating scratches and dirt in the right areas. It also has material presets so you can paint where you want a type of material to appear and all kinds of stuff. That particular image is a material ID image, it separates the different types of materials that might be on a single object into different masks so that Substance can more easily apply a material to just one part of the texture. So you might have an object that has chrome reflective metal along with areas that have a yellow painted metal and using that kind of texture helps distinguish which areas are which material.
The easiest way to make a map like that is to simply apply a solid color to each area of the model based on what material you want to apply there and then render that out to a texture.
Ok thanks a lot for the information. I see that I need to deal with substance painter. My first idea of just importing the UV map into a image editor and then “paint” the texture on this UV seems to be quite ineffective.
Thanks everybody!
You can paint the textures in something like Photoshop, depends on what you’re doing. Painting across seams is the big issue there, but Substance provides a lot more tools for painting textures for 3D objects.
