Hello there. Currently i’m working on DS series inspired environment, a kind of cathedral exterior with a cloister. Since it’s UE 5 i obviously wanted to test Nanites and Lumen, and after reading about large scale asset pipelines here and here i decided to go with 3 UV channels and masks.
HOWEVER after playing Elden Ring for while “just to gather references”, i noticed that most of buildings just made out of tiles, backed parts like bricks, columns, etc, and a bit of trim here and there. No masks, no vertex paint, only occasional decals with damage. And it’s still looks great in most cases somehow.
On the other hand, i’m pretty sure that Demon Souls utilizes multiple UV channels, and there is some work going on with vertex paint or masks. Sadly, i can judge only from screenshots, so can’t be 100 correct. I really want to dig what pipeline did they use, but lack of breakdowns and artdumps is just heartbreaking.
Now what I do is: 1 UV channel for tiling, so every single module\asset has 1024 td per meter, 2nd UV is for Macro normal and albedo (for edge highlighting) and third is for RGB masks. While it offers a lot of flexibility, it takes plenty of time to work on, hard to make small adjustments, and i’m starting to suspect that 500K tris modules with 3 UV channels could be a bit heavy to render.
So - how would you approach creating some really big modular structures, to strike the balance between looking good and not burning user’s GPU?
This is what i got so far - the part close to player, thus digging small details.
And this is what supposed to be on the background, in terms of scale at least.
