Manipulating Textures and Materials

anonymous_user_3fd16379 · May 12, 2016, 12:06am

The attached image shows the M_Brick_Clay_New material applied to 2 different walls butted up against each other. You can clearly see the seam between these two walls mostly because the bricks on the left wall are taller than the bricks on the right.

I’ve noticed this on quite a few elements that I’ve placed within my own little learning level that when you manipulate a BSP or a Static Mesh that the texture and/or material stretches. Is there a way to manipulate the texture and/or material after it is applied to a surface to be able to line things up appropriately for that that surface?

I would think there should be a simple way to manipulate to texture itself while on the wall that would say move it left, right, up down, stretch wider, shrink skinnier, stretch taller and shrink shorter.

Is there a way to do this in UE4? I’ve been searching for this answer since Sunday.

NasteX · May 12, 2016, 1:24pm

“Worldalignedtexture” node is that what you need.

anonymous_user_3fd16379 · May 12, 2016, 3:14pm

Thanks. On a very rudimentary level, that worked. That was purely with a texture and watching a video about Worldalignedtexture, now I need to figure how how that is applied to give it depth as the pre-installed materials are.

That’s enough information to get it figured out. It’s all a learning process.

Thanks,
RJ

anonymous_user_3fd16379 · May 12, 2016, 7:53pm

Today I’ve learned about Worldalignedtexture/Worldalignnormal and for the most part, that works pretty well, but that lead to another question as most learning processes do.

In the attached picture I show 3 walls. The first wall is the is the original material that doesn’t seem to play well with others, although I have it sized so it’s relatively the same as the other two walls and not stretched out for the purposes of the question here. The middle wall is one of my own playing with it just to give another wall for reference. The one on the right is using the original M_Brick_Clay_New material and modifying it with Worldaligntexture/Worldalignnormal where appropriate and for the most part, they look pretty similar. Some variances, but I’d be happy with it, since the 100 walls in between looked nothing at all like the original.

Now, let’s direct to the very bottom and top of each of these walls. Each of these walls is placed evenly with the floor, but the one on the left you can tell that the base of the wall is appropriately placed on the bottom as it matches up with the floor. The other two, on the other hand, look like the base is below floor level and thus makes the tops of them look like cut brick.

If the base (bottom of the brick) were actually even with the floor the tops would be even too and not look like cut brick. I’m assuming that this is because we are aligning with the world and not actually aligning with the wall. So a change in elevation of the wall will change how the wall appears.

Now to the question at hand. Is there a way to get things to line up appropriately, without stretching a material, but still be base 0 on the wall regardless of elevation? To add to the question a bit more. If you look at the seem between the 2nd and 3rd walls, you can also tell they are not justified to the left of the wall like the first wall is. Where, in this case, I would rather the textures to be a little further right so the vertical mortar would line up on the seam. Can that be done as well?

anonymous_user_3fd16379 · May 13, 2016, 4:59am

Boy oh boy!!! Manipulating textures is a lot harder than it use to be! With that exclamation out of the way, let’s get into my solution. Well… It isn’t quite my solution. I’ve pulled the information from multiple sources, but remembering what part of what came from where is too much for me to add to this. I think anyone else reading this might rather the solution than the sources all the bits and pieces came from.

As someone pointed out earlier, you can use WorldAlignedTexture to get perfect walls, but they were not quite so perfect as I found out. The biggest issue I had is that if you wanted a wall that was, let’s say, 30 degrees off from world square, it would do strange things with the texture, so rotating the walls would really mess up the texture. As can be seen by this picture.

I have, however found a solution that will work for me. From here on out, you can call this a tutorial of this solution.

For this, I have been working with the Starter Content Material called M_Brick_Clay_New, so much of this is the exact same, although you can apply the same tiling principles any Material, in theory. That has yet to be tested. I’ll go with any material that is intended to be used as a brick wall.

Let’s take a look at the walls.

In this picture you can see 6 different walls. The one on the left, separate from the crowd is a BSP Box wall. The 3 in the center are Basic Cube walls and the one to the right is a Static Mesh wall from the Starter content Architecture folder. Believe it or not, the wall on the right is actually Wall_400x200 that I have Stretched the wall wider and taller just to prove the point of how the material is now working.

Looking at the BSP wall (far left) you would think that it was a different material or sized differently, but in all actuality the BSP wall is the exact same as all the other walls. Apparently the UV sizing used in this material doesn’t work on BSP the same as it does for Basic Cube or Architecture Walls. Because of this, I do not find that BSP would be very good to use with this method as it still stretches no matter which direction you stretch it in.

Since we’re taking BSP completely out of the equation, let’s take a look at the remaining 5 walls a bit more closely…

The above image is 4 walls of Basic Cube with the Y scale set to 0.25 giving us the thickness of our wall, however this can be set to any number you wish to use for wall thickness. I used 4 of them to show how well they line up when you butt the walls end to end. These walls can now be resized taller, shorter, wider or skinner without stretching or compressing the texture on the wall surface that we can see. However, there is still a slight problem with this wall. Let’s take a look…

When we look at the wall from the top left corner we can see that the wall’s thickness does show compressed brick and not one single brick as one might expect. The top wouldn’t be much of a problem. That can easily be covered up with a roof or something of that nature, but the sides however, They would typically be player viewable. You might be able to come up with a way to cover them up, but I very well might want the corners of my structure to be squared and not covered up. That’s the only real down side of using a Basic Cube. Besides that, the Basic Cube Walls and the Architecture wall (far right) look pretty similar. There is one other minor annoyance to using Cube and that is when you resize, the resizing is based on the center of the cube, so you have to resize to the size you want it, then move the wall so it’s flat on the ground and all the mortar lines up again.

The Static Mesh wall, like the Basic Cube wall can be resized wider, skinnier, taller and shorter without loosing it’s texture as it is. Now let’s take a look at the Static Mesh wall from the same corner perspective as we have looked at the Basic Cube.

From this perspective, we can see that the player viewable portion of the wall now looks like a single brick. Now this portion of the wall will stretch or compress if you make the wall thickness wider or skinnier, but all in all, this out of the package architecture wall appears to look pretty good and shouldn’t really need to change how thick the wall is. It still has a minor issue with the top of it that I have yet to be able to figure out a way to look right, so it might not be good for a short wall where the player can see the top of it, however for housing or industrial building structures that the top will covered anyway it’s pretty good. I would be happy with this one… FINALLY! If anyone reading this knows how to fix the top to line up with the rest of the bricks I would love to hear about it. That would make for the perfect brick wall.

This is the best I’ve been able to do through researching wall texture sizing without stretching the last 4 days.

Now to the big question at hand. How was it done?

First things first. I would suggest if you’re going to play with this, make a copy of M_Brick_Clay_New and work with that so you always have a reference back to the original if you do something that you may have to go back and fix.

Now let’s take a look at the material as it is now, which I have named My_Brick_Clay_Align_Works.

I made a point to comment where appropriate for any other noobs like myself trying to learn. The overall Material is broken down into 3 main sections. Texture Variation, The Texture itself and Texture Depth.

The Texture Variation gives us an added look that the surface of the bricks are not perfectly flat. The Texture of the wall, is fairly simple and self explanatory. There’s plenty of tutorials already on the use of Normal to give some depth to your 2D texture. The Texture Depth portion on the bottom adds more depth to the brick than what you get with normal alone.

For the most part, all 3 sections are controlling the texture in the exact same way. The only difference is the input we give it varies between them, so I’m only going to walk through one of these sections. You can see from the overall Material how the rest is put together. So let’s take a look more closely at the Wall Alignment of Texture section in the middle.

Here you can see the UV adjustments on the left and it’s box is highlighted. Changing Utiling will make the bricks wider or skinnier, changing Vtiling will make the bricks taller or shorter. it’s currently set to 0.25 for both and they seem pretty well balanced keeping both numbers the same. You can play with these to see how they affect your material when applied.

I hope the actually aligning of the texture is pretty self explanatory. This portion was taken from another tutorial and it’s seems to do the job pretty well. The way I set this was was to search the Palette for each of the given key words BreakOutFloat2Components, ObjectScale, Multiple x2 and Append then arrange and connect them in the fashion shown.

You will want to duplicate this for the other 2 sections giving Texture variation and added Texture Depth as shown in the full Material. Each of those sections have their own UV controls. I kept them the original values from the original M_Brick_Clay_New material, however you can adjust these to get a different look and feel to the surface and depth of your bricks.

Using this method, you can do a full 360 rotation of a wall without any distortion of what it should look like as well.

Beyond that, everything else is the same as the M_Brick_Clay_New Material and you can use that for reference of how everything else is put together.

This may not be the best method, but for a guy just learning himself, this alone feels like an accomplishment. I’m quite sure I’ll be using this method for quite a few things, until I come across something better.

If you know of a better method and it’s given in enough detail that a noob can understand it, I would love to hear about t.

Peace,

RJ

Konflict · May 22, 2016, 2:11am

NasteX is right about the WorldAlignedTexture, and by simplifying the function node you can get texture coordiate out of the box.

This has all three outputs where the xyz can be attached to the BumpOffset to produce the desired PM effect.

The result looks quite ok on the sides. I’m using the standard cube mesh here.

And, because of the xyz is connected the top is also gets UVs, but it is world aligned which does not help in this case.

The WorldAlignedCoordinate can be extended to compensate this alignment issue by manually rotating and shifting (position) the output to fit on the sides.

Luos has already figured this part out:

anonymous_user_3fd16379 · May 22, 2016, 11:36am

Where the usage of WorldAlignedTexture in the way you did it fixed the angles so they don’t look totally terrible, I still have a few issues with it. Maybe I’m just being too picky or maybe one day I’ll figure it out without the use of WorldAlignedTexture.

It still does not use a base relative to the structure created, so you can have cut brick/buried brick issues when you don’t want them or always having to design vertical heights based on how the material aligns to the world.
Which I think it more important than 1, when angling walls, it stretches the texture. I’m seeing using WorldAligned as not a viable option unless you’re not perfectly square with the world.
The tops of the structures of angled brick don’t/can’t orient in the correct direction.

In this picture, the top 3 walls were from my solution. The bottom 3 walls are a duplicate of your WorldAlignedTexture solution. Depending on the angle it can stretch slightly or really bad. Maybe I’m just too much of a perfectionist.

Maybe there’s a way to perfect the solution I’ve used to work well on the Z axis as well. The more I learn, the better I’ll get. The better I get, I’m sure a Z axis solution will come to me. Although, on these particular walls they don’t look too bad. I think would I rather the largest surface look right. I can always bury the sides into each other to cover it up if need be. Although, I am replaying one of my favorite Bioware games just to see how all their structures look and realizing how much even the most professional of games don’t care so much about being perfect. Just good enough and for that, I’ll be happier with mine not stretching and the brick being at least in the correct orientation on top even if they are a bit compressed.

I’ve watched this video a few times already when I was trying to come up with an acceptable solution. I never realized it until now that he had the material download link in the comments. I’ll have to check it out.

zeOrb · May 22, 2016, 11:43am

Don’t want to sound like an ad, but I think you might be interested in SuperGrid!

Basically you have to use local tri-planar mapping instead of world aligned mapping. Thus you can retain orientation of texture and etc, but I guess you already figured that out. Then you have to unwrap UV shells so their orientation will correspond to scaling direction. Then you can use dot product of world direction you want([0,0,1] for Top/Bottom, [1,0,0] Right/Left, [0,1,0] Front/Back) with vertex normal of box to mask out particular side you want to meddle with(For example, to adjust top view of bricks so they correspond to other sides.

anonymous_user_3fd16379 · May 22, 2016, 3:06pm

It’s only an ad if it doesn’t apply to the topic at hand.

I’ve dabbled a little bit with local mapping instead of world mapping, but nothing successful as of yet. I’m more interested in learning right now, so I’ll take pieces of a variety of different components from here and there and play with them until they work or I break them beyond repair. I’m not looking to buy anything until I’m actually ready to produce something worth while. I don’t expect that to be any time soon. I’m guessing a year. I’ve only been playing with UE4 for 2 weeks so far.

Right now I’m playing with Luos’s material functions. I haven’t implemented everything yet, but I was at least able to get the brick all facing in the correct direction.

The only down side was that in order to get 3 different walls at 3 different angles to all 3 appear oriented in the correction direction, I had to use 3 different Material Instances. If everything were perfect squares, which people who create these solutions love to use, then it would all work in perfect harmony, but since brick is not square, but a rectangle, at least one surface will not be perfectly lined up somewhere. Although with creative architecture I’m not sure that it matters as much as I make it out to be.

Although I still need to play with the offset and size of the Z some more. I have no offset assigned for that Z yet, so thinking I could at least get one face and the Z lined up with Luos’s solution. and the ends of a wall would be what they would be. I think Luos’s solution can get real close, however still based on the world. For a wall that is only a single brick thick, It would probably work quite nicely.

Although, I would be interested in seeing how SuperGrid does with non-square textures. Before completing this I watched many videos on it, looked over the website, and read half of the thread and everything shown was all perfect squares. As I’ve been replaying my favorite Bioware game with the intent of looking at designs of everything within that game just to get an idea of how a successful game developer puts things together. The only thing that I have seen that were perfect squares were floor tiles. I would love to see how this would work in a practical sense with real textures and real architectural style meshes. Not so much on the, everything squared, sense.

I was reading through the comments on the Marketplace page though and realized your name was Dmitry and have to ask… Are you the same Dmitry that was on the DCR forums a couple years back? If not, no biggie, if so… It’s a small internet after all. I’ll just say I was one of the DCR2 beta testers.

Konflict · May 22, 2016, 8:36pm

The “streching” you are experience with the world aligned node is because of the “VertexNormalWS” part at the bottom of the mat function is using the ProjectionTransitionContrast which helps to define the sides of the cube. Setting this to a low value cause some sort of “bleeding” of the uvs which result in this odd stretching problem you are experiencing. I set it to 1e+4 which is 10000, this fixed the said issue in my case.

I’m sure that this world aligned texture method can be a help for quick and loosy prototyping of a level, but i definitely wont see it as a viable solution for end products. The normals are have to be manually tweaked (Luos does similar approach), but it is a very limited solution and can’t help for the POM algorithm which remains useless in this case.

Here i extended the function with Lous’ normal map tweakings and it helps to fix some visible problems. I also have added shifting, rotation and scaling of the sides, so the bricks can be aligned and tweaked on all three planes.

The bircks now looks and lit ok since the normal maps are ok as well (on most parts), but without proper normal mapping the bricks on the “other side” would be projected as inset. This issue can be fixed with this addition (more or less).

I also have removed the bumpoffset node because the POM will not work properly, and i see no proper solution (unlike the case of normal mapping) for that mappig issue.

Just to clarify things Luos is using the same approach but the only difference here is that you have to attach the textures to the material function, instead of extracting the UV coordinates. If you look closer to the nodes you will realize the definitive similarities, so you can try both implementation they all boil down the same solution. I only have choose to extract the uv coords in the hope that POM can be feed correctly, but this wont work properly either (and at this point i dont see how to solve this mapping issue on the back side).

What zeOrb have suggested (Object space triplan mapping) is intriguing i’m going to look into that calculus, thanks for mentioning!

anonymous_user_3fd16379 · May 22, 2016, 11:42pm

Wow, I’ll have to study that quite a bit. It looks to give a whole lot more normal definition to the brick and by simply extracting the UV’s you can use one function for both texture and normal vs two different different functions. I like that. Although, without using Texture Parm’s you couldn’t use different textures in Material Instances. Hmmm. Not sure which I like better, although I’m sure it could be modified to do so. I just wish I could see the Mat Function better. The tiny words are difficult to read in my old age.

I removed the bump offset in my tests as well, since I was use Texture Parms instead of Texture Samples.

You say the back is still not displaying right though? Is it similar to this…?

This is using Luos’s function with Texture Parameters and it seems like it still has some distortion (bleed as you call it) with anything between 30-50 degree rotation, give or take a little as I only tested in 10 degree increments. 30 being the worst of it and 50 is barely noticable. 50 is more noticable in the shaded area up close. I thought it was okay at first, which might still make it okay to use for simple walls, but larger blocks made it really stand out. I thought I broke it and was back tracking to find where it broke, but ended up finding out that it was that way all along, It just didn’t show itself till making the cube big enough to see. Although, for the walls, it’s happening on the ends, not the back. That’s probably just in how the cube was sized and could be the back if I reversed the X and Y sizes.

Late last week I downloaded The Monolith just to play with it. I liked how he used one material and 60 different MI’s to achieve the 60 different looks using a single material. Since that is better for performance, I’ll probably look to do the same or something similar for architectural designs. Not sure I like how he did the actual textures though adding color variations to the texture itself causes a repeating pattern look, which is one of the reasons I’ve stuck with playing with M_Brick_Clay_New because I liked how it added variation of color through additional textures so it doesn’t appear to be a repeating pattern on larger walls.

This is what I mean about that…

Although, that is just graphics editing and that I can do. Although, it will be interesting when I start editing for normal textures.

Here’s an off the wall question. Why do they call Normal, Normal? When it’s not so normal. Thinking from another perspective, and it took me a minute to wrap my head around what they were saying when I first read it, I would think Normal would be what you would call the plain base texture, but it’s called Diffuse. And what is Normal, I would think would be called Depth or Texture Depth. because that is what Normal gives your texture. Anyway, that is completely side tracking off topic. Just a curiosity more than anything else.

I’ll shut up now.

zeOrb · May 23, 2016, 8:29am

Oh boy, big post incoming

You definitely should examine object space mapping, it’s more appropriate to the task than world align mapping. World align mapping is more useful in situation where you have different objects/terrain and you want blend them together via some texture with world space mapping(So you get same visuals on objects with different uv/scale). Of course, people using it’s for world grid material and it’s a cheap way to have it, but when you trying to modify it to have proper looking texture during rotation - you trading off this simplicity and it could get out of hand pretty quickly. It’s like hammering screws instead of nails, to be honest.

Well, that’s smart, can’t blame you!

In SuperGrid I fix orientation problem within mesh itself - just rotate UV shells 90 degrees until it looks correctly. It’s much more easy, efficient and cheaper than having 3 material instances. But this won’t work with world mapping due to obvious reasons.

Rectangle is painful, yup. As far as I’m aware You physically can’t get proper result from single tiling texture, because bricks should line up to different sides simultaneously and top/bottom texture should be different to reflect that.

So either another texture or adding edges near borders and playing with uv and then using vertex painting to set different logic for UV tiling during scaling for different section like this(This is done with single tiling texture):

But… This is quite a work! This is cool and fun to learn/create, but the real use case is quite limited for perfect tiling bricks. For building you need only 2 dimensions to be right, top/bottom is usually covered by something else. For thin damaged walls you could add additional details so you can cover/break up improper top tiling with something else. Or you can use multiple single-brick-width walls with basic 2-dimensional tiling - top will be 100% right, because you have to worry only about aligning to one side

Any this solution is quicker and easier to make. Probably will recreate this brick material in UE4 just for fun, though…

I just avoid them! I decide to stick to 2 dimensions only. Adding third is too much pain for not so much gain

I’m afraid it was a different Dmitry… I’m not even aware what DCR is!

Normal map is actually quite distant from Depth! It’s trying to imitate depth by lighting differently vertex/face/pixels according to assigned normal(via a texture, for example. And normal itself is a vector perpendicular to a point.

So it’s not so straightforward as, for example, bump map or POM based on height. These both are depth textures, yet normal map is trying only to imitate this depth.

Actually what we use in UE4 is not a diffuse map anymore, heh. Diffuse is the old term that include base color + basic shading for objects to make them look more realistic/cool. For example, it what was used for games in prev. gen and arch. rendering. Nowadays only color data goes into Base color(Or albedo in pure PBR rendering. I guess in UE4 you can use these terms interchangeable. Also, here is great guide from Allegorithmic if you want to learn more) and additional shading is goes into Ambient occlusion slot.

Cheers!

Vollgaser · May 23, 2016, 1:49pm

Uhm, RJ you do know that for…

-BSP geometry there is the functionality to stretch/scale, align/move and (basic) wrap materials in the Details panel when you select BSP surface/s and look under the Surface Properties…Pan, Rotate, Flip, Scale?
It’s been there forever and does exactly what you ask for in youre original posting…“I would think there should be a simple way to manipulate to texture itself while on the wall that would say move it left, right, up down, stretch wider, shrink skinnier, stretch taller and shrink shorter.”

-static meshes you usually do the above in the 3d program like Blender, max. Either you assign a material there and align it properly, or you give the model a unique skin. In both ways, the aligning you look for is done in the 3d application.

Konflict · May 23, 2016, 5:31pm

Vollgaser is right about just everything! BSP is a powerful tool to craft kinda anything in editor, it’s crude at the edges but essentially capable of edit lots of aspects the static mesh you’re about to create. Besides, why would you wanna create tons of material instances to tweak every wall and brick on your level.

It’s optional, and in some cases can be faster than manually tweaking every face to correct the UV alignments. You can, which is the important part, but you dont neccessarily have to. And, when you’re about to scale your static mesh later (eg. extending a wall, or just cutting an open), the texture will start to be streched again, because the UV’s are baked to the static mesh you got from the BSP tool, so they will stretch with the object just like before.

Here is an extreme case just to show what happens when you edit the static mesh later. BSP at the left, and the right is something else im about to write below.

So i went back to think about this Object space, and UV’s and the problem that caused so much trouble was the transforming of the static mesh, which by using the Absolute World coordinates (and even when the uvs were projected locally in object space) resulted in odd stretching and wonky alignment issues when you rotate the mesh just about any direction. You should have seen this already, so i assume you know what i mean by that.

How about this UV?

This little guy can create a kinda “infinite” UV which is rotate and align with the actual mesh properly but without stretching the actual texture when you resize the mesh.

And, as a bonus, this UV can be used to drive the original material setup, so you can connect up the bumpoffset too, and all the normals are aligned properly.

This mesh is rotated, scaled and repositioned but it still projects the original material setup with all the feats the material is having. Its easy to setup, just pop in and go. The resulting UVs have no stretching, and distortions so far.

Now this image above, is clearly displays the UVs at the sides are no longer seamless, but we have some tools for that already. Adding a huge amount of inputs the resulting UVs can be individually tweaked from function inputs.

You can tweak it all the way around, but of course rotating a texture creates an issue with the normals which can be fixed by the Luos’ solution for normals, but its not a good idea to rotate the texture. Instead the shifting and scaling is what you can have, but rotation shall only be applied when normals are not your concern. (notice the bricks appear to be inset, since the uv on this side is rotated >180 degrees)

And it is kinda easy to set up, since all the input parameters are optional. i just added some inputs for this material to demo the results.

It would be nice to figure out how to align the UVs at the sides without manually tweaking them individually. It might be very simple i just dont kno’.

And here’s one more interesting image from the BSP comparison, when you create the stairs the texture will be aligned wrong (left), but if you just pop this little guy over the mesh the sides will start to appear like the image on the right, since the UV’s are coming from obj space.

Like i said this little tool can be a nice complement to the very powerful BSP tools. Just dont forget when you apply this node, you basically create new uvs for the mesh, so the UVs from the original mesh (crafted in bsp) will not be in use. This also applies to the Luos’ solutions as well.

anonymous_user_3fd16379 · May 24, 2016, 3:43am

That’s what I get for reading the quick start, then going off on my own and playing and figuring things out as I need them. Sometimes you miss some crucial information. I often learn better from having a need to do something and then figuring out how that is done rather than… Here’s the information you will need to know eventually at some point, but not have a practical need to put it into practice for it to stick. Luckily, I’m on nobody’s time table but my own, so I can take all the time I need. Although, I do need to get back to reading some more. Not to mention I got a little irritated when the documentation said something to the effect of… There’s some stuff over in the Details panel, play with the settings to see what they do.

The biggest benefit for a beginner that I can see… as I’ve read that Meshes don’t require as much overhead as BSP’s do, that you can create your basic architecture with the BSP’s and convert them to meshes, Materials and all. I just did a basic wall with doorway using the brick material I’ve been playing with and it worked out quite well and simple to do. That gives me enough to start basic level design and create my own meshes without the need for an external 3D application… for now. I’m sure I’ll need the other at some point, but for just some guy and his (adult) son playing. This makes creating something productive relatively easy without needing to add on learning 2 different programs at the same time.

I did download and install Blender last week, but quickly found I should focus on one thing at a time. Splitting too much focus between applications, I’ll learn less about both of them. So… One thing at a time. Although, I did check out some others. Still don’t like this subscription model all these companies are going to. Who with a typical 9-5 has the ability to pay 2 grand a year just to use an application? Although, I would pay that to buy the application and be able to use it to my hearts content, so C4D is looking mighty appealing when the time comes.

anonymous_user_3fd16379 · May 24, 2016, 5:14am

Good stuff for a newb though.

I think so too. Coming from outside this world, or semi-outside this world, there’s a lot to learn and it’s more about learning at this point. Vollgaser gave enough info about BSP’s for me to backburner this until I’m ready to tackle an external 3D modeling program. I really only wanted 2 things to begin with. 1. For anything I create to look at least somewhat appropriate, which is apparently harder than it has to be and 2. Create a small level with somewhat appropriate landscaping. Once I have those two things… good enough… I can move on to characters, although I think that is going to be a whole other ball game. I think I can do something with BSP’s and create basic architecture now, so I will need to move on to Landscaping. I will revisit this at another time I’m sure.

That does look ideal, but for basic architecture, it isn’t needed. I can see something like that being used for flooring or even outdoor walkways though. For a first project, I want to keep it small and simple. Maybe the equivialent of a 2 block by 2 block town center, or maybe I’m still thinking too big with that.

Out of curiosity, how was that done? It looks to me like that is from the 3D modeling program and just added additional lines / vertex where needed to be able to use the texture correctly. Is that pretty much right on target?

I wonder how supergrid would handle sizing that. I’m thinking flooring and walkways or even an old brick street. Believe it or not my street is still all brick block. Then again, I’ve seen videos of people placing pathways and able to stretch them out in many different directions and curves and it retain a proper texture look. Not sure I want to get into how that’s done yet. I have a feeling it’s mostly back in the 3D modeling program.

My son and I were talking about that last night. With everything being exact equal squares it looks kind of plain and boring after a while. I figure if SuperGrid could handle the X and Y and not worry so much about the Z, but still be able to create structures, architecturally speaking, then it might be worth the investment. I couldn’t see myself going there if everything must be perfect squares. The only thing I can see that being good for is maybe an Arena style multiplayer FPS. And our first project won’t be anything near that. We’re still kicking the can around for exactly what it would be, but being only 2 weeks into learning the software, we don’t have have to make the decision right now. Mostly it’s play and create, then decide what we’re capable of doing with the knowledge we have, which right now isn’t much. LOL

Still, I’d like to see what else it would do with non-square textures as it is. Even better yet, how it would handle something that is completely non symetrical like this…

or

Granted those are just screenshots from within a game. One being a floor, the other being a wall where the ends are covered up by other things, but the exposed texture looks appropriate. If it would merely allow for re-sizing, but retaining the texture, it might be worth having in ones toolkit to not have to fight with Materials to display correctly.

That’s okay. I’m sure it’s a common name in Russia. It’s merely a flash game and Dmitry was friends with the programmer/designer and I was part of the beta team.

Thanks!!! For now, I’ve bookmarked the page. It looks like loads of good information. On top of that, I also looked at their software. I’m not sure how it would apply yet, but it’s reasonably priced. Maybe it’s not needed at all, not sure, but sure looks like I could afford a look at the 30 day trial at least. Although, since it’s only a 30 day trial, I’ll reserve that right for after I know UE4 a whole lot better. Looks like some killer software though.

anonymous_user_3fd16379 · May 24, 2016, 5:26am

Holy cow! I feel like I’m being pulled in multiple directions and need to pick a path and go. I think I just may have to play with this some, but it’s already going on 1:30 in the morning here, so it will have to wait for another day. I do still like the idea of drag and drop meshes and materials, so this might actually be a better solution. For now it’s bed. Tomorrow is another day.

Thanks for the wonderful feedback.