I wanted to start building a map but I’m struggling on how to develop using PBR textures and modular assets.
I would like to implement a modular design for a lot of map meshes.
I am working on 2 simple meshes to start. A wall section 2m long and a corner piece.
Making walls in 2 or 1 m sections makes sense to me, having small elements will allow for greater variation, so it seems a good sort of size to work with for this.
The first problem I have disregarding PBR for a minute is that I appear to have shadowing artifacts when snapping the walls together.
The pivots are set right in the bottom corner. scale is spot on. So everything snaps beautifully.
It’s appears that because the walls are thick there can be some shadow casting between meshes even when touching.
I realise that it would be more ideal to use extruded planes for walls, due to wasted polys but it kind of made snapping and modeling a bit easier.
If I’m going to be chopping models into bits would anyone mind giving any advice on how to deal with that first?
Second issue as per the title is that I’m confused how to approach PBR texturing with this workflow.
I would need to have seamless textures to build walls out of meshes like that.
DDO and Substance Painter both seem great for texturing unique items, but I’m unsure if you could use those tools to texture assets like this.
Also I have 0 budget for software licenses.
I’m using Blender and Gimp.
Are there any free alternative tools to use?
Is anyone making PBR textures “by hand”?
Should I be going procedural?
Some of the sample materials are pretty scary!
I am by no means an expert on PBR texturing. But I am currently using Blender, dDO, nDO, XNormal and Adobe Photoshop to make my textures. But also i think a lot of PBR effects can be achieved through UE4s Material System.
I think Gimp can do most of the stuff Photoshop can, but Im pretty sure you need Photoshop to use dDO and nDO. That being said, Nvidia’s Texture Toolset can also make Normal Maps from images and if your okay with modeling High Poly and baking to Low Poly Geometry, you can use Xnormal, which is also free. XNormal can also bake Ambient Occlusion which can then be coloured inside Gimp.
Yes you need Photoshop to use dDo.
Thanks for the links, I have some plugins for Gimp as well.
I’m on a trial of Photoshop/Quixel Suite still. It is a nice workflow to bake the color maps in Blender and do the normals with nDo, but the texture generation for meshes needs to be seamless in some cases.
For this it would seem I need to get into manual editing anyway.
I think maybe some fancy material setup with blending could be a good option. Or I just make simple textures for the materials in a manual way. They will not want much detail anyway as they are repeating, along with say a detail layer, or use of decals that can break things up without having to paint anything.
I have done some more research and I thought the issue was caused by the normals not matching on the edges of the object.
They are pointing off at angles, if they where pointing straight I think it would fix the issue.
The problem is that it appears Blender is lacking a way of rotating the normal.
In Max there’s an edit normal modifier or something to solve these sort of issues, so I can’t test it out yet.
I’ll read the links you posted and see if that helps at all as well though.
I’ve been using the Generate Unique UV option for these tests, but Blender also has a lightmap UV packing feature.
This particular issue is not related to the normals necessarily. This is related to how lightmass builds lighting. However, if you say that you’re normals are pointing off at angles you can check this in the Mesh Editor/viewer to see how your normals are aligned.
I did a quick search for editing Normals in Blender and found this video. Looks like it was added last year sometime. I’m not that familiar with Blender so I couldn’t tell you for certain.
If you need to post any images feel free to do so when you can and I’ll see if I can help point you in the right direction.
Yeah, that one actually does look like a normals issue. The shadow seam issue is really only happening in shadowed areas, not in directly lit areas like this.
Would you mind sharing the wall that is having the issue and I’ll take a look at it in UE4 and Max?
If your meshes are simple enough (for things like walls) then it’s better to model it out than to create it from modular sections, you’d have a lower poly count and less draw calls.
I’d use this for everything from pipe sections to walls. The walls would be complete with more features and detailing. I would have versions with door frames, window frames, that sort of thing.
That’s the way I imagined going about it. So having things next to each other without seams would be critical.
I can build more optimised meshes for sure, the pipe sections could have no face where they connect for instance rather than be capped. It just means a loss of polys over more flexibility maybe, what’s bugging me though is that the floor mesh in the starter map is pretty much identical to my test.
The UV setup looks pretty similar, both simple cube shapes with solid sides.
As far as I can see I’ve built the wall the same way.
Yet the floor does not show this issue when tiled.
Further testing, here is your mesh in the editor from the front and then from the back with the default lightmass settings and lightmap upped to 128 from the default 32:
Everything checks out on my end with this. I would suggest that the lightmap have a couple of tweaks made though. It’s best practice to keep all the faces on the same planar connected. The part where you have the strip that is separated would be better to be connected to the main wall top and bottom for the lightmap face. This will correct some of the shadow issues on the bottom half area of the model.
As a note to the starter content and the floor there. This has the same issue. It’s not as noticeable because of contrasting materials and anything in a bright enough light will hide the seams. It’s too bright for any real soft shadows to cause the seams. Below is a comparison to show. In this I setup a single base white material then baked lighting.
Ok, I have managed to get some better results by paying more attention to my UV channel 0.
This is still with all the lightmap channel on seperate islands but with a different shape.
I guess I’ll have to try making more things and see how it goes for now.
I’m not too sure what you mean by connected planars, all the architecture examples seem to use disconnected islands and look fine bashed together.
Edit: I exported more meshes and see what you mean now about keeping planar sides connected together.
I still have to make some decisions on how to approach texturing. Any further insight would be much appreciated.
Thanks for the help Tim.
Offhand I can’t think of anything that is really pressing to pay attention to. You’ve got the majority of it under control. Having a foothold on the UVs along with lightmapping is one of the bigger hurdles to get most users heads around.
While the shadow seams issue can be overcome it can be tedious, but you’ll get there with it. It’s suggested that when using modularity for your design that keeping your seams at corners or having other meshes that cover that seam are best recommended without having to tweak the lightmass settings. There are continual improvements being made that will hopefully make this better in the future but is not necessarily a guarantee.
For the planar sides. Keeping those three polygons connected since their on the same face keeps from any shadow information being baked around their edges.
If you come across any issues or have any questions feel free to ask. I’ll gladly help out where possible.
