Should you have any question, feel free to ask them on this thread.
If you need any assistance, you could also contact me through this email address : sebvhe@gmail.com
I will also keep this thread up to date with further fixes and add-ons to this pack
I’m currently working on improving this pack! I made two new textures :
I’m probably going to add one or two more pretty soon
I am also working on a material that would allow simple base meshes to become fully seamless rocks, without the need to sculpt bake or anything!
It is still very much work in progress but the results are encouraging!
By the way, the rock on the left is using one of the new textures.
I’ll release an update as soon as all of this is put together nicely
This looks very good and promising. But how does all these details affect the performance? Can you compare the performance cost to a setup with a high-poly mesh. I mean, performance wise, whats the aquivalent amount of polygons you could use at maximum to before reaching the same performance cost?
Sounds interesting re the material you are making. Will pick it up when updated as can think of lots of uses for it, and the rock materials themselves look superb.
Regards
Slinky
It would be quite hard to come with actual numbers when comparing these. The material itself is not very complex, however it does rely on tessellation, which can be quite resource demanding. You can dynamically change the level of subdivision in the material and therefore making it depend on the distance. So the further away you’ll be the less triangles it will have. However you still have to compute the tessellation process.
You could create the same mesh in 3D software, therefore applying the displacement, get a regular mesh and apply the material without tessellation (which is also provided). I’m going to include the process in the documentation, this could be interesting to use as a LOD for instance, although it can be a bit time consuming and can be a bit restricting when it comes to blending various textures for instance. It’s hard to compare performance between triangles and shader instructions. I could however try to throw 100 or 1000 rocks with a high poly mesh and with a low poly + tessellation and compare, don’t know how accurate that would be though.
Everything is a tradeoff, here are the pros and cons I see at the moment :
CONS :
tessellation is resource heavy, no need to hide it, it is also a DX11 feature, I don’t think that is too much of an issue in 2017, but worth noting.
tessellation doesn’t work with DFAO, I have yet to try with LPV.
tessellation is only a visual displacement, it doesn’t affect the collisions, this could be a problem if using really large scale displacement as the player could get through the rock in some places.
PROS :
you gain an insane amount of time creating the props, it only takes a few minutes and close to no skill to create quick shapes in Maya, Max, Blender etc… The only skill/knowledge required is to create UV maps. No need to sculpt, no need to retopo/decimate mesh, no need to bake anything.
a lot of texture memory can be saved since you only use a handful of tileable textures rather than unique baked maps for each rocks. If you were to not use baked maps on sculpts/traditional meshes, you would need a more complex shader, reducing the performance gap between using tessellation or not.
because the textures are photoscanned, you get an actual realistic scanned displacement, which would be hard to get if you were to sculpt. Also, the albedo perfectly matches the normal and the displacement/silhouette.
TLDR : This is perfect if you want to quickly create nice looking rocks without much work and/or knowledge. If you want to do something more performance friendly then you should invest some time in applying the displacement in a 3D software using the documentation I’m going to provide.
Here is an example of the seamless material on a much larger and complex shape, it still holds pretty well! Now working on making a proper snow shader that also reproduce older, less fresh snow in larger patches, more about that soon, picture is still very WIP.
Then I’d like to add 1-2 more textures, make a proper documentation, and then release the update
I think I am done with the shader. I ended up making one very big master material, with loads of static switches according to which features you want to activate. This is with everything on!
I wanted to make the snow more realistic than the classic Y+ shader, which only really works for very fresh snow, now you can also have packed snow in specific places, allowing to have old snow that has been staying for days. Furthermore this may make the material useful with many other blends, such as sand, stacking up in the corners!
Here is an example of different kind of snow looks you can achieve :
If you have any feedbacks on this shader, now is the time, I’m going to stop iterating very soon, because I know I could go forever if I don’t put an end to it!
Looks great. Could you show an image of the base mesh you used in the example before material application?
I don’t need snow but I’d bet this would look good with a moss material instead…
How about some vertex painted lightening/darkening of textures so we can create more variety as well as illusion of layer stratification on distant cliff faces the player wouldn’t get too close to? Just a thought.
Hi SlinkyMuffins, here is a screenshot of the mesh without displacement. Note that the tri count is about 9k because the mesh also covers the outside of the arch not seen in the screenshots. Could probably go down to 3-4k otherwise. The mesh doesn’t need to be quad only, it was just faster for me to create.
The materials work fine with moss as well, although to be honest it is not as good as snow, sand or grass. Moss distribution is actually much more complex and random.
And I totally agree with the vertex paint lightening/darkening of texture, can definitely be needed for some types of rocks especially at large scale. It will probably involve a bit of reworking on the materials as all the vertex color channels are used at the moment. But this is pretty much what I’ll be focusing on after I finish this update.
However, I was outside scanning some rocks yesterday and captured a really nice one with quite some moss, I’ll be adding it on the upcoming update if the scan turns out okay.
I am now building up some proper documentation on how to use these materials, how to create meshes to work with it etc… Some materials can have quite a lot of parameters, I am therefore explaining them one by one and providing examples on how to tweak values. It takes a lot of time though.
Nice stuff! looking forward to the update and the documentation. Especially the part on how to make meshes for it. A mossy texure is something everyone loves ;p ps: will the above mesh be included in the update?
I have been super busy polishing that update. I finally finished the documentation, it took me a lot of time, but I am very happy with it, I do believe it covers and explain everything in details.
Furthermore, I just wrapped up two new textures on top of the two previous one.
Here are a few shots, both on the default sphere and the example arch
The update will therefore contain 4 new textures, bringing the pack to a total of 10! Alongside the blending options it really allows you to cover most scenarios!
I also included material functions of the snow blendings to make it easy to add snow to other assets you’d like to include in your scene.
Next up, I need to work on a correct video presentation, if everything goes smoothly I should be able to submit this update this weekend!
Let me know what you think
I am happy to say that the update is finished and has been submitted to Epic
It will be available as soon as they process it.
In the meantime I’ll leave you with my new trailer, hope you’ll like it!
Video is not public yet, I’ll make it public once the pack is released
Furthermore I decided to make my documentation public, this is the best way, I think, for people to have a look at what they will get before buying. You can find it here :
@Sebvhe Just bought this! this is very nice textures! very beautiful! however it’s eat framerate like hell for my game LOL
Is there a way to reduce or change texture tessellation and world displacement from far distance
Thanks a lot!!
