Texturing big walls/floor question

Development Asset Creation
1

Hello,
I have a question which could be considered stupid, but I can’t chose the best way/workflow and take a decision.

Our project needs of walls and floors obviously, and we wrote a shader to tile the texture as a “wall” object scales.
The problem with this is that we will have all flat walls and floors, even with the use of the bumpoffset.
We decided this way to have just a plane, 2 triangles, for km and km of walls, so: performance reason. The other medal face is that this is graphicaly poor, i mean this is what we would achieve:

i can’t place an image, look at this video at 5:49 ?v=a5V13EqUqO8

pLook at the top side of the wall (not the one where lara is climbing, look up) the wall is composed by two mesh:

  1. the mesh with just the texture + normals
  2. the mesh with the modeled bricks

They perfectly merged them to obtain something which seams like a unique mesh.
I can’t do this in Unreal, I don’t know how to obtain this: they used something to merge the materials, I mean: you can’t see the seam between the two meshes, and if you look accurately the textures fade on the edges to hide the seam

This concept is not easy to explain, I hope you can understand me

What I would like to do is to perfectly merge a brick modelled wall with a brick not modelled wall with the same texture fading to hide seams…

Is it possible? How could I achieve this?

Thank you very much.

2

You could just create both meshes + texture and then use vertex painting to paint over the areas so that you hide the seams :slight_smile:
Or just create one single mesh and also use vertex painting in your 3d programm + 2 material slots

3

The problem with vertex paint is the number of triangles. To paint nicely, the mesh must have enough points or it will give bad results.
We are giving a try at the moment with a textured flat one and a textured modelled one

4

Since the huge wall seems to be a huge asset for your project you could use a material with vertex painting aswell as a mesh with enough vertices to support painting as detailed as you want it to be for the wall as it is close to the player.
The further walls could then use a shader with a generic detail texture that spans its entire height and blends the detail on it with two mask textures that tile differently to create a huge amount of variation as to where the dirt/whatever is rendered ontop of it.

To answer your question to blend flat undetailed shapes with detailed geometry seamlessly you could use triplanar mapping. Putting the meshes onto the flat shape should actually work decently enough if you match the materials up close enough in color.