Hey all i wanted to ask here what would be a good workflow to texture your assets, i love to polypaint in zbrush and then bake de color and normal maps into the low poly mesh but if you consider the amount of textures you will put into a level with this workflow it doesn´t have very good performance.
I tried to do modular textures but the results aren´t as good as the polypaint one. Would you like to share with me what is your process on texturing an asset for environments(just only props because foliage is a different workflow). Will you make a high poly mesh and then bake the maps or just take the normal map from your texture and put it in your mesh? Is it ok to use 1 texture for each asset if you manage well Level Streaming and some other performance trade offs?
Thanks for your time and good luck with your proyects!
I’m still experimenting with this too, but haven’t found any exact workflow to use yet. Mainly I’ve been baking normals in Xnormal (and AO), and then using Ddo (Quixel) to work out a good diffuse and cool details. Most of the stuff I’ve made has been neoclassical style architecture and polypainting the textures usually makes things end up looking too organic (for me).
Do you have any specific questions about the workflow or just in general? If you have more specific questions that would probably help myself and other users give you more concise feedback. Everyone has their own workflow and some use different software than others. Also, depending on what you are looking to achieve with certain assets. Also, depending on the assets you created you may use zbrush or mudbox for sculpting.
Let us know and we’ll gladly throw some suggestions and more concise workflows your way that we all use.
if i read it right then his question is whether it is ok to use large texture maps
with individual sculpted/baked normals and diffusemaps or if the engine ressources
quickly demand you to make use of tileable textures instead.
my opinion without knowing ue4-limits:
make use of tileable textures wherever you can as long the detail doesnt get
too low too much.
as a matter of fact i find it really hard to find documented information on the engines
capabilities, like:
My personal workflow is based on the type of prop i make, is it an important one that has to have a lot detail or not.
For very detailed objects i use zbrush and bake the high resolution into textures, for more common props i simply either model it in blender / maya or zbrush for more organic stuff and sort out the textures in photoshop.
You might want to check Quixel Suite for texturing, i just started using it and it’s very nice, it could speed up your workflow and achive very good resaults.
The key is to really find the balance that fits well with your assets and your game to give you the best quality.
We do have some options within the engine to profile where you may be experiencing any bottlenecks. You can get this by going to the viewport window > select show > Stat > select the options you want to look at.
Generally with regards to textures I try to manage how I use my textures to be most effective. I try to use the lowest size without losing the detail I would like. I try to consider what are hero assets vs standard assets. I would put much more time and detail into something that would be more visible and used by the player than a smaller object that would barely be seen by the player. Making good use of UV space on my asset is key as well! There are a lot of different things that can go into this question.
Ultimately it comes down to optimization and what works best for what you want to achieve.
I’m not sure there is any official documentation on this. This is all relative information depending on what you would like to do in your game, in my opinion. Using the profiling to find bottlenecks and optimizing your game to handle well at the FPS you are targeting. A lot of this is testing what works and what doesn’t then optimizing for the target platform.
I will post this on our daily forum thread for any developers that want to possible chime in on and see if they have any hints or tips and tricks that can help.
sry, no i was talking of hardware limitations with ue4.
so consoles cant scale like pc’s can. they definitely have a hard limit for 30fps / 60 fps.
e.g. crytek’s “ryse” had a budget of 2million tris (or was it polys? no i think it was tris)
for a non-occluded scene (i suppose).
so this is cryengine on xbox one but i m interested about the ue4 performance.
the reason why i m asking is:
if i have to scale my project down for consoles (lets say investors demand)
i would have that in mind on my pc-version (for the pipeline).
