In my material-spec, I was using a 2-texture method with a 4-channel RGB+Displacement in the G-channel (for fidelity) and a XYZ normal texture. Given that alpha doubles-up on RAM it’s I wanted to explore other options.
I tried DeriveNormalZ but the texture compression/math leaves a bit to be desired.
Thusly, I broke down and expanded to 3rd sample (boo-hoo, lol). However, I find myself in an interesting conundrum…
The 3rd sampler will hold Displacement in the G-channel, but what to put into the other 2? Quixel-mixer is the source for my textures and they all seem to be opaque, so no opacity on most. All samples tend to come with an Ambient-Occlusion but since I have all-dynamic lighting, what might I use this map for?
Lastly, I don’t always get a roughness, but it seems to come with more samples than most (vs solid 0 or 1). Suggestions here? Is it worth using the slot for a roughness map, or is something else more desirable?
I thought of using the channels to add a built-in noise texture to work with, or a greyscale moss/deco thing to mix over the main texture. Anything goes. Any nifty uses for other maps to spruce up a material given I space?
AO isn’t for static lighting only. It works with dynamic.
Roughness is as important as anything else. It can make all the difference sometimes.
Why don’t you like derivednormalZ? It’s used professionally with fantastic results. Not any less than a full normal map.
My biggest advice though - if you aren’t a specialized material artist with sole job of doing nothing but this, I wouldn’t worry too much over this degree of optimization. Unless you have many thousands of materials, an extra texture or two won’t move the needle.
Also, what textures to use really depends on the asset, the art style, hardware bottlenecks, and so on.
Whenever I plug in an AO texture to the node, it only seems to make my instruction count go up…lol. No visual chnage to the scene. I have a post-process volume and have the AO Intensity set to 1.
Even without a texture-sample/map, and a 0 being fed into the node, AO does seem to show in the editor. This doesn’t visually change if I have AO enabled with a texture map, either.
To be fair, I’ve NEVER used any kind of static lighting, only dynamic (sun-object w/directional, some particle-systems, spells, torches). Do I need to enable anything else?
I’ve seen scribblings to the effect that one can multiply the albedo by the AO map but I’m ok without it (and the extra expense).
I don’t really have any other options as Mixer is my standard and they don’t really offer anything else for their surface-materials, so I am not too bummed about lack of an option/opportunity, but I’d be nice to ‘put it to good use’ if there’s a tip/trick or two.
As for the DeriveNormalZ, I don’t have a picture, b/c I already moved on and have been on a bit of a roll the last couple days (many changes since then), but it always seemed as if the output fidelity was just a hair less than what you get from the native-map. Detail lighting always showed a slightly blocky/pixelated output. That could, admittedly, be due to the encoding changing but I didn’t play around with things enough to know better; ultimately, the instruction cost was too costly as I have a few tri-planar normals and the it just ballooned.
I’m happy with the 3, it actually didn’t lose out too much as when I snuck it into the material I figured out a way to claw back a sampler so… Looks ok to me:
Looks ok to me: