When to apply displacement in the pipeline to Unreal?

Development Asset Creation
, , , ,
1

I created a wood material inside of Substance Designer which has a lot of bumps, knots and cracks that have displacement. I want to use this material on walls that need to appear old and it needs to be real displacement.

The issue i have is that i want to apply the material to a model in painter but don’t now if i should displace it before bringing it into painter, inside of painter, or after painter inside Unreal.

If i displace it after painter, then it may come out different than i imagined. Displacing it inside painter may slow down the program a lot because i intend to use up to a few hundrerd thousand polygons.

(A model with this many polygons is actually only a few Megabytes when using Nanite in Unreal so it is not really a problem since i will make everything modular. I’m trying to find a workflow to create high detail models but most sources bake to low poly without any displacement or defining silhouette on the model, and almost every tutorial on Nanite meshes uses Megascans).

Thanks for any help!

2

Hey there @b0rn2kil! So the fun part is when nanite was introduced, tessellation (what is used for displacement maps in UE4) was deprecated in UE5 in favor of nanite. That said you seem to already have your pipeline prepared for nanite meshes so that’s a plus!

You would regularly apply displacement maps themselves in the material in UE4 so you could control it well.