Thinking about UDK Materials...

punchface

So here we have a set of wall props, mostly utility boxes.

I don't wanna talk about my geometry, I promise y'all that it's fine. There are only two places I can think of off the top of my head where I really outta delete an edge loop because it's not really doing me any good. This set of props will be going into the same project that will have m Gazebo that I shared a month or two ago, before they go into that project, I promise take 20 minutes or so to just give a last going over of the geometry and well, I expect to find almost nothing.

Anyway, whatever, I'm posting this simple set of objects because I'm hoping for advice etc. regarding the materials.

The brownish grey dude is made of rough, matte/finished plastic. The rest of 'em are some kinda mostly rust resistant bluish steel painted over with grey paint. Y'know, like mostly normal utility-box/meter basic grey like we've all seen a million times.

What do you ladies and gents think?

Cibo

The rust track at the bottom piece is good. The olive color is okay.

My problem is that the props lack a visible function (no Enterprise logos or usefull warning messages) combined with simple design and texture so the greyish color is boring.

leleuxart

Can you try uprezing the textures? The compression is a little distracting, especially this close. Since you're trying to show off materials, I'd lean more towards visuals than performance in this case. Try setting each texture to UI in LODGroup, that ensures UDK uses the max resolution(which I think is 4096?). Using better compression methods and setting them all to "nearest" instead of "linear" can help too.

Right now, I think they're looking pretty spot on. I agree that the gray is a little lacking, so some more stickers or grime might help. Also, the lighting is a little bland. It looks straight on and like AO right now. If the transparent meter had a soft shadow casting onto the box, I think that'd be a pretty nice touch

Satotiga

There's nothing, other than the colour, that suggests this is made of metal in my opinion. In my current environment I'm working on metal walls and in my material the main thing that gives the impression of metal is a reflection map which really adds to the believability of the model.

Here is the wall without a reflection map:


It looks okay but there's nothing that's telling me its made of stainless steel.

Here is is with a reflection map:


Quite a difference. To get this effect I have an overlay layer in my normal map of a scratched metal texture and I have a similar texture in my specular map which helps to pick out all the scratches and dents when the light hits it.

Here is an image of my material too:


Obviously these aren't the best models or material in the world but I'm hoping it helps to get my point across

fab-camp

as mentionde befor you need to have your textures more crispy. especially those controlling your specularity.
also could be of hepl if you post some of your texturemaps and material-configurations, as totheworld did.

a combination of specularity + spec-detail-maps, and a reflection-map (masked with some baked ambient-occlusion) could be a good start.

almighty_gir

why would you have the reflection map in the emmissive? surely you should have it lerp with either the diffuse or the specular?

praetus

Almighty_gir - I want to say that the 3Dmotive video go into the reflection in emissive. From what I remember it has more to do with how you plan on setting up your scene.

That being said, I'm not sure what type of metal you're going for. A stainless steel metal or more of a dull matte metal? If it's stainless you need to add a reflection map but make sure to mask it with your grunge map so it isn't super clean looking. Also, make sure your spec mirrors that mask. Right now, however it feels like a flat matte painted metal.

The biggest issues I have is that the textures are somewhat muddy and your placement of grime is random at best. The area around the meter looks to me like you chose a dirt brush and just randomly painted around the outcropping and called it a day. You need to consider how rain and other effects would run off of these bits and where exactly rust and grime would build up. Also, your pipes are just dissapearing into the wall. Even if the wall was sealed around the pipe you'd see some type of mortar or sealant, right?

punchface

YES! This is exactly what I was hoping for from this thread. Thanks you guys a whole lot!

Just briefly before I gotta run again (I have some chores to do today before I can come back to this) I'll say a couple of things:

leleuxart - I'll implement all your recommendations and rerender and see what happens. If I run into any questions or problems, I'll ask. Then we can see if there will be a difference. I'm hoping that there will be.

For what it's worth, the entire set all shares a set of textures that are 512x512.

ToTheWorld - Remember that although the boxes are mostly made of metal, that they are covered in a flat grey pain that totally changes their surface properties to something that much more resembles uhhh...well something matte and dull...somewhere inbetween matte platsic and even maybe cardboard or something. A quick google search for 'electric meter box' or 'utility box' or something like that shows all manner of boxes with this grey matte flat dull treatment. For what its' worth though sir, I *DO* actually have a reflection vector with a component mask etc. sharing space with the diffuse map via a LERP in my diffuse slot already...but it's turned WAY the hell down and I'm considering getting rid of it all-together because I don't really think that it's adding much to the material. There's some very faint blue from the sky that's reflecting off of the boxes that keeps them from looking even greyer than they already do but that's about it.

Your willingness to share actual caps of your material editor is awesome, thanks a whole lot.

You guys are really great....I'll be back soon.

pf

punchface

Okay...here we go:

leleuxart,

I tweaked the settings per your suggestions. I don't see a particular boost to resolution (maybe 512x512 just isn't gonna get any better) when setting my LOD group to "UI" in my three texture maps but I left it at UI anyway just because. On the other hand, changing the filter setting to 'nearest' vs. 'linear' did have a noticeable and marked effect but it was a negative one in my opinion. It didn't sharpen the resolution of the textures in a way that was beneficial. What it did was pixelate everything and make it look completely NOT anti-aliased at all. I couldn't have that so initially, I tried resetting just the diffuse and spec textures back to Linear while keeping the Normal texture at Nearest but even that made the normal map look like I had a million faced high-poly model with no smoothing on it at all.

I went back and cleaned up the geo the tiny bit that it could be cleaned up and then added a couple of tiny doodads juts because I saved a few more tris than I thought I would (I saved about uhhh, something like 120 tiangles all told) so I SPLURGED! and added a bit more detail.

Here's two more new renders after also moving the light a bit so I wasn't straight on. Y'all will see a new problem that has me stumped right now which I'll go into a bit on my next post.

So, here's a couple of new renders and a cap of my material's nodal structure from the Material Editor:

punchface

So it's really apparent in these two new renders that I now had a shadow artifact issue on three of the models with it being super-obvious on the one side edge of the box with the circular black vent.

It LOOKS kinda like my light-maps are hosed up and UV clusters are too close together...but I'm pretty darn sure that they aren't. Just for kicks, attached here is a cap of the ligthmap UVs for the Washer/Dryer Exhaust Vent which also has some really obvious shadow weirdness going on along its lower edge.

A cursory look at my UVs might irritate people because layout isn't anywhere near optimized so if you guys wanna scold me for that, that's cool, I'll own it...but should to the matter hand, it should pretty obvious that the shadow artifacts aren't because the lightmap's UV islands/clusters are too close together.