Blend masking character like in the tech demo UE4

VisceralD

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0IzSfNmi1I"]Unreal Engine 4 - Character Aesthetics - YouTube[/ame]
So I’m curious on how this was done, I can reverse engineer most of it just by looking at it not everything. Such as how are the screws on this guy so detailed?

Is this just a regular bump map? Because for it to be that sharp at this close up it would have to be a 4k or 8k map. However my theory is that each one refers to its own material map. In which case I have no idea how that would be done. Maybe a floating plane, with an opacity map. Notice on the breakdown each screw is yellow, and there is only 1 yellow dot in the UV map. So did they unwrap it by pixel, or placed a face on the topology to where the screw will be.

Next I’m curious on how they got so many colors on the character. I mean I understand that you have a regular picture with many color groups having material ID’s. Then you just connect it to the diffuse and it spreads the different colors, in to groups. But when you look at how the material is set up it is not. Not connected to the color channel but rather the RGB and alpha channel. So with those inputs they should be limited to just 4 colors and not more, but they have several.

|*BILLY$CLINT*|

A lot of what see is actually really high rez textures that they title heavily across the model. They also make use of a lot of mask textures to separate all the different parts that need to be textured. The botls look crazy high rez because of the BC5 normal map compression that they are using in UE4.

Shift`

So in the demo they used 2k maps, but the thing is they broke the character down a lot. You can actually see this when they show the color masks on the character, (2 minute mark), so in reality it is several 2k normal, spec, and diffuse maps. The reason why everything is so sharp is because of the tiled texture sure, but as well as the fact that a screw can take up roughly 20% of the space on a texture.

/anty/

VisceralD
This color texture is the mask in linear space for material layers. Each material has own settings and textures.
https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Rendering/Materials/LayeredMaterials/index.html

VisceralD

@Shift "The reason why everything is so sharp is because of the tiled texture sure, but as well as the fact that a screw can take up roughly 20% of the space on a texture. "
how could this be done, Is the actually wire frame/mesh giving an individual face to each screw so that they can be unwrapped that way.

@anty: So I red that entire article and at the end they write that this is not efficient and its better to do things the old way. I thought that this new technique will be the core of what makes next gen games look so good.

JordanW

The character is broken into multiple sections, upper body, arms, head, legs, accessories. Each section has it's own baked normal map. each section has it's own layer set. So red channel mask on the head may be metal, but on the torso may be fabric.

The doc basically says use the old way for mobile, this is too heavy for mobile. baking stuff down will always be more efficient but with increased hardware power we can do more expensive materials to get better visuals.

Also using a dxt5 RGBA you can actually have 5 layers, since 1 layer doesnt need a mask since it's the bottom.

Screws arent in the tiling textures, they're a layer we masked in. Their layers have solid colors since it looks better than a noisy texture for small metal details.

VisceralD

Thanks Jordan that's exactly what i needed

VisceralD

However I guess what I need to learn why they decided to do things that way, specifically. Was it just a lot of trial and error.