Texturing game ready cave system

minev

Hello,

I am developing a Oculus game, ride through a cave system.
I would need help on how to establish workflow to get a HP sculpted cave system into a game engine, textured, looking pretty and all..

How I did for now:

Sculpted HP and LP cave - sculpted separate hanging stalactites in HP and LP -
baked 2K NormalMap (XNormal) for cave and 1K for a stalactite - imported into Unity5 - ''Standard' PBR shader with just Normal map applied - result in two pictures attached

Problems are obvious, 2K Normal map for huge cave part is not enough, so we need to brake it into smaller parts, each with it 2K Nmap, but then we have seams where those parts connect, how to go around this?

How to hide that stalactite is just a floating geo in cave? We want to just properly texture that connection, but whenever I import both 'cave' and 'stalactite' together into Substance Painter and want to paint the seam, one part just dissapears when I paint on other... as they are separate objects with separate UV maps... is there a workflow that enables to just paint and each stroke just goes to UV map it needs to go ?

Eric Chadwick

You should develop this using modular pieces. I have done this kind of cave system for a game before, and it works great. Many games have done this as well.

http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Modular_environments

In particular, see Skyrim’s Modular Approach to Level Design.

Edit.... you don't need 2048's, that's going to kill your texture budget. You can tile smaller maps, and this will allow more variation. You can also use "detail mapping" to get finer detail when you get close to the walls, look it up in the Unity docs.

Be aware, normal mapping doesn't look great in VR. You'll get better results with parallax mapping, and/or tesselation with displacement.

minev

@Eric Chadwick,
tnx for links, useful stuff!

We are trying to implement such modular approach. For now, I have created base meshes with standard connecting 'beginning/end' that we plan to use as 'building blocks' for our cave system. (credits to 'Luos' for some parts: forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?64883-FREE-Luos-s-FREE-Modular-Caves-Rocks-mini-Package!)

Plan is to get these base meshes into Zbrush, mask the standard part and sculpt the details to be baked into low poly...

Eric Chadwick

You could certainly do unique sculpts for each part. But I'd suggest making a few tiled textures, and painting blends between them using vertex color (or a mask texture). This will give you more texture detail, and take less time to make.

minev

Thanks for responses Eric!

I have sent you a PM and posted in Jobs, I hope to find a person to help us get this workflow going on.