Mesh Morph/Blends

Dave Jr

Hi,

I have sculpted, retopped and bakes some stairs that look nice in Ue4... however I did these as a damaged version and feel that ideally it would be useful to produce a non-damaged set and blend the damage detail/normal between the two....

ideally these will have different topology...would this be a case of vertex painting the damage onto the non damaged version or would i have to produce a blend somehow? Would the blend take into account the maps aswell as the mesh? or could i just blend the maps across...

Much appreciated.

Obscura

You not must need different topology, but then you need dynamic tessellation, and displacement. This approach can work very well. You could vertex paint it too if you want, and use vertex offset (world position offset). This would result less polygons. There are a lot of ways for doing what you want, maybe you could even morph it.

Dave Jr

Hi,

Cheers for the reply - its appreciated!!!

So ideally do I need to use the same vertex amount across both meshes? As you put "You must not need different topology"

I know how to use vertex paint to paint across different materials/textures and add some variation I just wasn't sure if this would work with a bake from one relying on UVs and then attempting to use another assets normal map on it.

How would I need tessellation and displacement? Sorry, you've sorta said its possible and then a bunch of semantics but nothing of implying how or where to start.

Obscura

https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Resources/ContentExamples/MaterialNodes/1_12/index.html

You not must need different topology, if you use displacement. You actually need one mesh then, and 2 displacement maps. Then you can put one mesh into your level with the one dsplacement map, and the another with the another. Or you can vertex-paint the displacement.