Vertex painting and LODs

Drav

How do you guys vertex paint, and transfer it to lods with different vert counts, inside UE4? Is this a valid technique, or should I be looking at another approach?

Cheers

Obscura

You should avoid complex materials in lods. Usually stuff like this is baked into one texturemap for lods, and it use an individual, simpler material. Depending on the distance, and the used amount of lods, you should limit yourself to only base color map on the far lod(s)

Drav

Sure, but, if you have a half brick half plaster wall its going to show in lower loss, but it also doesent make sense to bake a new texture fore lods, as this is what we are trying to avoid through the use of vertex colour. Are you saying lods in this case should only be used in the far distance, where you won't notice the blending not being present? And do you have an example of this texture baking for lods? Cheers

Obscura

What I told is the common practice. You can make that new texture with hand, or do a vertex blend setup in your modeling package, and you can simply bake it down.

Here is an example:
https://scontent-fra3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xpt1/t31.0-8/11406707_651948291608321_7150929477793605364_o.jpg

Avvi

If you can paint vert color in a 3d package, then some of them (Blender) can try to reproject vertex color to smaller lods (Data Transfer function). Inside UE... I don't know.