Tips on building light substances

dzibarik

So I'm currently implementing substance workflow at work and my task is to make materials for weapon customization - i.e. dirt/wear/base materials and so on. It will be used on the character screen and should be updated real time.

So any tips? So far I only know that uniform color nodes should be as low res as possible (up to 16 pixels) and that current grunge mask are pretty heavy (I currently use mask builder and random dirt). Also I need to put decals there.

NicolasW

- Try to work in greyscale the most as possible (avoid greyscale -> color and color-> grayscale
- Use the standard blend mode
- For alpha blending: use the opacity input of the blend node (instead of injected the alpha in the foreground)
- If the UV layout is composed of multiple parts (face, eyes, whatever), generate each part at its own resolution and combine everything at full resolution at the end
- If you add dynamic parameter, try to put them close to the output (so that if a node is changed, the minimum amount of following nodes will be regenerated)
- Watch the timings: some noises can be very heavy -> don't use a perlin_noise with 256 scale to make a white noise
- Noises are expensive, try to generate them at a lower resolution and make them tile if it's possible. If the noise contains low frequency details, generating it at lower resolution won't make a difference

dzibarik

NicolasW wrote: »

-
- If the UV layout is composed of multiple parts (face, eyes, whatever), generate each part at its own resolution and combine everything at full resolution at the end

Thanks, Nicolas!
I get everything except the part I quoted. What do you mean by its "own resolution"?

Froyok

What Nicolas means is that if you create an atlas at 2K for example, no need to create a 2K eye texture if you plan to resize it at 512px in the final texture. Work directly at the resolution that you need (or the relative one at -1, -2 and so on).

Also check out : https://support.allegorithmic.com/documentation/display/SD5/Performance+Optimization+Guidelines

dzibarik

ah, I see. I wouldn't work like that anyway!