Creating a Rock environment, would appreciate some help please.

skillstrengthorluck

Hey guys, as the title would indeed suggest I am teaching myself various new pieces of software. To do this I decided to create an environment piece in UE4. This was designed to allow me to learn a bit of Zbrush, Xnormal and UE4. 

Where i'm hoping someone might be able to help me out is about half way through this process.

 I have gotten as far as to sculpt a high poly rock from a low poly base mesh created in 3dsMax. Then I have managed to decimate it down and clean up a new low poly model. My low poly rock is sitting at 406 tris. Then I have baked out a normal map at 1024x1024 in Xnormal and I have taken it into marmoset toolbag 2 so that I could get a feel for how the normals were looking on the low poly rock. Initially I had some really horrible seams and I went back into 3dsMax and redid my UV unwrap in order to move them to a less conspicuous place but they I feel they are still not optimal.

My question is: How would you guys solve this? Would you simply try to hide the seams when you create the rest of the environment? Would you unwrap the rock differently to myself? A third even better option that I have not considered / learned?

The parts where the seams aren't visible looks quite nice:


The horrible seams:


The Unwrap and Normal Map:


Thanks in advance guys.

Cube Republic

Did you use a cage when baking?

skillstrengthorluck

I left the Xnormal Cage at it's default setting. I also tried making it bigger but came out with exactly the same result.

I'm not sure that the issue is with Xnormal though although I may be wrong. This is the rock in toolbag with no texture or normals applied and it still looks the same.

Cube Republic

OK. I used to have this issue all the time until I started using a cage. Here's the pipeline, although please bare with me as I'm a blender user. Triangulate your low poly if you haven't already and average the normals. Export this to bake to. Make a copy , keeping it in the same XYZ location. In blender I use a displacement modifier to puff this cage out a little bit so it envelopes the low poly. I then export this as my cage mesh. In Xnormal, where you add your low poly, right click and select browse external cage file, press OK, bake. 

Obscura

You should use all soft normals/one smoothing group on this object.

skillstrengthorluck

Aha! I believe I have solved the issue. I didn't have normals and smoothing groups selected when I was exporting the lp from 3dsMax. Hooray! 
Thanks for your help guys. 

Now I just need to work out what's causing errors like this one in this next picture and i'm away again:  


EDITL: I have now fixed this too. Thanks very much.

skillstrengthorluck

Ok well this has moved on a fair bit since I last asked for help, and this is my first time using UE4 so please bare with me, but I'm wondering what I should do to make this screenshot look better:


I am aiming for a render like the one we can see in the camera pane. I am wondering if I maybe need like a blowing sand kind of particle effect or something to tie it together a bit more? I tried to use the pre-existing Ambient Dust particle but was unable to get the desired look. Perhaps there are some nice lighting effects and things that I am missing? 

Thanks in advance guys.  

skillstrengthorluck

An update

skillstrengthorluck

Aw man, didn't catch anyone's attention with the lens flare addition. Sad face.

Anyway slight update: I have sorted the landscape textures now and I believe it's looks a lot nicer.

av0101

i would add more variation of rocks such as size large rocks, medium, small and rubble that will add better sense of scale.