Trying to develope medieval wood shader for houses, any help is appreciated!

FifthExodus

So for the past 2-3 weeks I've been trying to develope a medieval city of sorts, I started small with just a single house, and now instead of progressing in shape and size, I'd like to get the aesthetic looking right. I ran into some issues with textures from cgtextures / textures.com, they're not procedural enough.

Due to how the direct light in UE4 works, the wood looks entirely different when rotated 90 degrees, dark patches everywhere, really not nice.

Any ideas on where I can start with a material / shader for a simple wooden beam, which both looks good at a distance, and close up, I'd appreciate it!

FifthExodus

Any before you suggest Substance Designer, I'm more talking about the physically rendered side of things, how do I make it look realistic? And make light hit it realisitcally.

Eric Chadwick

First thing, post what you have so far, so people can understand how far along you are, and what direction you're going in.

Substance Designer is a physically-based texturing solution for realistic texturing, so it's a great suggestion for this task. But like any tool it depends on the skill of the user.

It sounds like you may need to study how PBR works, so you can figure out what kinds of textures to create.
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/PBR

FifthExodus

Eric Chadwick said:

First thing, post what you have so far, so people can understand how far along you are, and what direction you're going in.

Substance Designer is a physically-based texturing solution for realistic texturing, so it's a great suggestion for this task. But like any tool it depends on the skill of the user.

It sounds like you may need to study how PBR works, so you can figure out what kinds of textures to create.
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/PBR

I'm in the process of learning PBR at the moment, I have a question, is substance smart enough to determine whether I'm making a wood material, or like most PBR designers, does it assume I'm making something between metal and water? 



Here's what I have so far, and here's the maps

Diffuse: 

Specular: 

Roughness: 

Normal: 

FifthExodus

Also, can I import previously made textures into Substance designer, and somehow generate a roughness map from them?

Eric Chadwick

I moved your thread to the Allegorithmic section, so you'll get more support with your questions.

m4dcow

FifthExodus said:
In the process of learning PBR at the moment, I have a question, is substance smart enough to determine whether I'm making a wood material, or like most PBR designers, does it assume I'm making something between metal and water? 

Well you are the one that would modify how the actual material looks when you edit them in substance.

You can link existing bitmaps in substance designer just fine and use them within the graph as you wish.

I would also note that, when you import bitmaps into UE4 for things like roughness or masks you need to convert to linear space to match what you see in UE4 (uncheck sRGB in texture properties in UE4).