Jeep CJ66 - Unreal Engine 4 - Custom Normals - Substance Designer [WIP]

Quack!

Hey everyone!  At the start of the new year I wanted to dedicate time to working on a large-scale project. I decided that I would take the workflow from Cold Iron we have developed and try to apply it to a Next-Gen asset. Next-Gen in this case for me would be anything Xbox Scorpio+ (excluding PS4Pro, X1, PS4).

I wanted to try to get a glimpse of how assets may be crafted going forward. So I set a few design principles for my workflow of the future.
1. Almost zero baked normal maps and/or high poly.  Making the model twice via the high poly is easily one of the most time consuming extraneous aspects of current game art. So fuck doing that shit anymore and I will just be throwing tris/verts at the model. I may still bake normals for some fidly bits, but only to a small degree.
2. To realize #1, we MUST use custom normals.  Maya 2016+ does custom normals to a 90% quality level by default. But at Cold Iron we have developed simple tools to make applying custom normals easy and jumps the quality level to the max.
3. To realize #1 we must also use Mesh decals/deferred decals everywhere.  We are using mesh decals on every thing at Cold Iron, so I want to iterate on and improve how we make and use decal sheets.
4. Advance materials inside of Unreal Engine 4 are a necessity. Complex blends, advanced shader fx per material, vertex based placement of materials, POM/Tessellation for necessary materials.
5. No visible triangles. No real triangle limit, but I will keep it below 200k verts.


Substance Designer Tire WIP



Start of detailing rear end WIP



Quick Blockout of Vehicle and Materials along with a simple photography dome.

Quack!

Tail Light Material WIP.

There isn't any translucency response yet, which I would like to get in there.

AtticusMars

Question: How will working this way affect texturing the mesh? Given that a lot of masking techniques rely on using a curvature map generated from the normal map?

It seems like you touched on this in point 4 but I'm not sure I understand what 'vertex based placement' means, does that mean procedurally placed or manually (like painting vertex colors)? Or some mix of the two?

Quack!

AtticusMars said:

Question: How will working this way affect texturing the mesh? Given that a lot of masking techniques rely on using a curvature map generated from the normal map?

It seems like you touched on this in point 4 but I'm not sure I understand what 'vertex based placement' means, does that mean procedurally placed or manually (like painting vertex colors)? Or some mix of the two?

Good question!

So, with custom normals, we generally bevel a TON. So if I find it necessary, I can get a completely useable curvature map from my low poly model. 
If I didn't want to do that, and the model had the bevels to support it, you can easily vert paint details in and modulate the vert painting with a mask to generate any wear/tear you want.

Right now, I am going for show room quality of materials here, but as I get further I'm kicking around the idea of doing a 'lived in' version to show off some of these techniques.

With all that said, texturing now becomes much different.  Instead of spending most of our time outside of the engine in a 3D package and a painting package, we are now spending most of the time in engine using the complex materials and vert tools.  The beauty of this, is that it does allow us to proceduralize and iterate to a MUCH higher degree then previously possible.

Quack!

Worked quite a bit on the front bumper and adjusted the proportions of the entire Jeep to be more accurate.  I'll probably continue along the front front side, hitting the headlights and grill next.

(view the images in a new tab to see the them all high res and shit)

Polygoblin

fascinating how you're getting so much from so little. what are the tradeoffs w the shader trickery resource-wise? Are these assets cheaper or mostly quicker to make and easier to iterate?

This is how we've been making gun components in Gunstruction. Heavy lifting with bevels, SGs and decal sheets. No baking whatsoever. With severe time limits, it's the only way. Weird to see this method encroaching on more traditional ones. and its a little spooky that high poly modeling is beginning to be less important.

Quack!

Polygoblin said:

fascinating how you're getting so much from so little. what are the tradeoffs w the shader trickery resource-wise? Are these assets cheaper or mostly quicker to make and easier to iterate?

This is how we've been making gun components in Gunstruction. Heavy lifting with bevels, SGs and decal sheets. No baking whatsoever. With severe time limits, it's the only way. Weird to see this method encroaching on more traditional ones. and its a little spooky that high poly modeling is beginning to be less important.

So these assets are much more expensive at runtime then traditional modelling.  That is the tradeoff for the freedom of not having to make a high poly model and deal with baking and whatnot.  Your vert count and shader cost will be substantially more expensive then a standard high->low bake method.  You have lots of material blends and tons of bevels to get the custom normals to work.  I am 100% confident that you could not make a "realistic" game on current hardware (read: XboxOne or Switch) without some MASSIVE tradeoffs in the scope and complexity of the game. You could make some assets with this, but not all. However, if you make a 'stylized' game, or are slightly less concerned with realism, you can use this currently(Alien Isolation may have done most assets with this method).  In the near future though, when XboxOneX is the lowest common denominator(like the XboxOne/Switch are now) there is no reason you couldn't apply this to the vast majority of models in a game, including characters(do we need a high poly character model when the models LOD0 can be 120k+ verts?)

Games have been doing this for a while now, Racing games in particular have been eschewing the high-low bake and just throw verts at the problem.  But now that we have deferred decals, custom normal tools, in engine vertex painting, and shader/vert headroom, we can start making the assets that we traditionally baked.

And you asking that question has now made me need to prove out the workflow, so I'll for sure be making a 'lived in/dirty' version after I complete the showroom version.

CybranM

Looking forward to seeing this project progress. I'm interested in seeing how the medium-poly turns out

Quack!

A little tangent, I will be doing a dirt road variant of the final scene, rather than just the current sterile dome environment, so I made a dirt road in Substance Designer.

Larry

Menchen said:

I wonder how will you manage to set up your decal materials, since ue4's deferred decals doesn't support POM or metalness.

So doing a road variation of the material, means he adds a road decal on top of the material itself?

Quack!

Menchen said:

Larry said:

Menchen said:

I wonder how will you manage to set up your decal materials, since ue4's deferred decals doesn't support POM or metalness.

So doing a road variation of the material, means he adds a road decal on top of the material itself?

No, I meant on the jeep itself. He is using the star citizen workflow, therefore he is going to need decals for details and custom normals (he explains it in the OP). 

However, I'm just asking how he did or he is going to do those decals considering how limited ue4 is in that regard. 

At Cold Iron we had our technical artist add in a mask that gives us more options for mesh decals.  We can now dictate what is metal and what isn't, so we can have a divot on a surface with a metal screw in it.  This is possible with the stock limitations of the UE4 mesh decal implementation, you would just have to float a metal screw(with a simple metal material with 1 bit alpha) over the mesh decal(and deal with the sorting that can occur there).

Quack!

Threw the dirt and Jeep together in Unreal Engine 4 and whipped together a quick vertex dirt blend on the tires for funzies.  This is the start of iteration and creation of the final scene.  I figured I could bounce between the jeep and the scene as I lose focus.

Quack!

Made some simple grass in Substance Designer and threw them into Unreal. Still a bit WIP, need to clean up the normal and opacity map and get some more color/shape variation in there.

Quack!

Steering wheel! About 50% done with it.

Quack!

Started to model out the tires.  50% ish complete.

Quack!

Tires ~85% Complete!