(Solved) UV Scale in SP vs Material Tiling SD

bitinn

Hi,

I have been wondering about this. When I author a material in SD, I am able to change the material tiling factor to check how it may look with higher UV scale.

SD (this is under 3d scene -> materials -> edit):



SP:




While that works, I believe it isn't the same as the UV scale for material in SP. When I examine the same asset at the same texture size, both at 1024. SD show details that's blurred in SP.

SD:



SP:



I am not sure how to author a material that output the same texture in both SD and SP, when UV scale isn't 1.

Also an important side question: my asset use a low texel density, 2.56 px/cm; conventional wisdom suggests I should author my material at 1024 instead of 256 to maintain some flexibility. But using that made me need UV scale > 1 in SP, usually at 4~6. So should I really author at 256 instead?

bitinn

My OP might not have been clear, so to rephrase my issue:

- At UV scale 1, everything is fine, my expected texture size is 1024, SD and SP behaves the same.

- But one problem: because my texel density is low (2.56px/cm), a material that look fine on the default cube (10.24px/cm), will look wrong on my actual assets.





- My natural thought is to use material tiling, which looks fine in SD:




- But after exporting to material, SP doesn't work the same, details are lost (I turned off height channel for clarity):




I can recover some details with "Nearest" filtering, but never quite as good as SD.



So, should I author my material differently and avoid material tiling option in SD?

poopipe

You should set the size to 'relative to parent'  when exporting for Painter.

If you want to use the designer tiling just expose the tiling parameter before export. 

bitinn

poopipe said:

You should set the size to 'relative to parent'  when exporting for Painter.

If you want to use the designer tiling just expose the tiling parameter before export. 

But I did.

What I don't understand is why SP UV scale behaves differently from Tiling in SD?

bitinn

I should really clarify the Tiling is NOT the tiling X/Y on the Tile Generator node, but the Material tiling setting. I don't think I can expose it.



Also my UV looks like this, multiple models sharing the same texture, you can see the height map in background, if I author a material that looks fine on the standard cube, it will look strange without tiling or UV scale on my models.

poopipe

I misread your post, sorry.

I'm pretty certain the following is happening (from memory, haven't checked) 

Assuming you're not using dynamic material layering in Painter you have a fixed texel density and the uv scale parameter simply shrinks your material to make it tile more often. 

In designer the tiling parameter affects the UVs on the display mesh and increases/decreases texel density. 

bitinn

poopipe said:

I misread your post, sorry.

I'm pretty certain the following is happening (from memory, haven't checked) 

Assuming you're not using dynamic material layering in Painter you have a fixed texel density and the uv scale parameter simply shrinks your material to make it tile more often. 

In designer the tiling parameter affects the UVs on the display mesh and increases/decreases texel density. 

Thx! But then my question becomes:

- Is it possible to author material in SD that accounts for SP UV scaling without having to check it in SP?

- Are we expected to only author in UV scale = 1? Material Tiling effectively increases texel density which is not ideal.

- I am not sure which approach is better for my cases: I followed Sims 4's method of texture per model(s); but I know I can also create tile-able texture atlas and then create UV for them. I prefer to not change my approach, but which makes more sense given my low texel density?

bitinn

Got a tip from allegorithmic forum:

There is a Safe Transform and Material Transform node in SD, I can use it to set the width/height of output(s) into some % of the input(s). The output from Material Transform node looks identical to UV scaling in SP, I think under the hook they both just took the input and downscale the texture.

I am ok with this approach, save me tons of time moving between SD and SP.

poopipe

Painter is geared to working with UVs in 0-1 space,  it won't apply texture to  areas outside of uv shells and unless you're using dynamic layering you're working at a fixed texel density.
This is fine but it makes anything other than unique mapping awkward - if you're making tiling maps/atlases it's probably best to stick to designer. 

In terms of actual game production... 
On the project I'm working on now we author all individual materials at the same texel density in designer. These are then used at 1-1 scale in Painter on asset sets with uvs that are authored at the same texel density.  We generally put between 3 and 20 modular assets (forming a set)  onto a single texture sheet (size is dependent on the set), making extensive use of uv overlapping etc.  We did the same thing minus painter on the last two as well.

 doing things as described above basically makes correct density and (importantly) feature scale the default - you have to actively get it wrong.. 

bitinn

poopipe said:

On the project I'm working on now we author all individual materials at the same texel density in designer. These are then used at 1-1 scale in Painter on asset sets with uvs that are authored at the same texel density.  We generally put between 3 and 20 modular assets (forming a set)  onto a single texture sheet (size is dependent on the set), making extensive use of uv overlapping etc.  We did the same thing minus painter on the last two as well.

I am doing pretty much this. My problem was material authoring in SD, which I only use to create material to be used in SP, but then ran into issue with UV scaling.