[Baking Mesh Workflow] Questions regarding Tiling and Broken Walls.

Nordhal

Hi, 

I'm having big troubles with what seems to be pretty simple. I want to create tiled stone walls with one of them broken.

To do this, I modelized the stone wall using Blender 2.79 as you can see here.  

 

Then, I created a plane and baked this using substance designer. After further tweaks, I managed to achieve this material. 

I know I need to work more on colors, but the main idea was there. I used the height map to create a separation between the earth/lime and the stones. 

That was the easy part. Now I wan to achieve the same result but for a broken mesh.

 

And this is there I have a lot of problems. I tried to create a low poly mesh from this one. 

 

Since I wanted to be able to join my tiled wall and this broken one, I tried to get the same texture resolution, despite of the further details I have for the hole. 

So I kept the resolution to 2048x2048 and split my UVS into three main parts : Back, Front, and Hole, using UDIM tiles. 

   

Since I used Substance Designer before to create my material, tweaking mostly the height baked, I thought I could use the same technique. Unfortunately, I am not able to get a good result, since grayscale levels are completely different for these three parts. 

I tried different seams to split my UVs, but I really don't know how to achieve what I intend to do. For broken stuff, I read on your forums that generally you need two textures, the tiled one , and the broken texture, used only within the hole. In my process, I don't know where to begin to generate a good broken/damaged texture.

Since I own a license for Substance Painter too, should I completely let SD to focus on Painter? I thought this was a pretty simple geometry, and I did not need to dive into Painter, but maybe I was wrong. 

Should I try to re-work my substance graph to use ID map instead of Height map? In this case, I'm afraid the separation between the lime/earth and stone will be too sharp. 

Thanks in advance for the advices ! 

Mink

I don't understand. Why don't you just cut a hole in your planar mesh and use an orthographic UV view projection.

Nordhal

Mink said:

I don't understand. Why don't you just cut a hole in your planar mesh and use an orthographic UV view projection.

Having juste one UV Map ? If I do this, I would not get the UV for the interior of the hole. Baking the front and the back is simple, yes, and can be tiled with my planar mesh.
However, I cannot manage to get correct interior of this hole, because my material is using the black color from the height map to know where should be the earth/lime between stones (I use this instead of just plain ID Map to get some stones faded into the lime), and my height map coming from the interior of my mesh is mostly gray. 

Mink

...just...use the original texture from the flat wall and project in on the mesh with the hole. You're really over thinking this shit.