Tessellation nowhere close to Substance Designer?

kdobkowski

Hey Everyone,

I've been practising low poly stylized texture creation in Substance Designer. I have created a wooden plank texture which turned out amazing in designer but once same settings were applied in UE4, the look is, well... far from what I see in designer. I can't seem to figure out why, which frustrates me a good bit. 

Here are the images of, texture in designer, in ue4, the settings for tessellation and the height map respectively. 









Can anyone help me figure out how I can achieve exact same look and feel as seen in the designer?

Thank you in advance!

Obscura

Tessellation isn't so lowpoly lol. Your mesh would need higher base division to remove the edge artifacts in the tessellation. I'm thinking maybe you are also referring to the lighting because you say the exact same look. In that case, you could apply the same environment map in Unreal, as what you used in Designer.

kdobkowski

Obscura said:

Tessellation isn't so lowpoly lol. Your mesh would need higher base division to remove the edge artifacts in the tessellation. I'm thinking maybe you are also referring to the lighting because you say the exact same look. In that case, you could apply the same environment map in Unreal, as what you used in Designer.

These are indeed a single face planes, if I have a plane of say 50 faces, and throw tessellation on it, once I tile the planes won't that hit the performance substantially?

Obscura

You are already hitting it with the tessellation :'D Its very wasteful to use tessellation on planar things like this. For a movie its alright but you shouldn't use it like that in a game.

kdobkowski

Obscura said:

You are already hitting it with the tessellation :'D Its very wasteful to use tessellation on planar things like this. For a movie its alright but you shouldn't use it like that in a game.

Would you recommend paralax occlusion instead?

Obscura

Probably only a normal map. In a case of a game. For cinematic, or still image, anything that looks good.

kdobkowski

Obscura said:

Probably only a normal map. In a case of a game. For cinematic, or still image, anything that looks good.

I'm trying to achieve this effect https://bit.ly/2ti2Chq on the floor plank tiling. I noticed these planks are offset, was hoping I could do it with tessellation. How would you suggest I go about recreating this style? Would I have to manually create each plank? I mean, it looks pretty darn close in designer (not exact, but the depth offset feel). Maybe I'm just trying to cut corners by sacrificing performance (tessellation), which is a bad approach I guess.

Zack Maxwell

Paralax is workable, but I've never seen it used well. Either the effect is negligible, or winds up looking objectively worse.
I think the situations in which it would be good to use are actually pretty rare; like wooden reliefs in a wall which don't touch any of the borders.

Obscura

It shouldn't be tessellation. I made a breakdown picture of whats happening on the screenshot you are showing:


The red areas are tiling textures like yours, I will get back to them later. The green and blue pieces are somewhat modeled out, but the green still uses a tiling texture. Or if in the reality, this one doesn't, it could. They also give some real height variation, but basically box meshes.

About the red - tiling texture and its feel of depth:


I made a cross section view of your plank height and theirs. You can see that they use a lot of slopes. The edges of the planks are damages, and angled, so they can be much better represented using only a normal map.

Another example of this (from Polycount wiki):

kdobkowski

Oh god that's actually very helpful!  

I'll go back and try apply your approach and come back with the results!

Thank you sooo much!