FWVN edge wear material function for dynamic procedural texturing

Obscura

I got a bunch of requests for a tutorial or release of the fwvn edge detect technique in the past, so I finally decided to take some steps and roll it into a material function, which I will make available very soon. Until then, here are some preview screenshots. C&C are welcome.

The material function will look something like this. Unfortunately the amount of inputs can't really be reduced further, if we want to keep it nicely customizable. 

The actual effect applied on the color and metallic channel:



Lit view:


If you want to go gross, it could be also hooked up into a perturb normal function, to make normals. Unfortunately this suffers from strong aliasing at distance.



The technique could be used to a make edge wear on any mesh that has beveled edges with face weighted normals, it doesn't necessary need to be hard surface stuff.

Link to the download will be available in this thread in the upcoming days, so stay tuned. I only want to make some slight adjustments now, and to wait a little bit for peoples input on it, so it can be adjusted to the needs before releasing it.

musashidan

Great stuff, Kristof. As discussed, the custom grunge map input would be very nice.

Obscura

Yep, its already added. The input of it is called GrungeTexture, and its visible on the picture where I show how the material function looks currently. This texture uses world coordinates to avoid uv seams, and its used to break up / customize the edge line shape. The whole material function takes around 30 instructions, which isn't so bad in my opinion.

Obscura

I should add a switch to make it able to do it with a normalmap too. As seen here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dy7N9lOWraE&index=8&list=PL0E46ZI2yrE-k2vPrSlBJS--7gu1tv0FE&t=0s

Obscura

I added a feature to make random offsets on the world aligned grunge map, so the tiling isn't obvious. This isn't exposed, because the inputs it takes are grabbed from the mesh. For now, I thought random vertex colors could be used on the different elements as input for the offsets, plus actor position. Even one channel of the vertex colors is enough. To add random vertex colors to your mesh, you could do it like this, but I'm sure there are other ways too.
https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/3ds-max-programming/assign-random-vertex-color-per-element/td-p/7127413

KyleK

This is amazing! Is it a post process material or did you manage to do it another way?

Obscura

@KyleK - No, it isn't a post process, its a material function node so you can do it and customize it on a per material base.

KyleK

Obscura said:

@KyleK - No, it isn't a post process, its a material function node so you can do it and customize it on a per material base.

That is absolutely amazing, so you would be able to replace baking curvature maps and be able to use it along with randomized edge breakup (using noise or whatever) to give a really nice procedural edgewear right in engine?

Obscura

Thats right.

KyleK

Looking forward to it so much. Great work!

LTS3D

Awesome! I've kept an eye on this shader in your original thread. Might have to give it a download and intergrate it into our procedural texturing shader

Obscura

Tests with a normal map:

KyleK

Insane!!! 

musashidan

Looking really good, Kristof.

Obscura

Menchen said:

I guess it is based on Josh Van Zuylen's material that he posted in his artstation, right? Because I remember seeying here and there some artists using pretty much a very similar function for custom normal meshes. I tried to do it once, but I couldn't get it to look good

Keep us updated

No. I was working on this like a year and a half ago, or so. I just got back to it because I got some messages from various people asking for a breakdown. Here is a link to the original post (scroll down a little bit). I may be wrong, but I would assume its the opposite, and they got if from here Or maybe not. This short breakdown was made almost 2 years ago, but it didn't include as much customization as the current one:
https://us.v-cdn.net/5021068/uploads/editor/sj/apmvtvz1bppp.jpg 

https://polycount.com/discussion/157279/the-wonders-of-technical-art-unreal-engine/p2

melviso

Really. Nice!!! This would save a lot of time and getting certain details in would be easier. Thanks man

Obscura

Since there wasn't too much actual feedback, I'm looking for one or two guys for internal testing before releasing this. Throw me a pm with your email address if you would want to test, or you can write me an email directly at kristof_lovas@hotmail.com.

Obscura

Giveaway for pre-testing is closed, I found my people. Thanks! The download will be up in 1-2 days.

Obscura

Added a new breakup method, and the grunge map became the secondary one, as this gives much more natural results. Thanks to @musashidan. Now the edge line width can be varied, with 2 parameters, minimum edge width, and maximum edge width.




Reference:

Mehran Khan

Hey man, I  was just planning on making this exact same thing in unity (ASE). I think I know how to go about it, but what I want to know is are you calculating curvature in realtime or have an input map for that?

Obscura

Hi.its extracted  in realtime.

Obscura

Currently it adds around 30 instructions.

Obscura

Added convex / concave separation, and its working on both normal map and vertex normals. 

Example with beveled edges (vertex normals):


Example with a normal map input:


And an example with some noise texture break-up and convex only edges:

turbinea

Very, very nice!

Would it possible to handle convex / concave separately? What i mean is, to use green lines for scratches and red lines for grease / dust buildup.

Obscura

turbinea said:

Very, very nice!

Would it possible to handle convex / concave separately? What i mean is, to use green lines for scratches and red lines for grease / dust buildup.

Sure.

musashidan

@obscura just PM'd you that first crate unwrapped.

KyleK

Amazing work, I cannot wait to test this!

musashidan

KyleK said:

Amazing work, I cannot wait to test this!

Yep, @obscura has put some serious work into this. 

gozu

Ahhh wow. This looks amazing. Great job!

Niber

Hi Obscura, that look amazing! Any updated ETA for the download?

Am I understanding right that the limitation to this technique is that it really only works for thin wear on meshes with thick chamfering? I.e. you can't really do big chunks of paint chipped off from the corner of a building (unless that corner was very chamfered)?

How were you able to isolate the convex parts (red lines)? I can do the same by multiplying the AO map over the lines (making the questionible assumption that any edge covered by AO is "probably" convex), but based on your pictures I think you've discovered a more mathematical solution.

Obscura

@Niber - Hi. I'm not fully sure about the upload date, currently I'm very busy with work, so I don't have much time to work on this. I will be done with my current project in the next week or so and then I will get back to this. Weird enough, the current version works better when the input is a normal map. I need to fix the errors that it does with beveled meshes and then it should be ready to upload, I think thats the only thing left. Yeah, its a mathematical solution, and it does great job on identifying convex vs concave. The edge line width can be set so you don't need to add very wide bevels either.

@gozu - Thanks!

Niber

Obscura said:

@Niber -  Yeah, its a mathematical solution, and it does great job on identifying convex vs concave.

Any hint what that math is? Would be a huge benefit to the project I'm working on (I already have all the other stuff implemented) 

Obscura

Nice try :'D  Alright, due to the big interest from people, I think it would be better to upload to vertex normal and the normal map one separately so people who are fine with using it with normal maps don't have to wait. I'll do this today after work, so check back in like a day.

Obscura

Download to the tangent space normal map one available here:
https://gum.co/ykMbP

Have fun! I'll get back to the vertex normal one soon.

Niber

How come you decided to make it into a "Custom" node instead of using material nodes?

Obscura

Looks much more organized, and professional, and it gives me some protection. Is there a problem with that? You could translate it back to nodes if you would want to.

K

Very cool stuff! Would it be possible you think to make a round edge shader with this? Perhaps using a normalised distance field and the edge mask as alpha?

Losersteelman

This is really cool, when will you be releasing the FWVN version? Really looking forward to this. Already been using this in a Material Function and a MasterMaterial but really interested in the World aligned grunge texture part. Please release it soon!

Obscura

Hey. a grunge map could be already used with the released normal map one. I will probably make a video about it next week.

Losersteelman

Yea, I bought it already, trying to get it to work=)

Losersteelman

I don't have any tangent map normals on my geo edges since I use face weighted normals so I need the vertex one. I use it in my master material with a static switch to turn it off and on different material instances. I use it as a mask which I layer blend scratched steel material function over but sometimes the mask leaves straight edges that look bad yours looks really nice and you have some normal roughness along the edges so freaking sweet. I have to learn how this is done. Please=)

johngorat

Bought the tangent space normal map version and now very exited to get FWVN version to play around!

Losersteelman

Obscura said:

I should add a switch to make it able to do it with a normalmap too. As seen here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dy7N9lOWraE&index=8&list=PL0E46ZI2yrE-k2vPrSlBJS--7gu1tv0FE&t=0s

Hey, Could you please show me your material setup for this? I would really love to know how you're doing this.
Please.

Ginsplosion

Hi - fantastic thread and function you've made possible. Having some issues getting the normal version to work (just purchased on Gumroad) - I've used a comp mask to use either the red or green channel due to issues related to float3/4 undefined arithmetic or something to that degree.

Any update on the FWVN version as I'm currently working on a full AI/SC type workflow and this would work wonders and save me trying to generate edge wear through means of decals/trims.

Obscura

Hello. Convex and concave are packed up in the red and green channel.

Ginsplosion

Obscura said:

Hello. Convex and concave are packed up in the red and green channel.

Thanks, I simply used a mask component twice (R & G) and added them together from that point. Not entirely sure the normal map method is going to give me the realistic type of edge wear shown earlier in this thread utilising the FWVN method as this seems to have more control due to more inputs.

Hoping you do find the time to push that version.

Thanks!

benmerrick3d

I second that, would love to see you push on with the second version too. Keep up the good work

jorg1234

Hey! Love this! Did you ever release a vertex normal function? 

Obscura

Hey. No, because of some technical issues. Doing this with vertex normals requires sampling the neighbour or near by vertex normals, which is only possible using a vertex normal texture, which breaks the purpose of the whole thing. There is a way of doing this without a need for a vertex normal texture,  by using screen space derivatives, but the result isn't consistent and screen size dependant.

jorg1234

Ok I see, well, thanks for the normalmap function anyways! 

miguel1900

Hi @Obscura !

So great results. Would it work with landscape's curvatures, for example, to "detect" water erosion? Or it only work from normal maps?

Thank you!