Blending material and polygonal details?

BTDarmstad

Hey everyone!

I'm currently setting up this scene in Unreal Engine 4 for a proof of concept I'm working on, and at some point I will have to start creating materials and break up surfaces with details. I want to have these details, transitions from a tiled texture to polygonal detail, be as seamless as possible to my ability, and I'd like some sort of tutorial or guidelines for this particular thing. Or, if there are better alternatives that don't compromise performance too much, go for it. 

Let's say I have a rather flat surface with a stone tile material, or wooden material, and a few tiles or planks are missing, and I want there to be considerable damage underneath it, so I need to model that with some polygonal detail. I really only want to model those parts and keep the rest a flat, low poly surface (I might want destructible surfaces later on, but that's probably a separate issue, and won't be as seamless anyway since I might need to do voronoi fracture). I'm planning on doing this with Substance materials.

The biggest issue I see coming, is that whatever tiled material I put on any given surface in UE4 must be adjusted (offset and scale), and I don't know if there's a way to export the material back to Maya so that I can "punch a hole" exactly where I want to. That, and blending between the material of the undamaged surface and the damaged surface (an extra edge loop around hole and vertex painting?)

How should I approach this? Am I overthinking this? Or as I mentioned, are there alternatives?

BTDarmstad

Couldn't find a decent example for this problem, so I made this:





This is a rough example of what I want to do with surfaces that have already been textured in UE4, and that's why I need to get the material in a 3D modeling program to perfectly align with what I've made in UE4. I must say that just doing this, even without the problem of exporting or aligning materials from UE4, was a really anal task without changing the UV map. This is in C4D, I'm planning on switching to Maya if that has better tools for this kind of thing.

But is this the correct workflow? I'm absolutely certain that I shouldn't be baking huge tiled surfaces like this, but it doesn't feel right. Is it supposed to be this finicky?

The other day I tried to just align a material in Maya manually, using the exact same values as I use in UE4, but for some reason it doesn't align.

poopipe

No, You shouldn't be baking massive surfaces. 

And...

it should line up - assuming it's the same bit of geometry with the same UVs and you haven't done anything to affect UVs in the ue4 material. 

BTDarmstad

poopipe said:

it should line up - assuming it's the same bit of geometry with the same UVs and you haven't done anything to affect UVs in the ue4 material. 

Alright, I tried switching up the values in Maya, and it does look like adding a minus to one of the offset values makes it line up... So that value has to be inverted in UE4 somehow to make this workflow easier.

But anyway, I've been thinking about it, and I believe I should be doing the offset and modeling in Maya, and then make it line up in UE4, instead of the other way around. I've never done this before, and I still have no idea if this is how professionals do it, because it seems like a really finicky way of doing things, but that's the idea that I have so far.

poopipe

if the mesh has one UV set, you export it, apply the same texture in ue4 and it doesn't look basically identical that means one of the materials involved is messing with the texture's tile rate. 

check both materials, make sure that the textures are not being tiled/scaled/rotated/whatever .  if they are, stop it happening. 

if the two results aren't identical after that  then something is very broken indeed