How do you get small details into textures/normals?

Necrodark

Been playing god of war and was inspired to make a project. i dont have much done right now, im just starting to texture one of the main assets and I dicided I want to get to the bottom of a problem i've been having for a while.

My textures always seem really low res, i can never get any small height details to come out well and pretty much any minute detail i try to add comes out looking blurry and pixelated. (also my normal bakes never come out right, weird edges)
I've done the baking in 4k working in 2k and switching to 4k before export but it still doesnt look right.

for example i want to add this small carved detail

As you can see, apart from the textures being blurry, the alpha stamps dont show enough detail and just come out looking weird.
If you guys have any ideas or pointers please feel free to leave a comment.

also this is what i mean with the weir edges in the normal bake

Justis

Hey, hmmm without seeing normal map is hard to say what is happening, but still mostly even when done baking the textures might need some manual cleaning. Weird edges might come because the mesh might not be in good distance from the sculpted one or maybe the distance of bake is not correct.

musashidan

It just comes down to texel density. The lower it is, the blurrier/more pixelated your maps will be. For larger assets this is where mid-poly modeling + tiling texture/trim sheets come in.

If baking unique assets you really need to spend time on optimising your unwrap. Too many new artists don't spend nearly enough time on this. In real-time unique bake assets your UVs and extremely important. I can't stress this enough.

Necrodark

musashidan said:

It just comes down to texel density. The lower it is, the blurrier/more pixelated your maps will be. For larger assets this is where mid-poly modeling + tiling texture/trim sheets come in.

If baking unique assets you really need to spend time on optimising your unwrap. Too many new artists don't spend nearly enough time on this. In real-time unique bake assets your UVs and extremely important. I can't stress this enough.

Thanks alot for the awesome feedback, Yeah i definitely need to plan out my assets more and spend more time on the UVs. this asset is a pretty big platfrom that a human can walk around on (for a UE4 Environment), would you recommend using tilable materials or stay with the unique textures?

Brian "Panda" Choi

You could look into using decals in a proper game engine like Unreal

musashidan

I would use tiling textures for the main surface material, and then you can create a decal sheet for all those carved details, plus a tiling detail normal.

A tiling detail normal map is usually used on large surfaces to get really fine detail where a baked asset would fail due to low texel density. The important thing here with a unique bake is not the map resolution, but the UV space texel density/resolution.

Necrodark

@musashidan

Damn i didnt even think of using decals, thats a good idea! as for the tiling textures do you mean applying those directly in engine (like a substance designer material) and also how would you go about applying multiple materials to one mesh, i'm guessing ID maps?

Obscura

From your another thread:
"You could either split the mesh up into multiple materials, or consider tiling materials with masks and / or in engine decals."