Damaged House (Brick/Plaster) best way to achive - game ready ?

mobpapst

Hello guys,

right now i'm working on some buildings and i want broken plaster parts where the brick underneath is coming thorugh that it looks kind of organic like on the picture below. But now i'm asking myself what would be the best way to get the approach done for a game inside UE4.

My current thoughts:

1. Sculpt it unique, mask it and texture it unique (i need several buildings and It would cost a high amount of time and i cant use tilables which i would prefer)

2. Work with several geo decals to cover the parts where i want to show the brick up

3. Use height material blend inside ue4 shader (vertex paint). This works but in case of the polycount its hard to get crisp edges and this nice flaked structure

What would be your approach to do this - i want to achive a high quality level because its for a first person one.

Thanks a lot!

scgstudio

For me vertex paint would be good, but not alone.
To get correct edges between textures you can use mask texture to get irregular transition between textures.
This will give you an ability to control how those textures are mixed.
Also to break up texture repetitiveness ( brick in this case ) you can use floater geometry. Could use the same texture ( or another hard to tell )
and place them in specific spots, like those arcs above those windows. Floaters should not cast shadows.
There are more problematic areas like 'transition' texture between brick and plaster.
This could be a texture placed between transition vertex colors masked at the edges to remove unwanted gradients.
Or. Put 3 textures into shader and mask each with painted mask as another textures... similarly to composite map in 3ds max. But this may become expensive.

m_asher

I'd separate your foreground asset approach from your background asset approach — height blending will work fine where the player can't get up close and personal with it, and decals/floaters will get the job done for the front-and-center stuff. You could also try some fancy stuff with POM floaters, if you're looking to push the depth of the bricks.

mobpapst

thank you very much guys. so far i tested hight blend and by pushing the plaster it works quite fine for the first approach but i think i will also work with pom floaters and decals. Maybe i also try sth with cutting parts out and using different ids together with decals to get good edges