Using trim sheets with alpha floaters and blending with tiling materials?

jordank95

I have a trim sheet I created that has a bunch of metal handles/bolts etc. that Im trying to overlay on top of a tiling material that uses the same metal texture. The issue is, I cant get these to blend seamlessly with each other. You can see the edges of the floaters.

Changing material to Decal in UE4 would work so its just overlaying the normal and blending them together, but I have some edge damage/dirt buildup in the albedo of the floaters I want to keep. How can I get around this?

icegodofhungary

Is every texture showing its edges or is it just the albedo? In other words, if you just use the normals does it show edges then? I had an issue in UE4 where I had to change each texture's compression settings (double click the texture, it's at the top, drop down box with an option for each type of texture) to get decals to work properly.

jordank95

icegodofhungary said:

Is every texture showing its edges or is it just the albedo? In other words, if you just use the normals does it show edges then? I had an issue in UE4 where I had to change each texture's compression settings (double click the texture, it's at the top, drop down box with an option for each type of texture) to get decals to work properly.

Its just a regular texture currently since the top half is using tiling horizontal trims. The bottom half is where all the alpha floaters are. 

icegodofhungary

I'm just trying to understand your problem so I'm not giving bad advice. You have a regular texture with albedo, normal, roughness, etc. The top is your trim in which you need regular texture settings. The bottom is decals in which you need decal settings. If you change the texture to decal, it works fine but you can't use albedo/color. Is that right or is there another issue where the decals show the edges?

You can set the decal to include color. See the buffer settings: https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/Resources/ContentExamples/Decals/1_2/index.html

"DBuffer Translucent Color, Normal, Roughness - This is non-metallic and will use the Color, Opacity, Roughness, and Normal to work with baked lighting."

Make two materials, one a regular PBR material for your trims. Then make another using the same textures but set it to deferred decal, using the above option for the DBuffer. That should let you use the texture both ways without having to break them up and import separate textures for each material. The above will use the same metaliic texture as your base but different normal/color/roughness. So if you're doing metal details on metal, that's a good option.

As for the decals showing edges when they're not supposed to, I'm not 100% sure but I had a similar issue. The only way to fix it, for me, was to change the compression settings for each of your textures (albedo, normal, rough). You can access the compression settings in the drop down menu at the top of the texture settings window. That got rid of the edges for me.

jordank95

@icegodofhungary thanks. setting it to Normal in Decal Blend Mode with the mask plugged into Opacity I think is the closest Im going to get it. I lose the dirt/edge damage I had in the color/roughness channels, but I dont know how else to make it work. I can live with just the normal information. 

Udjani

Since epic is not using decal on fortnite, the decal shader is not the best it could be kekw. There is a thread about this problem here: https://polycount.com/discussion/202328/expanding-dbuffer-decals/p1

One work around would be to use 2 uv channels, but you would have to cut the ''decals'' into the mesh instead of having them floating, which would also increase the polycount a bit.

Here is a paid tutorial about this workflow. https://www.artstation.com/artwork/z5gmQ