Is tehre any cost for editing textures inside game engines?

Udjani

I am modling in blender wich uses OpenGL normals, so when exporting to unreal i have to convert it to DirectX. But i am curious if would be better to do it before importing or the cost of doing that inside the engine is neglectable?

poopipe

If it's done when importing the texture as a uasset there's no cost

If it's done in the shader there's a very small cost per pixel, it's probably not something you'd notice but I think most would consider it to be bad practice.

Obscura

There is a checkbox to flip the green channel, inside the texture asset in Unreal. Its free.

birb

Blender lets you bake with any swizzle, making flipping the green inside Blender for preview purposes even more attractive.

I remember seeing a devtalk suggestion about including a flip green switch in the normal node, but that must have fallen through the cracks.

gnoop

birb said:

I remember seeing a devtalk suggestion about including a flip green switch in the normal node, but that must have fallen through the cracks.

I just saved my own group node with [separate RGB>  1- green channel >combine rgb > normal map node]  in startup Blender file.  Issue solved

As well as lots of other useful nodes I created through years.  Like object space normals  connectable to emit input for light speed baking.      All in a single startup file .   So much more convenient than all those references, libraries etc   in Substance designer for example.

And all that is still linkable  to any outside project  any time.  Never missed , never created a single problem.

birb

gnoop said:

birb said:

I remember seeing a devtalk suggestion about including a flip green switch in the normal node, but that must have fallen through the cracks.

I just saved my own group node with [separate RGB>  1- green channel >combine rgb > normal map node]  in startup Blender file.  Issue solved

As well as lots of other useful nodes I created through years.  Like object space normals  connectable to emit input for light speed baking.      All in a single startup file .   So much more convenient than all those references, libraries etc   in Substance designer for example.

And all that is still linkable  to any outside project  any time.  Never missed , never created a single problem. 

Last time I ran performance tests on nodes flipping the green through a RGB Curves node was slightly faster than separating and recombining. It was a negligible difference, but not something an expert in crashing Blender like me should overlook, haha.

I used to store all nodes groups in the startup too, but it can be annoying to maintain if you get blend files from other people. There's an addon called NodeCustomBuilder that lets you store node setups, sorting them in folders and everything. You can also store compositing and world nodes.

The only caveat is that you need to be careful and save those nodes in a backup file just in case you lose the data like I did. I'm still not sure if it was a bug or me fucking up my 78937219 blender builds.

gnoop

Thanks  birb

looks like a cool addon.