Modular modeling

Filip5

Hey guys, just want to ask a few tips about this modular modeling approach. So I did higpoly brick, cloned it, decreased to about 500 verts and baked the textures. Now I wanted to do a wall section, some windows etc., but I am in doubts if to use lowpoly or higpoly to do so.

I got this wall assembled in ue4, but its made of separate lowpoly bricks, which seems as really odd way. 


I also tried to create this wall in blender from highpoly but I ended up crashing it. So at this point I got lowpoly and highpoly brick, but how can I use it to create walls and custom meshes. Also, its good to point out that I dont want my wall just to be flat plane, more like I would like to group this and bake into lowpoly, prefferably inside blender. 
Whats the best way to do this actually ? 

.Wiki

Bake your highpoly bricks to a tilable brickwall textureset. Then use some lowpoly bricks to break the silhouette. The middle part of your wall could easily be displayed with a tilable texture. The border areas can be done with additional lowpoly bricks.

500 vertices is pretty highres for just a box. A beveled cube with a few cuts, to break the silhouette, should do the job.

Filip5

Hello guys, so I have tried to do some ruined wall and also baked the wall texture. I got quite a few things going on, so I post pictures and then questions:




So to say, to the first image, bricks itself are somewhat in different color than the brick texture. I textured both with the same material, exported and reimported but this seam is quite visible.  Is there a workaround ?

Also, the uv tile is getting a bit off. This may be caused by the material offset in UE4, as the grid in blender fits perfectly. Still, please correct me if I am mistaken.

I also got model itself in blender and wire of it. I plan to do some vector painting later on, so I guess its ok to have the wall divided.

I have been thinking about repainting the wall in substance painter, but I am not quite sure about this. Whats the best approach ? Its also worth to mention that I modelled the wall, reimported lowpoly unwrapped brick and joined the objects together. I did the same with wall itself. As result, each brick got its own material, which doesn't seems as effective way. Also, there is about 13% texture overlap, which causes huge issue at model.

Please let me know what is the best approach to model and texture this, because this looks somewhat off.

pior

Your normalmaps seem inverted (green channel). There's no reason for this brick wall to be lit from below while outdoors.

The Blender defaults (intuitive, with the shading of the green channel coming from the top) and The UE4 defaults (counter-intuitive, shading coming from below) are opposite in that regard. So you either need to output the two styles of textures from your texture creation app, or, invert the channel in the material of either Blender or UE4. (But doing the inversion in-material in UE4 is bad practice since it is not consistent with their convention).