Help with modelling
polycounter lvl 2
Having a little trouble with an environment that I'm working on and was wondering if there was a better way to model a broken brick pavement that blends in better with the brick texture on the terrain if that makes sense.
Replies
You can get pretty far with Pixel Depth Offset blending and/or Runtime Virtual Textures, but typically I think these would be part of the same contiguous mesh, and the blending is done with displacement heightmaps. This is a bit more fiddly without tesselation, you might have to set up the blend in Houdini or something.
https://www.artstation.com/blogs/paulygonn/9qXz/unreal-shaders-vertex-height-blend
I think A good method would be to make a piece that you can put in there that has some dirt and part of your bricks (3D) and then maybe do 2~3 variants of it and just jam it on the ends? Possibly some grass/dirt to hide the seams? Have a look.
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/0X163K
Or do something like this? (maybe with a bit more dirt in the seams and some bricks missing? Then some more random single bricks and dirt clumps mixed in to smooth the transition?
Sauce: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/Le9mBA
If you're trying to create a broken brick variant with actual geo so it can show off some nice contours/etc while hanging off edges or merging into other materials from how it looks from your screenshot then I would just straight up cut into the geo that your tiling texture is running along.
in all honesty though, this is a stage I tend to commit to once everything else is in place, I'd consider it a polish pass since adding this kind of detail will require you to commit to the UV's you currently have on your floors. This is a destructive workflow should you start it and then try to go back on it later.
If you aren't working with manually modeled floors and you're working with a landscape floor then you could just take your current floor texture, do the cutout, extrude the faces up so you have sides on the bricks that stick out and use that while using singular bricks to manually place to help transition back into the ground. As long as you're using the exact same floor texture it should just blend with the rest.
From this tiling texture you should be able to build variant meshes, several stand-alone bricks, etc if you model them straight from the texture alone and map the sides to hide the stretching.
As a general rule of thumb... just because your tiling texture is tiling it doesn't mean you can't chop-shop the hell out of it to create something new. Be conscious of your texel density while doing this but aim to keep them perfect every time unless you actually can't, then bend the rules a bit there.
Hope that helps :)