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Texturing workflow for a large asset?

Hi, I'm a game artist and I'm in the process of making a large table that has a lot of sculpted detail. I just finished the sculpt in ZBrush and I'm now UVing it. The shells do not have enough texel density if I map them to a 2k map so I was going to just cave and use a 4k instead. 

However, I've been watching some videos about making rocks for games and I was wondering if a similar workflow could be more suitable if I want to retain sculpted detail but not use 4k maps/multiple materials, and if it's something that is typical for large prop texturing in the industry. I was thinking something like this:

1) Map UVs to a 2k texture in UV set 1
2) Make UV set 2 and map the UVs to a tileable texture
3) Export out mesh with UV set 1, bake maps as usual in Substance Painter, set up RGBA masks for various details like edgewear etc, export out the baked normals and RGBA masks
4) Set up a material in UE5 that uses the baked normal map (I think this is called a macro normal?), the masks, and the tileable texture, possibly also a detail normal map

Also, if anybody has any tips for texturing large assets and retaining sculpted detail, I'd be grateful to hear them!

Thanks!

Replies

  • iam717
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    iam717 interpolator
    polygorgon retaining sculpted detail?
    do not decimate the sculpted meshes, ever.  Puts some sort of "wave" into the normals and i dislike that so i do not ever decimate the sculpt, its a struggle on mid to lower tier pc's but if you want that extra ooph to stuff as i do, i do not decimate.  that is just me.  idk about others. (now i have a mid to mid high tier pc, so it doesn't matter anymore, i pay extra attention to NOT go over a certain % in subding and "millions" of tris.)
    Hopefully a AAA enviroment/asset artist comes in to help you with this or has some useful links.


  • Eric Chadwick
    You can actually get away with a single uv layout for both layers. Make an atlas layout, no overlaps, all inside the uv square. Use it as-is for your bakes (normal, masks, ao).

    Tiled textures can have their own per-texture transforms which make them tile across the atlas.

    You can align the uv islands in the atlas layout such that wood grain goes lengthwise for legs, etc.

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