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An exercise in modular textures - Scifi lab UDK

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  • Serith
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    Serith polycounter lvl 9
    Wow, very impressive stuff Snefer. You've really got modularity on lock down! Very inspiring
  • Ark
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    Ark polycounter lvl 11
    Wow, great stuff! :)
  • Snefer
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    Snefer polycounter lvl 16
    In vimeo we trust. This should work : ))

    [vv]35470093[/vv]
  • Jessica Dinh
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    Jessica Dinh polycounter lvl 10
    This is stunning in motion :]
  • Skillmister
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    Skillmister polycounter lvl 11
    Absolute wizardry! Can't wait to poke around the scene and let my brain be a sponge
  • Orangeknight
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    Orangeknight polycounter lvl 5
    How many unique mesh's are there? Also how many texture sheets?
  • S_ource
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    S_ource polycounter lvl 9
    How many unique mesh's are there? Also how many texture sheets?

    He used only one 256x512 texture, that was the whole thing about this project i think. And also looks really nice dude, love the light rays coming throut the window, truly inspiring. :) Good work!!
  • Snefer
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    Snefer polycounter lvl 16
    orangeknight: maybe 100 or so : )

    Here is what the texture looks like:
    Layout.jpg
  • Sliterin
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    Sliterin polycounter lvl 11
    When I watch your metall stuff, I think that can become legendary. I'm serious ;-)
  • alloa
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    alloa polycounter lvl 12
    I think that maybe you have create a new trend.
    Inspiring work!
  • Jeff Parrott
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    Jeff Parrott polycounter lvl 19
    This thread is so much awesome. I'd say post breakdowns but that's what pages 1 though 8 are. Great job!
  • metalliandy
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    metalliandy interpolator
    Well, damn. This is extremely impressive stuff, man.
    The video looks pretty amazing...
  • Seirei
    As hard as I try to wrap my head around it, I don't realy get how this could be done, I kind of understand it but it's just put together so tightly... wow just wow, realy impressive!
  • Gannon
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    Gannon interpolator
    The scene looks fantastic, great job. You are a material wizard sir.

    I need to try out that normal map trick to fully understand how you're generating it. Seems really useful
  • Axios
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    Axios polycounter lvl 10
    This is so slick, it's nasty. Top notch stuff. Light shafts may be a bit on the apocalyptic side though.
  • cptSwing
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    cptSwing polycounter lvl 11
    dude. crazy nice.
  • raul
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    raul polycounter lvl 11
    This thread is pure awesome! Really nice work there!
  • Wahlgren
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    Wahlgren polycounter lvl 17
    Good stuff!
    The video really sells it.
  • Envart
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    Envart polycounter lvl 6
    Amazing work. You da man!
  • Snader
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    Snader polycounter lvl 15
    Wouldn't it be possible to clamp the NormalBlue out of the RGBBlue?
  • Ron.S
    Amazing job man, I don't completely understand the full aspects of what happened here but its impressive. Is there any way you could release a little tutorial explaining the process and how it would be applied to a single mesh maybe?
  • Computron
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    Computron polycounter lvl 7
    Dx11 reflections?
  • Snefer
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    Snefer polycounter lvl 16
    Thanks for the comments guys, glad you like it.

    Snader: not quite sure what you mean?

    Ron.S: yup, more breakdowns/explanations will be posted, explaining the entire workflow/thoughtprocess in detail.

    Computron: Nope, its dx9, scencapture-actor for floors, prerendered cubemap for the rest : )
  • Snader
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    Snader polycounter lvl 15
    Basically, you pump up the contrast enormously until there are (almost) only black and white pixels. Then 'clamp' it so you don't have values lower than 0 (which will subtract when rendering the scene) or higher than 1 (which will cause bloom).

    TextureClamp.jpg

    You'll probably have to fiddle a bit with values and maybe your texture channel to get it to work nicely, but it could save you an entire channel, which in this case means an interesting enough 20% savings.

    Also, could you give a short description of what all 5 channels do, precisely?
  • Kbrom12
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    Kbrom12 polycounter lvl 8
    Man I love those videos dude, I can't get over the reflections you got and that hard plastic look you achieved...I'd love to know what the shader looks like to get that look but I can wait till you release the pack!!! :):):)
  • Snefer
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    Snefer polycounter lvl 16
    Snader: yes, that is how i got rid of having an alpha-channel for the decals. It wouldnt work for the AO though, since not everything that have AO is supposed to be the other material : ) (and a value over 1 doesnt cause bloom, you set that independently in the postprocessing of the scene) also, I am using that channel as a alfa for a lerp, so thats the reason why it needs to be between the 0-1 range, otherwise you will get fiddly results.

    The red channel is a tiling metal that I use to get some surface detail, the green channel is an AO overlay, the blue channel is the decals, the alpha is the texture for the screens, and the bluechannel of the normalmap is a mask I use to separate the metal from the painted surfaces, so I can set independent values for the specular, reflective values, etc. : )
  • Snader
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    Snader polycounter lvl 15
    Ah, now I see. There are some small differences between your texture and my clamped version, such as the black bar on the left border. My bad.
  • Snefer
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    Snefer polycounter lvl 16
    Well, there is a workaround for that, I could combine the mask and the AO if I wanted to. Basically have the AO at 50% over the mask, and then clamp the channel at 50% instead, so the top 50%*2 would be the AO and the bottom 50%*2 would be the mask : ) so thats an easy optimisation on the textureside, even though it would add another bunch of instructions in the shader, but the theory is sound. Also when using heavier compression you tend to get alot more artefacts when dividing up your channels like that.

    I have done that with mixed results on assets before. When used as a mask it can be quite effective, since then the artifacts are not as easy to spot.
  • Snefer
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    Snefer polycounter lvl 16
    Ah, damn it. Why did you have to do that :D Now I must see if i can implement it and shave another channel of this ^^
  • Jungsik
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    Jungsik polycounter lvl 6
    sorry to bother you, I cant see your amazing video you uploaded on Vimeo..it comes out white no matter how many times I refresh it, it could be the school computers.
    On the other hand, I love you...r work.
  • Snader
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    Snader polycounter lvl 15
    Snefer wrote: »
    I could combine the mask and the AO if I wanted to. Basically have the AO at 50% over the mask, and then clamp the channel at 50% instead, so the top 50%*2 would be the AO and the bottom 50%*2 would be the mask :)

    Hadn't even thought of that, yeah. I'd go for a different distribution, though. 12.5% (I reckon 1/8th is faster to calculate than 10% because it's a power of 2) for the mask, since that is high contrast and doesn't need smooth gradients, and spend the other 87.5% on the AO to keep it as smooth as possible.

    Heh, technically you might even be able to squeeze more layers together this way. Maybe even all in a single RGB texture ;) Let's not do that right now, though.
  • [HP]
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    [HP] polycounter lvl 13
    This is absolutely nuts, one texture, a whole scene. You can have the cake, it's all yours.
  • allaze-eroler
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    allaze-eroler polycounter lvl 11
    that is so amazing, i never though you actually find out how to deal with this ! i'm now wondering if you plan to make a full step by step for 3dcreative or as free tutorial at 3dtotal ? that would be so interesting to read with ! :D
  • tekmatic
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    tekmatic polycounter lvl 11
    Snefer wrote: »
    Thanks for all the comments! See if I can answer some of the questions. :]

    dpaynter26: Yup, Disting got it right, I dont have a baked normalmap. I map the UVs after the existing texture :] It doesnt matter how the UVmap looks aslong as the model looks good. I use the lightmap UVs for a tiling metal texture, and for the lightmaps. Thats more or less how i do it. I have changed the shader a bit since, so I will post an updated version aswell later, right now i have some annoying bugs and crashes when baking lights, no clue as to why.

    I am completely lost as to what you just said. Where the hell do you learn these techniques cuz the school I went to definitely do not teach these techniques at all.....can you direct us noobs to the source of you training or is it picked up working in a studio.

    Great work mate....very inspirational.
  • Seirei
    tekmatic wrote: »
    I am completely lost as to what you just said. Where the hell do you learn these techniques cuz the school I went to definitely do not teach these techniques at all.....can you direct us noobs to the source of you training or is it picked up working in a studio.

    Great work mate....very inspirational.

    My personal guess would be it's just a matter of knowing what stuff does by using it here and there and then one night you lie awake and wonder: "What would happen if I do 'this' and 'this'?" and you jump up onto your computer and throw stuff together. And sometimes you get some realy crazy stuff that inspires you to do more and as it seems some people invent some reaaaaly wicket stuff, as seen here.

    Correct me if I'm majorly wrong here, but as I said I could imagine it pretty much like that. Atleast I have some smaller versions of these moments.
    If it's something else, I'd be interested to hear it too! :D
  • d1ver
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    d1ver polycounter lvl 14
    Sunavabitch! Tor, this is so flipping dope, I'm lost for words.
    It even got a little Bladerunner vibe!
    I also learned a thing or two.
    Thank you very much, man.
  • LoTekK
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    LoTekK polycounter lvl 17
    Snader wrote: »
    Heh, technically you might even be able to squeeze more layers together this way. Maybe even all in a single RGB texture ;) Let's not do that right now, though.

    Yup, if you were able to spare the precision (or you want to get really silly), you could cram like 8 grayscale textures into 1 channel. You'd definitely have to pay attention to the compression artifacts between value ranges, though, as you've already pointed out.

    Shader Fun: Trading Accuracy for Variety
  • Reverenddevil
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    Reverenddevil polycounter lvl 9
    man awesome work! Very well done!
  • Snefer
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    Snefer polycounter lvl 16
    cheers guys : ]]
    LoTekK wrote: »
    Yup, if you were able to spare the precision (or you want to get really silly), you could cram like 8 grayscale textures into 1 channel. You'd definitely have to pay attention to the compression artifacts between value ranges, though, as you've already pointed out.

    Shader Fun: Trading Accuracy for Variety

    Yupp, its all just data in the end ^^ But for masks etc its is an elegant solution, dont know how to do this in an efficient enough way in UDK though.

    allaze-eroler: there will be some kind of complete breakdown/explanation, dont worry : ))

    tekmatic: you pick things up over the years, you ponder things, then you try it :D Its things i picked up at a couple of studios, aswell as thing i came up with myself and things you see here and there that gives you ideas.

    Seireri: thats more or like it. ^^
  • Ged
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    Ged interpolator
    this is very cool, whats it like in terms of draw calls? is it more efficient to make games with more textures and less shaders or less textures and more shaders? I cant even use shaders most of the time when making ios games :(
  • Snefer
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    Snefer polycounter lvl 16
    Ged: The entire scene is 871 objects, 1084 drawcalls, but that could easily be reduced by a few hundred by just combining things together.

    I'd say a mixture of both ^^ The shader is quite expensive, depending on what features you turn on, but i didnt really try to optimise the shader that much. For just the core features, the tiling of materials and specularity etc etc, is 89 instructions, but with fresnel, reflections, etc its 130 instructions or so. For iOs games this would be pretty good I think, since most of the stuff is not expensive, just need pretty cheap shader and some thinking beforehand. I see this mainly as a way to save texturememory so it can be used somewhere else, or just boost the resolution up a few notches, for example, had I used a 1k*2k texture instead this would have been really highrez but still pretty cheap : ]
  • marq4porsche
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    marq4porsche polycounter lvl 9
    Snefer this is a beautiful scene. I am amazed that you could get so much with such a small texture size. It honestly looks how I think Mass Effect should look. You're a beast to get this done all so quickly.
  • Jonathan
    A little late to this thread, but lovely style, Snefer. Great job. :D
  • Bobby J Rice 3rd
    VERY clever. I'm impressed. Using the rgba channels to utilize essentially 4 texture sets with one cost is cool. I think the only crits i have is with your geo. Abit unimaginative. The shapes are basic and the composition is bland. With the current texture set, you could push the complexity of the scene much further.
  • Amadreaus
    Tor, you are an absolute psychopath, and your work makes my eyes bleed in pure joy. Seriously, screw you, you are amazing. :)
  • Snefer
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    Snefer polycounter lvl 16
    haha, cheers, glad to hear I can make peoples eyes bleed! I think... :D

    Crazyeyes: yeah, scene as a whole is not that amazing, I agree, I did not plan ahead enough on this one, and kind of got stuck in the shapes I had. Tried to salvage that towards the end but its the basic shapes that are boring unfortunately. Problem was that I was sticking to pretty realistic shapes for the walls etc, so any fancy shapes for them should have been designed into the architecture and building as a whole, but I kind of missed that opportunity and once it was down to the props I just tried to hide the squareness, and fix the things I could bother with, heh. Lesson learned ;)
  • HAWK12HT
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    HAWK12HT polycounter lvl 12
    Congrats on finishing this :)... I want to keep it professional so cant curse you really :D for what u have done. Neways since im begining making my own set, I notice that when u scale ur UV set on small texture or large texture you get strectching, especially on areas that use patterns (honecomb). It will look odd haveing just 2 honeycomb pattern on a huge floor piece cause you shrink your UVs to fit on such a small texture. I dont know if you have though about it though :D.
  • HAWK12HT
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    HAWK12HT polycounter lvl 12
  • Zelenkov
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    Zelenkov polycounter lvl 9
    Tor ur pretty amazing if you can work full time and pump out these levels every few months. Very inspiring work :)
  • R3D
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    R3D interpolator
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