My first Game ! Noob needs help! (UE4, zBrush, Quixel Suite, Tileable Textures etc.)
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Hey Polycounters 
I just started working on my first game, and I am having a lot of questions.
I want to make an ancient arena. For the walls I plan to use some tileable textures.
I want the walls to be big bricks
I am a little stuck right now - and I hope somebody here can help me out!
I started in 3Ds max with Snap to grid and a plane 16 by 16 gridspaces - 256x256 units.. put some boxes on the plane so that they are tileable..
I than imported the boxes into zbrush as one mesh with different polygroups and sculpted on them following the Fanny Vergne Tutorial in Vertex 2..
Is that the right workflow? How can I make that bricks tileable and bake them on a plane? How does the cage have to look like?
My plan is to texture them in Quixel Suite DDO for use in Unreal Engine 4 ...
Any help is much appreciated! :thumbup:
Cheers
Feingeist
I just started working on my first game, and I am having a lot of questions.
I want to make an ancient arena. For the walls I plan to use some tileable textures.
I want the walls to be big bricks
I am a little stuck right now - and I hope somebody here can help me out!
I started in 3Ds max with Snap to grid and a plane 16 by 16 gridspaces - 256x256 units.. put some boxes on the plane so that they are tileable..
I than imported the boxes into zbrush as one mesh with different polygroups and sculpted on them following the Fanny Vergne Tutorial in Vertex 2..
Is that the right workflow? How can I make that bricks tileable and bake them on a plane? How does the cage have to look like?
My plan is to texture them in Quixel Suite DDO for use in Unreal Engine 4 ...
Any help is much appreciated! :thumbup:
Cheers
Feingeist
Replies
I would suggest to use some more stones to create your tiling pattern. Otherwise the repetition would be obvious.
If you want to bake them tilable you need to offset your existing rocks to the left, right, top and bottom. Otherwise you would miss ambient occlusion information at the borders of your map.
Your baking mesh would just be a simple plane. My personal workflow for assets like this is to create the plane first. Then i setup my stone pattern and export the aligned stones into my sculpting application. After the sculpt i re-import them and offset the imported stones.
Thank you and thanks for the fast reply!
The thing is ... i want the bricks to be kind of big.. because the arena is built out of huge bricks. So my grid snap plane in max I built was quickly filled with just 3 of the stones. What would the workflow be to have more bricks so that the tiling will become less noticeable? Just increase the size of the plane in 3Ds max and put more bricks on it?
For the tiling workflow.. I am a little worried to put my high poly in max because it has over 9 million polys. Do you think max can handle it when I duplicate it a few times to tile it? :poly121:
Max should be able to handle a few million polygons in the viewport. But you can reduce the polygon count by remeshing them in optimizing them in zbrush before you export them
If you are planning to have a wall that is 3 bricks high, you might want to go with a 2:1 or even a 4:1 ratio texture map so you can have more unique bricks horizontally to reduce repetition. An example of a 2:1 ratio map would be 1024x512.
You should be able to do it all inside ZBrush (including the duplicate buffer tiles) without having to re-enter Max; it just depends on your personal work flow. There's no wrong way to go about getting your final result, but some methods are faster than others.
I started over again and this time I did a tile with 12 different bricks. I baked a normal map in xNormal and it came out seamless
I also baked a mortar plane with the bricks to fill out the gaps
Another thing: Now I want to create another version of this 12 bricks that is more destroyed .. to later blend them with a layered material in UE4 to break up the tiling even more..
Do you guys have some suggestions how to destroy the bricks in zBrush?
And one last question: I want to texture the bricks with quixel suite pbr workflow for UE4 and I tried to bake a color id map by assigning different colored materials in max to the high poly bricks and the mortar plane.. but xNormal seems to ignore the colors. Anybody has an idea how to get the color id map without needing to uv layout all the high poly bricks? Is polypainting in zbrush the only option here?
Thanks so much in advance for your awesome help!
Cheers!
Feingeist :poly124:
I came up with a wall I like so far. It's far from perfect - but I am heading to new assets now!
I did a little minion flesh ball in zbrush in quixel
It's supposed to be a minion for our game (Battle Arena in Space) that rolls around the arena and attacks the heroes.. what do you think?
Lowpoly has around 1000 polys and its textured in quixel suite..
Cheers
Feingeist
I am working on the boss character of the game right now!
Here is my WIP so far ->
As this character is very huge and made up of different subtools I wanted to ask some pipeline regarding questions:
When I finish the sculpt with all the subtools in zBrush my plan right now is to color-code the different subtools for quixel suite texturing and paint some color ids with polypaint on the different parts of the body that will be needing different texturing.
I plan to export every subtool to Topogun to make LowPoly meshes..
than I plan to make UVs in headus uv...
Do I need to bring all the LowPoly subtools with UVs back in Maya or Max to put everything in one uv tile? I plan to use 2x 2k maps for the whole boss...
I plan do group all the differnt objects togerther in max/maya to import it to quixel suite for texturing. Is that wise or should I texture each part on its own in quixel? I plan to do it that way to see if the different materials of the boss work with each other.
Any tips on that workflow would by much appreciated
Cheers
Feingeist :poly142: