Seams are showing up between modular pieces using an atlas texture I made in substance painter

Rbanh · May 2018

Hi, I've been trying out substances new plugin for unity 2018.1 with livelink and I've been having a small issue with the textures to a modular apartment hall set I've been working on where these seams would appear between the pieces as you can see below.

I was using a plane mesh for the atlas and mapped the uvs for the modular parts to match an ID map I made on the atlas, and then I added the textures masking to the ID map.

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5021068/uploads/editor/l7/9xk2l2tkugd7.jpg

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5021068/uploads/editor/2k/9k6xbksw5gw6.jpg

Now I've attributed the seams being caused by the way substance painter has been generating the normals with these strange artifacts on some of the edges that are either 1 or 2 pixels wide, so I tried compensating that by shrinking the uvs for the parts by those pixels in hopes that it would resolve it.

But it only seemed to have resolved those seams when the camera is close to the texture.

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5021068/uploads/editor/ib/kzvuihoi1mfg.jpg

Is there a better method I should be using to create a texture atlas with substance painter?
I even tried patching those normal edges in photoshop but with no avail, at this point I'm not even sure if it's a problem in Painter or Unity.

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5021068/uploads/editor/7z/2midcuxwo19r.jpg

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5021068/uploads/editor/ok/05vartd5hgfu.jpg

poopipe · May 2018

It looks like mipping to me. There's not a lot you can do except pull your UVs in a bit or try not to put wildly different colours next to each other on the atlas

Mink · May 2018

poopipe said:

It looks like mipping to me. There's not a lot you can do except pull your UVs in a bit or try not to put wildly different colours next to each other on the atlas

Exactly. Engines Mip in powers of 2, so try tI have your atlas divided more evenly. Ie, have every side of every atlas element a power of 2, so 64, 128, 256, 512, etc. I wouldn't reccomend atlasing in thirds like you seem to be doing.

Rbanh · May 2018

Yea that makes sense, In hindsight I should have paid more attention to that, it's now split up more appropriately

Nevertheless, these lines are still appearing even with mip map generation turned off.

which would make this possibly seem like a problem I'm having with unity.

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5021068/uploads/editor/nq/qtvix5hdyqir.jpg

But on a side note, I notice when I zoom in on the edges of masks in SP I notice they are fading, is there any way to make these edges solid?

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5021068/uploads/editor/6e/bl7skoqs7m59.jpg

EarthQuake · May 2018

Yeah you really need some padding between the different elements, butting them up right next to each other is going to cause bleed problems when mipping or simply at lower texture quality settings.

Rbanh · May 2018

Okay so I've added some space between atlas elements but those seams in the distance unfortunately won't fade no matter what I do

Image: https://puu.sh/Akxde/202b1948d1.jpg

and it's definitely something with the atlas as they don't appear if the meshes don't have the textures applied.

Image: http://puu.sh/AkxlP/ecb6320d65.jpg

poopipe · May 2018

That big black cross is the problem - google up how mip-mapping works and you'll see why.

I'd be inclined to look into alternative ways to split your materials up, atlasing like this doesn't make a lot of sense to me unless you're severely limited on draw calls (which i assume you're not because its 2018 and that's a corridor)

Rbanh · May 2018

I've spent this much time trying to figure out what's going wrong, I'd like to just know what's going wrong at this point. It doesn't seem to be an issue with the mip mapping, as the textures appear to be mipping just fine. I even improved the padding between elements instead of blank space between with no change.

Image: https://puu.sh/AkQzT/5bb522a814.jpg

PixelMasher · May 2018

This is one of the reasons I hate using atlases and prefer to use tiling textures and trim sheets. you have way more control over individual materials and can quickly push material definition a lot easier, and you can make a larger variety of modular pices and kits with only a few tiling materials. Atlases really limit how far you can push a kit and for something like this, just doesn't really make sense. especially when you move onto larger levels that you can have a ton of re-use by combining different tiles and trims or are creating assets for other artists to use.

Rbanh · May 2018

PixelMasher said:

This is one of the reasons I hate using atlases and prefer to use tiling textures and trim sheets. you have way more control over individual materials and can quickly push material definition a lot easier, and you can make a larger variety of modular pices and kits with only a few tiling materials. Atlases really limit how far you can push a kit and for something like this, just doesn't really make sense. especially when you move onto larger levels that you can have a ton of re-use by combining different tiles and trims or are creating assets for other artists to use.

Could you help me understand how trim sheets are different from atlases? I've been doing some searching but they seem like pretty much the same thing..

poopipe · May 2018

Trim sheets usually tile across the whole page in one or both directions.

In this case you could simply split that big atlas into 4 tiling maps.

LaurentiuN · May 2018

Instead of using 1 big 2048 texture why not split in 4 textures each 1024? This way you can tile the texture in-game. And also use trimsheets like Pixel saied.

Rbanh · May 2018

I thought I'd practice making more optimized assets, using less materials for less draw calls

Mink · May 2018

Heres my two cents. Your UVs and your textures aren't done well. At all. They dont align, they're not seamless, theyre not tiling. I would make this in substance designer and use their transform mode to resize 4 materials into their own quaters of the atlas. Don't bother with padding, but make sure everything tiles and your UVs are perfect, because they're not. Also optimized and Unity should never be in the same sentence.

Rbanh · May 2018

Mink said:

Heres my two cents. Your UVs and your textures aren't done well. At all. They dont align, they're not seamless, theyre not tiling. I would make this in substance designer and use their transform mode to resize 4 materials into their own quaters of the atlas. Don't bother with padding, but make sure everything tiles and your UVs are perfect, because they're not. Also optimized and Unity should never be in the same sentence.

Yea I have already tried using designer following this method with the atlast maker node from Wes McDermott.

That just led me to the same issue with seams even with the uvs snapped to the exact pixel of each atlas element even with edge padding.

I've concluded for myself that using an atlas for connected repeating modular parts isn't worth the trouble and just ditched the attempt and went back to using individual substances for each piece.

Mink · May 2018

Ive made complex atlased enviroments that use 8 materials containing about 56 unique tiling textures with substance painter, albeit I built said enviroment in blender and UE4, so your issues may be engine specific.

Seams are showing up between modular pieces using an atlas texture I made in substance painter

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