UE5 workflow ideas - texturing high poly meshes
interpolator
I'm testing out some ideas for workflow in UE5. Heres my first test so far. I'm using baked inverted cavity (curvature) and AO on the zbrush highpoly to drive materials in unreal engine with world aligned textures. No low poly and no uv maps which is fun! Very exciting to have UE5 to play with. This runs at about a almost constant 40fps on my 1060gtx with lumen and nanite doing the hard work.
I cant seem to get normal maps working at the moment. I did notice a mikkt space error when it loaded the mesh in and converted it to nanite so perhaps there is something I could do before export? the normal maps work on unreal engine cubes and spheres etc just not on my mesh.
Please don't judge the art too much! I'm more just exploring workflows and the tech here, so the art is just mostly thrown together in zbrush with some quixel megascan textures. I made custom materials and also material functions in ue5 to do the dust/rust and edgewear. This model is around 1.4 million triangles and I had a load of them in the scene with no problems.
I cant seem to get normal maps working at the moment. I did notice a mikkt space error when it loaded the mesh in and converted it to nanite so perhaps there is something I could do before export? the normal maps work on unreal engine cubes and spheres etc just not on my mesh.
Please don't judge the art too much! I'm more just exploring workflows and the tech here, so the art is just mostly thrown together in zbrush with some quixel megascan textures. I made custom materials and also material functions in ue5 to do the dust/rust and edgewear. This model is around 1.4 million triangles and I had a load of them in the scene with no problems.
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I was thinking of trying to push traditional "texture maps" into different VC channels, since most DCC apps support that, but didn't get around to actually test it yet, since it ain't really a priority and more of a curiosity thing.
Vas basically thinking of using diferent channels in the same was as we do in a clasical PBR workflow, but I'm not sure wheter UE will actually swallow and cew through multiple VC chans, and am also unsure of the format to use in order to export multiple VC channels from lets say max or blender, into unreal.
There's also the mehs painting options inside Unreal intelf that I wanted to try to use in the same way, but once gain, just idea for now.
Maybe those ideas will find better use in your hands Ged.
Edit: Dynamesh for better "texel" uniformity and then a decimation with preserve polypaint toggled might save on the ressources.
And we need new names for this like textures and texel it this workflow is acually viable.
I personally think what would be cool is if unreal engine and quixel could make a smart material system that all works inside of UE5, using distance fields and edge detection etc so all you need to export is your highpoly and an id mask in the form of vertex colours or a texture. The rest of the texturing (like what we do now in substance or quixel mixer) could all be done inside unreal engine on nanite meshes.
Alusfier I don't think nanite does anything to the actual mesh, when you are up close enough it is just the raw mesh that you exported you are seeing as far as I understand it so there are a fair amount of messy bits of geometry going on.
Unfortunately mesh painting in unreal engine 5 is not currently supported on nanite mesh instances.
some more tests trying to get displacement in blender from 2 different textures, painted the weights with vertex groups and vertex colour and then exported to ue5. There are a lot of really small artifacts on the mesh, I'm not sure how much of that is just my mistakes. Another issue is that at a distance the splits between the pieces of nanite mesh that make up the terrain begin to become more obvious.
Just subdivided a cube to get sove verts real quick, I guess it qualifies as programer art at this point.
Basically, if you setup your blend mode to add and paint in full R, G or B, you can paint those easely it. And I think there might be an addon or two to paint stuff with layers kinda like painter or 3DCoat, but I'm sure it's nowhere near the level of usability you get out of the box in any modern texturing suite.
I was thinking of something more akin to simple masking like that as a first test, to see is any of the modern export formats support exporting and importing multiple VC channels in UE, and worry bout the prettiness of the thing latter.
I suppose you could pretty much setup a a complex node based material with texture inputs and then bake it
Worst case, you paint your stuff all in zbrush, then export multiple highres objects, and combine all the VC into one mesh with multiple channels by transfering the color data into a new channel each time.
Could probably do the same with quick uvis and textures authored in painter , then baking down the textures to the VC.
Again, all theoretical at this point. Just throwing logs into the fire, to see what burns bright.
I did have a conversation with Simon Verstraete. He's done some experiments with Houdini and UE5. This one here is cool! https://www.artstation.com/artwork/XnQGaw
Anyway Simon told me he has already tried packing roughness and metalness into the model and the results just were not high fidelity enough compared with using actual textures. From what I understand, the way nanite optimises in clusters dynamically means the result isn't very clean.