Help requested, bark material in Unreal 4
polycounter lvl 3
Hello 
I would be grateful if you could point me in the right direction to fix my banyan tree bark?
Background: I'm creating the texture in Substance Designer. This is a test in UE4.26 to see if the big macro shapes are lining up as I imagine, with the trunk. They are going up with the world...but not locally with the shape of the mesh. The trunk looks great! The branches and roots, dreadful.
I've included an image of the material and mesh in UE4 as well as some images of the mesh itself so you can see it without the leaves etc. I'm a student and your help is very much appreciated, thank you.
I would be grateful if you could point me in the right direction to fix my banyan tree bark? Background: I'm creating the texture in Substance Designer. This is a test in UE4.26 to see if the big macro shapes are lining up as I imagine, with the trunk. They are going up with the world...but not locally with the shape of the mesh. The trunk looks great! The branches and roots, dreadful.
I've included an image of the material and mesh in UE4 as well as some images of the mesh itself so you can see it without the leaves etc. I'm a student and your help is very much appreciated, thank you.
Replies
UV the branches ?
1. The material graph
2. The UV's of the tree
If the material is applied to UV space, you have to fix the UVs.
If it is applied world space you fix it in the material graph.
Once you pinpoint the problem then fixing it is just a few easy steps. It's common stuff so you can google it easily as well, just have to know where the problem is so you can search the right phrase.
Here is #1, the material graph.
And here is the #2 UVs. I think my problem is the UVs not being setup properly. Hmmm
Thank you again.
I believe I need to fix it in the material graph.
Check out this guys channel. He'll help familiarize you with some of these nodes so you can understand what is happening:
World-Aligned Textures - UE4 Materials 101 - Episode 22 - YouTube
It's probably a good idea to go and review the texture/UV section of the wiki here as well. Don't worry it's easy stuff to understand and will lay foundation so you can troubleshoot problems like this easily in the future. I'd recommend putting this particular model aside for a moment and setup a test project with just a few cylinders you can practice on. Reduce the variables so that your eyes can see what happens when you change just one thing at a time.
edit: this guy is useful too WTF Is? Material - World Position in Unreal Engine 4 ( UE4 ) - YouTube
If you want to make a lot of trees and vegetation it might be a good idea to grab a SpeedTree model so you can see common techniques for laying out the UV's and what sort of textures they use.
Ditch the world aligned texture nodes - it's an extremely expensive way to apply a material to a surface.
Instead, simply alter your UVs until it looks nice - scaling and shifting them around will do fine.
Basically what Alex said
I switched it to local UV space and it works but is too big. I just need figure out how to add tiling, which I'm sure I can search for. Another basic
Thanks again, Alex.
Then scale the mesh UVs in your 3d app.
Doesn't matter if they extend outside the 0-1 area
It sounds like you are saying to scale/move the UV shells in the 0-1 UV space until the texture looks nice. Then tile the texture as I need it in Substance Designer rather than Unreal. Am I understanding you correctly?
If so, does having different Texel density cause issues?
Appreciate the help.
Just keep your uv's oriented the way they are (so they all flow in the correct direction), scale them all up uniformally until you meet your desired TD. No branches should be scaled larger or smaller than the other, else you'd get TD issues.
texel density isn't a worry as long as it doesn't look shit - the scale of information in tree bark changes depending on the age/thickness of the limb so it is appropriate to have varying texel density when using a tileable to texture it