nav2

Wednesday, May 18, 2016

Texturing PBR materials in 3D Coat and exporting to Unreal 4

3D coat generated an ambient occlusion and a curvature map for each object I painted in it - that way it knew how to paint in crevices that are stored in the imported normal map.
It was excellent in this regard as I found out that it can handle memory quite well when compared to Substance Painter. In 3d Coat I was able to get over 40+ layers on 2x2048 maps of 3 paint objects - with all channels + normal map. In substance painter - it just crashed on the second or third layer I made (preview texture set to a miserable 512).Even though my laptop is 7 years old - 3d coat handled this one quite gracefully.

For the skin I used one of the leather pbr shaders that came with 3dc and heavily altered it to make it look more like human skin.
Of course it is really difficult to fake SSS in real time. Unreal engine - which is the target engine for this character does have a SSS shader, but since the character will not get any closeups and not much of the skin is really revealed- I decided to be cheap again and stick with one material for the entire character. Before texturing the body I made an import test of the head/spray mask texture.

I set the texture maps in unreal in a way where the alpha channel of the diffuse is used to store the roughness map pass. I also wanted to use tha alpha channel of the normal map to store the metalic pass, but I found out that Unreal 4.10 does not allow using the alpha channel of a normal map texture if the file is a png. A few forums noted that it will work if I use targa instead - but targa is a huge file size and I thought i wont be saving a lot that way.



I imported my character with the unreal rig applied to it.
Here is the model - you should be able to preview it in your browser:



For the spray cans in the game I used an rgb map to split it into three areas - cap, sticker and can . The alpha channel of the sticker controls the sticker's mask in this case. That way the programmer on the project - Steve Stavrev can control the color of each instance of the spray and even change it dynamically during run time to create some interesting effect. 
His pose and animation is not my work - it is using one of the unreal project examples. Since my binding pose and the source binding pose are slightly different, the actual animation is a bit screwed up on the target. Unreal 4 supposedly has nice tools to adjust binding poses and when this issue is at hand, but I discovered that as I am writing this (4.10.4) there has been a bug for over an entire year that nobody from epic fixed that stops the users from doing that. I had to blindly set up the bones in blender, but the fingers are still screwed.
The best thing to do here for my portfolio is to actually make the animations myself, but unfortunately the freelance nature of the project dictates that we make do with this.

No comments:

Post a Comment