This week I've dedicated to creating materials to use when texturing my assets. My goal with these textures is to try and make them as reusable as possible so I can focus my time. I aim to texture many of my assets with trim sheets and tillable textures to allow for more effective iteration off them and to save on memory.
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| Bare Wood material. |
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| Bark material. |
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| Bone material. |
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| Stone brick material. |
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| Rock material. |
My primary tool for generating materials has been Substance Designer, I've had previous experience with Designer but that has mostly been for stylized work so this has pushed me. I want these materials to be very tileable so I've had to walk a fine line between high detail and keep the texture generic enough to not look obvious when tiled. due to the difference between how these materials look within Designers Iray render compared to Unreal 4s rendered I have had to make adjustments to them once I hate them within Unreal 4.
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| A wood material using layered tileable textures(left) compared to a zero to one wood material(right). Both materials texture sets are the same resolution but the tiled holds up much better under scrutiny. | |
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To compliment my Substance Designer work I have begun developing more complex materials within Unreal 4 that layer tiled textures on top of each other to achieve better results, this does have an impact on performance compared to a standard zero to one texture set. However, I feel the visual quality enhancement are worth the trade-off as it allows me to achieve a much higher resolution than I otherwise could. Though to help alleviate some of the performance cost I have tried to build these materials for trim sheets so they can service multiple assets with just one draw call. This approach will not be appropriate for every asset so I will still be using zero to one texture for assets like the weapon stand.
