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In UE 5.4 epic have added instancing for MeshDecals (commit 25dce53f0eb133320aebc53d3c9c052fab69782d for 5.4 branch) . So this technique becomes even more desirable .
Watched the whole video, signed up to art station, downloaded your content files ONLY TO FIND OUT it's not compatible with 5.3. What a shame because this is the first tutorial that does somewhat of a decent job of explaining how this all works. But as you explain in the beginning of your video this is not a step by step set of instructions and therefore this video tutorial really relies on the project files for a complete understanding. A warning in the description would have saved me quite some time this morning.
So, how would you go about fixing the seams in the detail normals that'll occur at the UV borders? Tri-planar projection comes to mind, but I think that becomes problematic, if your mesh is supposed to move? Trying to get this effect going on a character.
So, to answer my own question, should anybody stumble upon this: Take a pre-skinned local normal and a pre-skinned local position node, connect them each to a VertexInterpolator node and then connect these to a WorldAlignedTexture node. (into the World Space Normal and WorldPosition inputs) Then connect your texture (use a texture OBJECT, NOT a texture SAMPLE) into the TextureObject input. Then take the XY or XYZ Texture output and plug it into whatever channel you need. Boom, no texture seams anymore.
hi, great tutorial , very straightforward! I'm having trouble getting this to work with other angles though. Is there any way to use the same texture( baked from 90degree corners) on, maybe a 45degree corner or do I need a specific edge decal for each angle?
All this is cool but shader complexity might be a bigger problem than drawcalls. So at the end you will get fewer drawcalls but less perfomance because the shader is more complicated which neglects all the benefits.
GPUs are crazy fast at calculation. Doing this masking (especially in vertex shader) is waaaay more cheaper rather than waiting for a drawcall from CPU.
like the above said, draw calls and texture lookups are far worse. as well, you can have high instruction count shaders, just don't use them on meshes that are prone to overdraw :)
its not necessary but its a nice skill to have. most AAA studios will have a texture artist to do that part, but maybe in smaller studios the environment artist will have to create the materials.
So between your answer to the question about shaders and your obvious interest in making large scale pieces: you should absolutely learn Houdini and PCG in Unreal.
not sure what I'm doing wrong but when I create mesh decals sharing the same world space as the base geometry it starts flickering like crazy. Also I can't seem to apply materials set to deferred decals to meshes, only to normal decals. Edit: In case anybody is running into the same issue I did, don't enable nanite for your mesh decals in UE5 or decal materials won't work.
This was really helpful! And I love how respectful you were while still providing constructive feedback that can be easily actioned. It's super trendy up here to just jokingly rip people apart, and though I'm sure most of them are scripted and that the artist is told in advance, or at least warned that its a bit, it still promotes hate for me and is plane useless for the viewer other than for comedic purposes and potentially some low esteam folks wanting to think "ah I'm better". Anyway! Rant done! Just trying to say that this review was actually helpful and inspired me to think differently on some of my stuff. Question: I'm currently working on Nomad Sculpt because I'm a fan of its portability and ease of use. Have you used it? Any suggestions for creating good mesh with Nomad?
So in a nutshell…. 1. Use weighted normals on Target mesh 2. Non weighted for High poly mesh 3. Turning off the Normal channel so its not baked and therefore if flat. 4. Add levels and adjust the white!
Question: I have a MASSIVE environment I am building with 100+ Walls of varying shapes and sizes. Can this mesh decal be used on most of them that I am trying to lessen the hard edges on? It's a lot of work to do every single wall corner by making it less 'hard' so I was wondering if this is an alternative that could work.
Hi looking very nice and helpful. And I want to know that "normal detail article” you mentioned in stream while giving feedback .can you share me the link which is helpful for me. Thank you
Wouldn’t you agree though that this really depends on the studio? Because we are PBR we are not it’s a estimate anyways. Substrate I think changes this.
Any given material should almost always be solid black or solid white (the only exception is things that mix metals and non-metals at a microscopic scale, like metallic paints), but if you only have two bits of information you're gonna get jaggies in the transition between metallic and non-metallic areas of the metalness map due to aliasing. I'm not aware of any workflow that gets around that.
Hello, thanks for sharing this cool technique. What about UV sets from Blender that has name instead of numbering order? is it still work the same way?
So from blender as far as I know they still are in the order they are made. There are addons that let you change the order but I usually keep the packed one in uv0 always because substance painter takes the first uv set always
