Week 16 Collab WIP

[ZachDude]

Still working on my game environment, I’m following some tutorials on Artstation which show the creation of some game ready pottery in UE5 (ArtStation - Environment Production - Part 6 - Production-Efficient Asset Creation - Introduction). There are some advanced techniques they go over, and a lot of software!
But I figured it was the perfect opportunity to participate again in the collab, and here is some behind the scenes stuff

Barely over the 1K triangle mark No motifs and cool designs yet…

The material which I made in Designer:

In reality when they make the pots by spinning a cylinder with the clay on it, there are some lines left which I tried to leave. But this is supposed to also be older clay with some cracks.

Sculpting some of the motif designs in ZBrush which will be applied to the pot:

Combining the ZBrush detail with some of the normal information from the clay mat in Painter:

And using a bunch of reference:

The idea is to really have a library of pots, or at least the flexibility to easily make variations and such.

That’s it so far! The goal is to have it in Unreal for the submission. I know there’s a TON of non-Blender in here, but Blender is the glue that everything goes into. Hopefully this can be forgiven in the spirit of the collab!

[bOBaN]

@ZachDude

Still working on my game environment(…) But I figured it was the perfect opportunity to participate again in the collab

That’s the best way IMO - having something that you already are doing and/or learning connected to collab.

@ZachDude

Barely over the 1K triangle mark No motifs and cool designs yet…

You do have exactly 1k triangles there… 1024 is such a nice, round number

@ZachDude

The idea is to really have a library of pots, or at least the flexibility to easily make variations and such.

That’s a cool idea to have!

@ZachDude

That’s it so far! The goal is to have it in Unreal for the submission. I know there’s a TON of non-Blender in here, but Blender is the glue that everything goes into. Hopefully this can be forgiven in the spirit of the collab!

Don’t worry about it too much. It’s not strictly blender required. It’s more of a thing to learn 3D skills. And most of them are transferable between different software.

[ZachDude]

Thanks for the comments!

[ZachDude]

Update:

Successfully imported the pot into Unreal!

The mesh has two separate UV sets, one for the tileable clay texture I made in Designer, and one for the trim sheet material:

The pot on the right has a channel-packed material (a new concept for me), and contains both trim sheet normals, and a painted mask channel I made in Painter:

Everything is combined together in the master material in Unreal. There’s actually quite a bit more work to be done to the material, it will have dirt/dust and more color variation and flexibility. This is a huge milestone for me, pushing a simple asset through so many programs to get a result!

[NP5]

Looks good. Trim sheet?

So it is just two UV maps combined on the one object?

[ZachDude]

A trim sheet is something I learned about recently, it’s just a bunch of high res detail baked onto a plane, but organized in a way that makes laying out UV’s on it flexible. So you cut portions of your mesh and lay them out however you like in the trim.
Yes the UV’s are being combined in Unreal for the normals and the paint mask as well.

[ZachDude]

Next update:

Getting some color variation in the pots:

I’m learning that there’s quite a bit you can do with material customization in Unreal. For example, the color tint of the pots is obtained just by moving them around in 3D space. There’s a node that takes that information and picks a color from this little grid:

Another example is that while scaling the pot mesh, the tileable clay material will dynamically scale with it. There’s a fair number of nodes just to set up a master material:

I’m almost done with the course, the only thing left is to add a function which applies dust to the mesh, which is calculated based on location as well.

[ZachDude]

Last update before final:

Made the transition to UE5 after all and dang Lumen does look good:

Thanks to @bitpatio about the tip for turning Lumen off though, and I also learned that by default, UE5 displays at 120 fps. Turning this down really helped tone down the gpu load on idle.

The pots now have a material function which applies a dust texture to them based on the Z-axis, so more is supposed to be collecting on top of them.

Now I just have to figure out how to get a render for the collab, I feel like really only one pot counts since each one is 1000 tris, but maybe I can get away with having the others in the background

[bOBaN]

Looking really good! I like the lighting in unreal very much.

@ZachDude

Now I just have to figure out how to get a render for the collab

How to do it technically in unreal or how to compose the final scene?

@ZachDude

but maybe I can get away with having the others in the background

I think you should be fine, as this was a part of task description: you may set up the scene as you wish. Background objects do not count towards the tris limit.

[ZachDude]

Thank you!

@bOBaN

How to do it technically in unreal or how to compose the final scene?

Well both haha
I’m still quite new to Unreal but I assume there is no ‘render button’ as in other software. I know there’s quite a bit you can do with the post process volume and there is the high resolution screenshot but that’s as far as I’ve gotten.

@bOBaN

Background objects do not count towards the tris limit.

This is exactly what I was thinking

[bOBaN]

@ZachDude

@bOBaN

How to do it technically in unreal or how to compose the final scene?

Well both haha
I’m still quite new to Unreal but I assume there is no ‘render button’ as in other software. I know there’s quite a bit you can do with the post process volume and there is the high resolution screenshot but that’s as far as I’ve gotten.

Technically… just run it full screen and take a screenshot. There are tools for recording videos, even for path tracing etc… but for still image a screenshot is enough

PP is a big beast as usuall. By just dropping the PP volume and setting it to be a global one you get some stuff to play with already. But the real power of it comes when you get into PP shaders.

[ZachDude]

Ah good it sounds like I’m on the right track then

[bitpatio]

Actually, UE4 also has a cap at 120 fps in my experience, but it doesn´t push my graphics card as much as UE5 does so it tends to hit it more often. Yes, Lumen is the main culprit but boy, does it look good…

Just out of curiosity, does that dust shader work based on the world z-axis?

Is UE allowed for renders in the collab? I´m interested because the game jam is coming soon and I’d like to really push my UE skills before that. My Blender ones too, of course, but the less I have to wait for a frame to render, the better.
Too bad I can’t use path tracing, though. No RTX here.

[bOBaN]

@bitpatio

Actually, UE4 also has a cap at 120 fps in my experience,

t.maxfps 1000 ?

@bitpatio

Is UE allowed for renders in the collab?

It is. I don’t think there is a limitation on render engine. Esp. that in Blender you can use other ones like Octane. I would even imagine that if you did all your modelling in other software than Blender it would be ok. But the overall goal is to practice Blender skills

@bitpatio

Too bad I can’t use path tracing, though. No RTX here.

Path tracing or realy time ray tracing? Those are 2 different beasts in UE. Both work best with RTX, but for path tracer:

GPU: NVIDIA RTX and DXR driver-enabled GTX series graphics cards

Idk. how well it works on GTX. But when I tried real time ray tracing on GTX (1080ti) it was a pain and results were not very good…

[ZachDude]

Yeah, I’m fortunate enough to have a RTX card (2080 TI), and UE4 on idle was using 20-30%, while UE5 was closer to 60%. That’s just at default, which I learned is everything cranked up to max with Lumen at 120fps

Yup exactly the dust shader works on the world z-axis. I barely have an idea of what I’m doing, just following along the tutorial for now. But I understand the principle.

What is the game jam?

[ZachDude]

I’m glad other software is allowed for this collab. I know for instance in the Blender Artists weekly challenge, there is a separate group for ‘pure’ and ‘open’ entries. Where the pure has to be 100% Blender and only material made in that particular week (no recycles). But it’s a much bigger website and I bet those restrictions are there for a good reason.

[bitpatio]

@bOBaN

t.maxfps 1000 ?

t.maxfps 0, I think it’s the default.

@bOBaN

It is. I don’t think there is a limitation on render engine. Esp. that in Blender you can use other ones like Octane. I would even imagine that if you did all your modelling in other software than Blender it would be ok. But the overall goal is to practice Blender skills

Good to know.

@bOBaN

Path tracing or realy time ray tracing? Those are 2 different beasts in UE. Both work best with RTX, but for path tracer:

GPU: NVIDIA RTX and DXR driver-enabled GTX series graphics cards

Idk. how well it works on GTX. But when I tried real time ray tracing on GTX (1080ti) it was a pain and results were not very good…

I know. In theory (and the documentation) my GTX 1080 should work with path tracing, but no option shows up in the viewport, whereas it does in UE4. I think this is related to Epic deliberately disabling raytracing for non-RTX cards in UE5.

No matter if I enable raytracing support in my project settings and select raytracing as the GI and reflection method, it won’t work and Lumen will resort to software raytracing. I could probably enable it by compiling the engine from source but after seeing the results of path tracing in UE4 for my machine I don’t think it’s worth the hassle.

As you say, they are not very good…

[bitpatio]

@ZachDude

What is the game jam?

This site’s game jam: https://itch.io/jam/gamedevtv-jam-2022
(itch.io seems to be down right now, but that URL will work again… eventually )