Materials wish list

[manguste]

@Ivan: Sorry, for the time being Substance's not going to be supported. The reason is pretty simple: what about compression? It's quite a time-consuming task which hardly can be done in real-time.

 

Of course, you can generate textures with this tool, but store them on the disk and compress them before assigning them in Unigine.

[pascal.winistoerfer]

what we use and i think it works great for creating nice textures in .dds for unigine with LODs etc.: crazybump.

 

Costs around 200$ for a single license and the results are nice. you can even create ambient occlusion maps and tessellation maps.

 

http://www.crazybump.com/

 

ivan, if you want to know more i can provide you a screenshot and sample texture from crazybump.

[Guest shane.ploenges]

what we use and i think it works great for creating nice textures in .dds for unigine with LODs etc.: crazybump.

 

Costs around 200$ for a single license and the results are nice. you can even create ambient occlusion maps and tessellation maps.

 

http://www.crazybump.com/

 

ivan, if you want to know more i can provide you a screenshot and sample texture from crazybump.

 

Also a very good free tool i use that can do similar things called Xnormal

 

http://www.xnormal.net/1.aspx

[ivan.cuevas]

I found substance interesting because of its parametric nature, for example, increasing or decreasing the texture resolution depending on the hardware where the application is running.

But I didn't know about the tools you have mentioned, and they are quite interesting, so many thanks Pascal and Shane.

[demostenes]

Sure, at least in virtual simulation you have to provide high-quality details for very large worlds were it is simply impossible to always use hi-res textures or complex mesh geometry for detail representation as this would immediately blow up memory or performance limits.

 

Actually I prefer virtual texture approach in this case. Good implementation means also lower memory usage (and always constant) than conventional textures and you have benefit of almost infinite detail. It also means saving lots of work with optimizing resolution of textures, because resolution is not issue anymore (so everything can be high res) and it also gives you chance to make very efficient batching, because you technically have all textures of you game in one HUGE atlas.

 

Procedural textures make some sense on mobile devices or streamed games, where you need to save bandwith as much as possible, but thats all. Virtual textures are better in all other aspects.

[nat.harrold]

Suggestion for Normal Map Intensity slider.

 

Our artists and myself would like more control from within the engine over normal map strength so it effects lighting.

 

There is some control within mesh_reflection_cube_base, but this only effects reflection, not lighting.

 

Suggestion:

 

for less intensity - blend normal map with 128,128,255

for more intensity - overlay the values on top of each other?

 

Cheers,

Ai3D.

[steve3d]

agreed with nat, a normal intensity slider would be much useful now.

[anton.stetz]

+1 to slider )

[frustum]

Can't promise normal map scale slider for the next SDK.

[nat.harrold]

:)

[nat.harrold]

Hi unigine,

Hope to see this normal intensity slider some day.

 

Also,

The mesh deferred decals are great.

We have used these very extensively in our current urban project.

 

We think the 2d mesh decals would be even more awesome if you had a slider/value option to soften the edges. (edge blend alpha).

Thanks,

Thoughts?

[frustum]

Normal map intensity will be available in the next SDK update.

 

We will take into account your decal requirements.

[werner.poetzelberger]

Fur Shader:

 

I would love to see (and actually need for a potential next project) a FUR shader.

 

I am pretty seriously interested to get this shader, as I found it very very useful. As well I could imagine, that large worlds could profit from this technique, as it is cheap (if clever setup) and works as well very well form various distances), especially from angles top down.

Further on you can do all kind of effects with this technique. 

 

I am happy to share my experience with the shader with Unigine, of course.

 

I have developed one for our projects which was very useful to create huge (basically unlimited) areas with short cut grass (lawn), which is looking very good from basically every camera distance.

 

Basically it is the simple fur technique, multiplying the geometry, which the shader uses and applying various properties, using the 'Layer' of the fur to modify e.g. the contrast of a 'Distribution' map for the grass for the thinning in z-direction.

 

All you would need is a geometry you want to grow it from,  a grass alpha texture, which defines the shape seen from the top, a distribution map, for the denseness of the grass, a color texture, a color mod texture ( combined with the distr. map). But you can be creative I think to add properties like thickness and direction of a bend. Add animation for a motion of the layers etc.

 

I combined it further on with some 'fake shadowing', more like some drop shadow onto the underlying surface.

 

(This is just one possibility to use it e.g. I modified it to create Dust Storms...). And of course ... fur as it is meant to be. (Or like done for the Viva Pinata, Pinatas http://www.insidegames.ch/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/viva-pinata.jpg) etc. (they used it for their grass as well ;))

 

Please find some images. (these are images from projections of our artworks, but all content is CG).

 

I can find more if needed.....

 

I think it is a very good, easy to control and cheap (in render terms) method to create short cut grass.

 

Best.

Werner

[werner.poetzelberger]

This is an image from 2008.

Unfortunately the jpg compression is crunching the details.

 

Cheers.

Werner

[nat.harrold]

Thanks Werner, I like the suggestions, I am sure we could use such a fur shader

[phillbot]

Hi,

 

The ability to control blurriness of reflections through a map would be great, similar to how Skyshop from Marmoset does it in Unity:

 

So you could have shiny bits of your material and matte bits, eg where the glossiness map was white the highest mip was used, and where the glossiness map was black the lowest/blurriest mip.

 

Thanks.

[frustum]

Material blurriness control is ready and will be available at sdk update.

[phillbot]

Awesome, good to hear :)

 

Can't wait to use it.

 

thanks.

 

when is the next SDK update ETA?

[phillbot]

from our artists

option A: and Option B

Is option B completely off the table? It would really be able to yield some better results with less back and forth required. Here is an example of this being used to good effect :

 

[frustum]

mesh_layer_base is an option B.

[phillbot]

mesh_layer_base is half way there.

 

how hard would it be to have 2 seperate materials blended together? not just 2 diff and spec maps, but entire materials? (similar to the way 3dsmax does its blend materials)

 

also the ability to copy and paste settings of existing materials would be good so we didn't have to rebuild materials manually every time we wanted them to blend together.

 

also the mesh_layer_base doesnt have reflections, which we use on pretty much all of our materials.

[phillbot]

Basically something like this:

 

 

This video explains pretty well how and why we'd want to use it.

[phillbot]

it's pretty quiet in here...

you can nearly hear the crickets...

[werner.poetzelberger]

UV channel selection for each texture slot.

 

I think it would be very useful to have the possibility to select either UV channel 1 or UV channel 2 for each texture.

 

It gives the freedom to design materials more flexible and make use of the very useful different UV channels.

[werner.poetzelberger]

Multiplying alpha channel material.

 

If using different UV sets, or at least different tiling options (transforms), an option to use a multiplied alpha channel, base * detail,  would be great.

 

E.G. you can cut an overall area with UV1 and a detail with UV2.