Research & Notes

Modular design (or modularity) is an approach used to design various products or applications – by breaking it down into separate or independent parts. Basically using as few "building blocks" as possible to make up your scene in this case.

"Modular means pieces are made to fit together according to a common pattern, so just a few pieces can be reused multiple times to create a bunch of variety. " - wiki.polycount.com

Pro - Reusable

Con - Repetitive (same textures, architecture)

"..players are bound to notice the same rock or farmhouse or tapestry used again and again. And another two dozen times after. Art fatigue sets in where this repetition becomes obvious and erodes the authenticity of the world. " - Joel Burgess

Examples:

"The Texel Density tool allows you to quickly scale the size of UV islands or individual polygons such that they span roughly the same number of texture pixels per meter of real size. (A UV island is a connected group of polygons in a UV map.) " - learn.foundry.com

It allows for specification of of the resolution of the texture that we are using, which allows the texel density to be appropriately calculated for different texture but still be consistent.

Example - a texel density of 512 pixels per meter would need a 1 meter real size to span 2 UV units for a 256 x 256 texture, but only 1/2 UV units for a 1024 x 1024 texture.

UE4 Naming Conventions:

• SM_ = Static Mesh

• BP = Blueprint

• T_ = texture

• M_ = Material

For materials

• Prefix_BaseName_Variant_Suffix

• Example = M_Guitar_Body_01 *

• M_Rock_01

01 - iteration of different colours, could also be for different texture usage. N - normal map, C - ColourMap etc.

Difference between "Material" and "Texture"

• Material is built up of different texture maps (Normal/Albedo, Roughness, Metallic etc)

• Texture -

Material inputs

• Base colour: Overall flat colour of the material

• Metallic: level of "metalness" - 0 = non-metal, 1= metallic

• Specular: Scales specular for nonmetallic surfaces

• Roughness: smooth or roughness level - 0 = smooth, 1 = rough

• Emissive: applies a glow effect

• Opacity: controls the opacity

• Normal: allows normal maps inputs for detail (distortion or disturbance in the material)

• World position offset: vertex animation/surface disruption

• Ambient occlusion: inputs for self-sehadowing and cavaties

A look into Substance Painter

As I was having trouble understanding Substance - I searched Youtube and other sites for some help and found this video. It helps explain and understand how Substance and different elements of the software works and made me realise that baking the mesh with a smart texture on it is how you get it to "work" properly.