Unity ArtEngine

• ArtEngine is Unity's material authoring tool. Harnessing the power of Assissted Creation, the tool helps creatprs accelerate production pipelines. This software uses machine learning algorithms to expand and enhance textures using mutation, seam removal, content aware fill and other nodes. It also has standard nodes for producing normal and height maps from color maps and also color management nodes like removing gradients from albedo maps for example.  You can read more about the software HERE.

• Main UI

  1. 2D Preview

  2. Imported textures

  3. Available nodes

  4. Constructed node tree system

  5. Node properties

• Compose Material - you can use this node to combine all the maps into a material so you can mutate or modify all the maps at once. The Metalness slot needs to be changed to Fresnel and the Roughness needs to be changed to Gloss.

• Mutation - this is the most commonly used node for this software and the most important one. This allows you to extend the textures and make them larger and tileable at the same time. We should use Mutation (Structure) if the texture we're processing has any difined pattern or structure. The properties of it are similar to the original mutation node.
  1. The output resolution is usally set between 8K and 10K and all the details are set to 100% preservation.

2. The Scale and Orientation tab lets you randomize and scale the features of the texture. Sometimes we need to control the rotation and set it to 0 degrees in order to avoid unwanted randomization of the features. Scale and Orientation shouldn't be ticked if we're using Mutation (Structure).

3, The World Scale tab lets to input the current real world size of the sample and the desired output size of the texture after it is processed. In order to preserve all the detail of the scanned texutres the output size of the texture needs to be around 30cm when the resolution is set between 8k-10k but that's too small size to avoid tiling problems so we need to sacrifice some resolution and set the output size to 64cm. That way we avoid visible tiling for most of the textures. The input size depends of how much we've cropped the raw scan.

4. When everything is set up we need to hit the Execute node button on the top right corner.

5. When everything is set up the Output node let's you export the processed textures in the correct directory. All the maps need to be exported to .jpg format except the height and normal maps which need to be .exr format. This can be configured in the Material Constumization tab.