Hello everybody, so im working on my demo and im using UE5, i dont want to use nannite, lumen, etc. lets say im going old school in order to ensure a good performance. Im using treamsheets for doing a castle level but I cant get out of my head that it looks very plane… you think its a problem about geometry? or is something bad with my treamsheet? let me know your toughts
If you are going to use the trimsheet to make the stone blocks of the castle, you are going to need more clear blocks than that.
Did you make the trimsheet yourself? If you did, there are a few modifications you could make that would help.
- Make the cracks between the blocks a bit clearer. If you are using a normal map, that means bigger bevels on the blocks (normal maps store only angle information, so making the cracks deeper makes no difference, the angled borders of the blocks has to be wider).
- You have added a tiling stone texture on top of the bricks, right? right now, that stone texture seems to tile continuously from one block to the next. That makes the individual stone blocks harder to see and they get lost in the stone pattern. If the texture was placed differently from one block to the next, it would look more realistic and break the pattern. Also, you could randomize the brightness of each stone block by a very small amount, just so it’s more clear that each one is a separate piece of rock.
- Your preview lighting is very low quality, lower quality than it will be in UE5 (even without Lumen). I see you are in material preview mode. Material preview uses Eevee, so you should go in the Eevee render settings and make some changes to get a more accurate preview.
The relevant settings are going to be in the raytracing category. First, turn raytracing on, it will immediately make the lighting way more realistic. Turn off denoising, as that can blur textures and you probably won’t need it for this model anyway.
For the “method” setting, you have a choice. The default “global illumination” will give you a similar result to Unreal’s SSGI, if you intend to use that. If not, you can set it to ambient occlusion and then set a distance value and it will give you something similar to Unreal’s screen space AO.
Are you going to use lightmapping with Lightmass? If you are, try looking at the model with Cycles instead, that will give you a much better idea of what it will actually look like once fully baked.
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- You could get a much better texturing by using 2 versions of the texture and blending between them using masks. This is a similar method to how landscapes are usually painted. Basically, you would make a second version of the texture that’s more dirty, then use a mask (could be done with vertex colors for simplicity) to blend between the two versions and make the wall become dirtier near the ground.
Example:
I have taken the screenshot of your texture and quickly made a dirty alternate version to show what I mean (don’t actually use it though, it’s low resolution from your screenshot, you should make a better one yourself).
Now, I start by applying the regular stone to a model:
I paint a mask using vertex colors:
I then use that mask in the material to replace the texture with the dirty version where the white is using a mix node.
And now I can just paint dirt on any model that has that material (as long as there are enough vertices for it). The mask could also be done with an actual image texture, but doing it with vertex colors is lighter and quicker and saves you from making a separate mask texture for every object that uses the material.
You are a God´s gift WOW… thank you so much I cant explain to you how much all this information helped me. I did the trimsheet so I can modify it, and now I have a good idea of how I can improve it. I was studying elden ring castles and I noticed they mix flat planes with more complex geometry to break and add variation to the silouettes do you think its a good idea to use a trimsheet just for the wall bricks and another for example for the patters for columns? I think if the trimsheet is bigger the repetition will be more hard to nottice and I can always do vertex paint on Unreal if needed.
Yes, it’s a good idea to do small details in their own trimsheets. In fact, the primary use of trimsheets traditionally is to make small patterns, borders of ledges and other long repeating details, that’s why it’s named the way it is, it’s used for trims, not for storing the main brick pattern.
So if you are concerned about repetition and the texture being too small, you could make the trimsheet contain only the small borders and details and give the big wall surfaces their own separate tiling brick texture that can be much bigger.
So, you would have a main material with a large brick texture that you can just put on everything without needing the careful alignment of a trimsheet, then use a second material with the trimsheet that you can assign to specific sections of the model that need a small detail.
That way of working should be faster and it leaves room on the trimsheet to add a bigger bank of small details instead of needing to put the large bricks on it.
Do you think it will be convenient to use POM on the brick walls to give silouette? because I wont be using nannite and tesselation
If you can get it to work well enough, it can add a little something to the model, but it will never look perfect. I’m also not sure how it will react to a trimsheet and with all those UV seams everywhere.
I haven’t had very good results when trying this in the past, but I’m not an expert on POM.
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I might have some other ideas to add details to the walls though. Here is what I would try:
I would cut the main walls into a grid using loop cuts, making sure the horizontal cuts match the height of the bricks.
Then, I would extrude a few sections here and there to add depth to the walls. The vertical cuts don’t even need to line with the texture for a good result, only the horizontal ones.
I also distort the model a little bit with a displacement modifier and some noise.
Here is the result.
For a modern game engine, that’s really not that big of a polygon count for the amount of detail it allows, and LODs can reduce this very easily anyway.
The extrusions can also be beveled for a smoother result. This is very easy to do, as they will be already selected when extruding.
I like it, that’s most likely going to look better than before, but you should try it on the actual model to be sure.
The bricks are so much more clear there, looking a lot better!