You Won't Believe the Power of Vertex Masks in Unreal Engine 5.5

[@ArghanionsPuzzlebox]

Link to my Patreon Projects - Including World Forge and Cloud Forge: www.patreon.com/c/arghanionspuzzlebox

[@UnchartedWorlds]

This looks amazing, thanks for this tutorial, its perfect for rocks something I enjoy making in 3d and texturing.

[@ArghanionsPuzzlebox]

Thank you for watching and glad it is helpful!

[@zynun6140]

What are the main differences between vertex masks workflow and RGB masks workflow?

[@ArghanionsPuzzlebox]

For one - a Vertex Mask baked eliminates the need for a Texture Sampler to load up the RGB Mask. This means that you can use the same Material Instance Setup for multiple different Meshes as the shader will sample the baked information rather than a Texture Sampler. Using an RGB mask means that you will effectively have to load up yet another texture into memory (another call) and usually for optimization purposes - people would like to remove that entirely. There are caveats of course, the more vertex you have on your mesh, the better the vertex mask when baking it in. The RGB mask doesn't have this problem as its projected onto the mesh like any other texture would be. There are more things to be said on the subject but I personally would say the big take away here is "the use of masks - be it vertex or texture masks" and the next one being that you can save up a texture sampler and increase workflow efficiency by using a vertex mask bake instead of a sampler.

[@zynun6140]

@@ArghanionsPuzzlebox I see, thank you for the detailed explanation!

[@mindped]

I do similar stuff with vertex color.. the only problem i have with nanite is it crunches away the verticies and can create some very noticeable popping in the vertex color position since it moves verticies around... unless u have a lot of variety in position from one vert to the next.. but many verts along a flat wall will not work out well with nanite.

[@ArghanionsPuzzlebox]

Fair enough. So we effectively need to work out around the fall back mesh.

[@mindped]

@ArghanionsPuzzlebox well u need to slightly push and pull flat verts so its barely perceptible.. so the nanite reduction holds those vert color in place as it reduces

[@jonathanperreault4503]

are there ant pluggin do to this in blender? i always try to avoid that adobe subscription

[@ArghanionsPuzzlebox]

You should be able to bake various maps such as cavity, ao and thickens in blender. Then you can use those to generate the rgb vertex

[@GatyhInteractive]

Can you still use vertex data, if nanite is enable on the mesh ?

[@ArghanionsPuzzlebox]

Yes. It will be fine.

[@jaysprenkle1026]

Is substance painter the only way to achieve this?

[@ArghanionsPuzzlebox]

Any software that is able to generate Textures would in theory be able to do this. Software such as marmoset, blender, substance painter, quixel mixer (i think that is now deprecated), 3d coat - are some examples that come to mind that can do this. Hell, you can even make these bakes in Unreal Engine directly. My point here would be that Substance Painter has the most straightforward method of doing it.

[@Marvelcurd]

@@ArghanionsPuzzlebox You can skip all this except creating material in ue if you would use Houdini and its bridge instead. Just choose mesh in unreal, one click send to Houdini, simple setup there with a few nodes, geometry masking and color assign mostly and one click send back. Done. You have your mesh. No baking no substance and you can tweak and fine tune on the fly going between Houdini and ue.

[@ArghanionsPuzzlebox]

@Marvelcurd this would work with the free version?

[@yanbr1f1x]

Hello, I know that I didn't finished the video yet, but I don't think you will talk about that part. So if I going to make a huge cliff rock, but want it to be optimized and only have for example 5000 tris on low poly. As I know if I am going to bake such huge object, the resolution of normal would be too low and it would look bad at close distance. So how do I solve that problem? Only thing that I get in mind is combining this normal map with detail map to fake details, but I am not sure if it right way to do. And thank you for your video, this is exactly what I was looking for!

[@ArghanionsPuzzlebox]

Hi The idea of this video is that you take the Bake of Thickness, AO and Curvature to create masks where you blend the Base Color, Normals, ORM etc. - So based on that - the Normal quality predominantely comes from those high quality textures, not from the mesh itself. So for the mesh example I use here - there is absolutely 0 Bake done for anything except the Vertex Color Masks. Please let me know if I answered your question but I can explain further on Discord.

[@SnoopThePunk]

This is great,but the give and take moment is that you have to keep a lot of vertices,in order to have verteks position baked.You are not blending macro normal with detail normal,right?

[@ArghanionsPuzzlebox]

I've only done macro and that was it. There are many blends and maps to be considered and added. For me, most importantly has been to be able to have large scale Meshes with very good texture detail up close. I normally also do 2 distance blends as well, I've seen this predominantly used in god of war ragnarok when approaching the great wall of asgard.

[@daniGRewc]

Why not just make a parameter out of the texture sample for the mask to use through instances

[@ArghanionsPuzzlebox]

That would mean you would have different instances for different Meshes. This method just ensures you use the same material instance across multiple Meshes if you plan to texture the same

[@daniGRewc]

@ArghanionsPuzzlebox i get that , but I would prefer really to jump into SP to change the mask and quickly reexport instead of baking Vertex colors everytime I want to do a change on a mask for every asset especially on production

[@Tanjiro2424]

Does this only work for 5.5?

[@ArghanionsPuzzlebox]

This works for Unreal Engine 5 in general as long as it has the modelling tools / baking in it.

[@cyex9232]

Great content. What is the game or demo you are showing at 47s ? any link ?

[@ArghanionsPuzzlebox]

This is the world forge auto material kzbin.info/www/bejne/al7ZmYOdgbCYY9k Check the video description, you can find the beta on patreon.

[@Punisher1992]

sadly not for skeletal meshes, weird that its not there.

[@ArghanionsPuzzlebox]

Hmm - good point - I'll need to look into it because there are plenty of game devs that use RGB masks for texturing most HERO characters in their games - but they might just use RGB masks instead of vertex colors. I've seen this really beautiful article for Uncharted - Nathan Drake - where they were talking about how using Masks they were able to achieve a look of 8k texturing with a combination of 2k and 4k maps for the main character.

[@swrcPATCH]

you are too close to your mic

[@ArghanionsPuzzlebox]

Oh. Too much booming?

[@swrcPATCH]

@@ArghanionsPuzzlebox not sure if it is called like this but I guess? like 3 cm more away and it is fine

[@wormjuice7772]

Its called clipping. The "capsule" in the mic is vibrating to much from being so close. This makes it kinda "freeze" in place for to long. That creates the clipping sound "distortion" in the voice. A capsule should always be able to move, but when your voice pushes to hard on it, it cant move any further then its max possible movement. Visually in a wave editor this looks like a maxed out peak, but you can think of it as a to loud volume with a flat top. Hope that makes sense.

[@swrcPATCH]

@@wormjuice7772 That does make sense indeed, I've been doing some sound editing but on a very basic level. Yet I feel like I can understand you - thank you so much!

[@ArghanionsPuzzlebox]

Cheers guys. I'll look into fixing this in the upcoming videos