Create Nanite Meshes From Displacement Textures Completely Inside UE5
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- čas přidán 17. 07. 2024
- The Video shows how to create UE5 Nanite ready meshes from a single displacement texture directly inside UE5.
Link to Artstation Post...
www.artstation.com/artwork/Ze...
Feel free to message me or see more of my artwork here...
www.artstation.com/cb3dart
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Chapters...
0:00 - Intro
1:10 - Enabling Unreal Modeling Tools
1:31 - Getting A Displacement Texture
2:38 - Viewing The Imported Assets
2:29 - Packed Textures (Basic Overview)
3:58 - Creating The Base Mesh
6:19 - Creating The High Poly Mesh (Displacement Tool)
11:32 - Stepping/Banding Issues
14:38 - Quick Shape Fixes (Lattice Tool)
17:57 - Alternative Selection Method (Tri Select Tool)
20:01 - Tools Ideas and Suggestions
22:35 - Mesh Tidy Up (Trim and Simplify Tools)
27:18 - Final Result
This is fantastic! I've been playing with this technique and it showed promise so I'm stoked to see how far you've taken this workflow! Keep it up!
Great, pleased that you are finding a use for it!
Keen for the Timelapse and ALL of the videos. Your videos are really great, thanks for the time you put into them.
Thank you for the nice comment Peter, the videos always endup taking way longer than I expect so its always nice to hear when people enjoy them. so thanks. I need to check over the timelapse, I am away for a bit but hope to have it up in a week or two
I love the way you are explaining things, you're a great teacher
Thank you that is very kind
This tutorial is a god send. Been looking forever on how to use displacement maps in UE5. Big thanks!
Pleased it helped!
Wow really well structured video man. Thanks a lot!
Thanks pleased that you liked it.
Pretty cool tutorial. Saving this one for later use
Hey, thanks for these videos, man! This is awesome! I'm working on parametric/procedural tools using the Geometry Script plugin, and I'm excited to be able to try to create modular meshes and use spline or handle controls to automate the modular usage. I was thinking I would have to do displacement modeling in Blender or make a tool myself, but this video definitely showed me that what I need is already done. Thanks again!
Great really pleased it helped! In the small bit of free time I have had to try the Geometry scripting stuff I have really liked it, in fact I have a plan to do a tutorial on one of the things I made, its not super complicated but hopefully it might be useful for some. Hope your tools work out well!
Definately adding this to my list of saves! Great tip thanks for this 🤙🏿💯
Thanks and your welcome
double comment because this video is literally what i needed for days, even mentioning the color channel thing which is currently not available, subbed
Pleased that the video helped!
Very nice explained and very helpfull. Thank you!
Dude. You keep blowing my mind.
Thanks!
Thank you, pleased that it was helpful!
Really helpful 🔥
Good tutorial, very detail, well explained, good paced.
Thank you, always difficult to find the right balance between amount of content and length. Not sure I got it right but pleased you like it.
Thank you this was helpful, I can finally use my displacement textures instead of importing high poly meshes
Thank you for this video, superb tutorial with a lot of useful info and also to the point. It helped me with stuff I didn't even knew I needed help with xD
Haha, thats great, really pleased it helped.
Fantastic video mate
Thank you! pleased you liked it.
Omg, this is amazing!
Pleased you found it useful!
Bro, that was cool, I'm subscribing
This was really useful thank you!
Pleased you liked it.
Awesome work. Keep the vids coming please :)
Thank you very much. Definitely want to do more, just finding the time is always the issue. :-)
Great tutorial and very relevant remarks about possible improvements to the workflow. I hope by now some of them have been taken into account.
Thank you, I know they continue to add lots of cool stuff to Geo script and the modelling tools so I am sure they will. With Geo script, you can pretty easily create a displacement tool to be honest, I might make a quick video on it. I think there is still issues with displacement stepping but I am sure they will fix that at some point.
@@CB3DART Btw there is a cool video about applying a disp. map from geo script here czcams.com/video/HYCB3BC0_Ig/video.html
Sorry, your other reply seems to have disappeared, anyway, the tutorial you mention is by Ryan Schmidt czcams.com/users/RyanSchmidtEpicvideos he was actually the (or one of the) programmers on the Modelling tools! So definitely check his videos out.
wow.. I never knew that you can do that with decals inside UE5. Thank you so much for this video..
Thanks for the comment, pleased the tutorial was helpful!
Great tutorial. Subscribed.
Thank you
I NEED MORE LIKE THIS!!!!!!!!!!!!
Thank you! I will try!
very good video. 10000/10
Thank you very much!!!
pleased it was helpful
tnx!
Hey CB3DART - that was really great tutorial. Great voice, tutorial flow, explanation. Hope to see more uploads from you - last one was 4 months ago sadly but fingers cross you will find time to record something new soon or sooner :) sub
Thank you! Yeah, work has been super busy but I do have a plan for a new tutorial as soon as I find the time, hopefully not too long.
If you don't need to use nanite as it doesn't support masked materials you can skip deleting the polys and just setup the mat as you would for a decal and just mask out the sections you don't need using the shader. Eventually if nanite supports it then id say it would be for sure a viable alternative on irregular shapes like debris or other things that its a pain to cut out. Dope video man the detail you can get in this compared to a normal decal for those angles where you are not front on to it is amazing
Thank you for the comment. yeah you can mask the polys and get a nice edge rough obviously this loses the benefits of nanites rendering speed and can introduce overdraw (and other performance related stuff) but if performance in the scene is not a issue then you could totally do this.
You can roll your own displacement maps of any kind by sculpting and baking in a 3d modelling program (Blender, for one).
Hello, this was definitely really helpful, and you explained many of the the little things that most other tutorials assume you already know, which I really appreciate. Were you stil planning on doing a tutorial for that scene? It would be especially helpful for an Arch project im doing right now to see the workflow to create a street scene, complete with roughness wear and tear, vegetation etc. Thanks again for the content.
Pleased that you liked it, I did try to aim it at people that might not have used much of unreals modelling stuff, so pleased that it came across that way. As for the street scene I have a time-lapse of how I created it (but its not a tutorial really its more of just a video showing what I did, so not sure how helpful that would be for you. also given how long it took to create it would be a sped up timelapse)
Hope we can get 32bit for heightmap soon. That would be really cool for small real world heightdata landscapes to...
Yeah, I am sure there must be a reason that its not working yet. Obviously the folks at epic are super talented and I am sure if it was easy it would be in already.
Using texture to cut the mesh workaround could be to displace a plane with the alpha and boolean it from the original mesh. Boolean in UE is quite robust it works on non watertight meshes (meshes with open border edges). I haven't tried this method. Just a thought.
This is true, this could work. As you say unreals booleans seem solid and it might work well. Would be good to have the option to select polys based on texture channels but this is a good idea for a work around! Thanks
This one is powerful
thanks
I was totally just wondering if this was possible, it could revolutionise my workflow if it works how I would like, thanks
Great hope that it works out the way you want it too.
Great thanks, Look forward to watching the time lapse.
So for the road, wall and pavement in this scene, would you model them in a 3d program such as blender and then use this displacement method in Unreal Engine? Or would you bring in a high quality mesh from a modelling software. I'm just wondering which would be the better option. Thanks
Hi Gavin, In the case of this scene I made almost all of it inside unreal 5 using no external software (apart from the Railings on the wall). Some assets are obviously just quixel megascans models but most others are using the displacement method I show in this video. The walls, Road are a simple UE5 plane with displacement. The pavement is a megascans model but it could be made with a plane and displacement, just used a premade one for speed tbh. As I mention on my artstation, I would not say this is the best method to make roads and walls, etc I was just experimenting with ideas and techniques and wanted to see how far I could get with UE5/Megascans only. If I was doing it professionally I would likely take a different approach (depending on the time limitations available) Exporting a modelled mesh from blender as you mention could be one method and likely would give more variations options. You can displace inside blender as well so you could just model and displace in blender if you wanted, this would allow for further sculpting etc. For this scene I tried to "create" everything inside unreal rather then use other software, partly to see how for I could get and partly for speed.
@@CB3DART Brilliant, thanks very much for the reply :) I'll have a check out of your artstation too.
Good method, also I like the scene overall looks quite believable, I would have added more damage on the red brick wall though to sell it more.
Thank you Maciej, you are right about the wall, I also noticed that it needed more break up but I have to be honest the scene was way larger than I initially planned (was originally just a road and pavement for a single shot/image) and I was kinda running out of steam on editing it more but I agree it would have helped. I decided to spend a bit more time playing around with lighting (rather than add more variation) as I was enjoying it more. You can see some alt lighting and videos here if you are interested... www.artstation.com/artwork/ZeevV1
@@CB3DART I am also guilty of the same, small scenes morph into monsters as I keep getting new ideas. I really dig the night scene among your alt lighting setups.
Thanks. Yeah, when doing stuff like this (non work stuff) I generally expand/contract it if I am enjoying it or not, this can lead to massive "feature creep" haha
Whoa, this was super helpful. Any chance you could make a tutorial on how to displace landscape materials in UE5? Or how to remap a mesh so you can have different materials on each side? (Like a building wall that is concrete on the outside // wood inside)
Hi Robert, I am not sure I will get time to show how to displace a landscape material in UE5 but I would recommend looking into Virtual Hieght Field meshes for UE5, these are experimental (i.e. epic is still improving/working on developing them) but these allow for landscapes to be displaced and rendered correctly, etc.
With regards to applying different materials, Ryan Schmidt has been releasing some great tutorials about geometry script and the modeling tools (he is one of the people at Epic that made the modeling tools, so he obviously really knows his stuff!) anyway he made a video about polygroups in Unreal Engine and at the end of that video he shows how to add/change materials using this method. czcams.com/video/ErQim-RNVK0/video.html
im playing around with this idea but outside unreal, make height in 3dcoat, export to mixer, make some cool materials work on a plane, export textures to blender, make displace modifier using acutal geo, then decimate back to nice render mesh, match up textures to mesh for final. marsmotion on artstation. ends up being higher poly than prev game assets but not too much for nanite i guess. all this depends on your use case.
To Those who gets horribly compressed displacement maps (for example when using Openland texture unpack widget tool, or reimporting), the solution is to choose NO MIPMAPS in the texture setting and chose HDR compression.
Great demonstration, I'm trying to wrap my head around how nanite will change content creation. I don't want to depend on scans and initially was thinking exporting displaced geo from painter/designer would be one solution. This seems very promising! Would this method also work on imported geo from Maya/blender?
yeah, its nothing to do with scans really (though its a great process for scan data) I just used a scanned displacement as an example (as it was quick and something everyone with UE has access too)
It should work on imported Geo, its basically the same as subdividing in blender, max, etc it just takes the existing Geo and sub divs it. So to get good results you will need nice clean imported geo topology that will sub divide nicely or you might get rendering issues
I think if you get your decal you can place it in quixel mixer and can save it as the separate files, so you do not have to worry about which rgb channel your texture of choice is assigned to. However you did say third party software so perhaps you are aware of that.
Thanks for the message, yeah, there are many ways to get the texture info in the channel UE requires. I have been working on a new tutorial and in the Geometry Script you can select a channel for the displacement texture, so thats really helpful. (I have not checked the Modelling tools to see if that option has also been added in there, it might have been!)
Thanks for the tipps for the "uneven" decals.. currently struggeling with it. Gonna give it a shot as I was thinking a mask tool for poly cutout would be great. Did you heard anything new to it?
Your welcome, Not looked at the mask stuff recently, so not sure if there has been anything new added.
I did have a (potentially silly) idea of using the mask of a decal as a displacement (which would push all the polys of the mask up) then you can easily select those pushed up polys (as they are now separated by the displacement distance) then apply the actually displacement to the remaining polys.
HUUUGE :'D I was doing this in Blender and this is just annoying as hell as Blenderr just can't handle that many polys... Thanks for doing it in Unreal like real men hahaha :'D
No Problem, Glad it helped!
Very nice content thank you. Honest feedback, I find the transitions startling since it goes from you talking to dead silence. I think if you had some background music it would be less of an issue.
thanks for the feedback, I mainly put the "cards" in there so that people can jump to different sections easily (also helps me when having to add the "chapter" bookmarks in youtube) but yeah, as I record it not knowing where I will put the "breaks" then they can sometimes be a bit sudden. (As usually I have had to shoe horn them in, while I am still talking, haha)
This was so helpful! Is it possible to do this to a wall/floor?
Yes, you can use it on anything really only issue is that you need to be carful with UV seams and sharp corners but it should work.
Regards to the banding issues, if the texture is stored as a png file then Unreal has issues with 16-bit png files and treats them as 8-bit, causing the banding even if it says it's 16-bit and uncompressed. Try using a different image format like targa and you might find that solves the issue.
Hi Chris, Thanks for the message. I tried a number of different formats at the time and nothing made a difference (mostly use EXR for non real-time displacement maps but tried others too) sadly nothing seemed to resolve the issue for me. (I am not sure when I recorded this, if I was using the most up-to-date version of UE5 though so it could have subsequently been fixed as I have not retested it.)
For some reason my current version of UE5 (updated today 20/01/2022, commit 7eab3c7) does not have the ability of enabling or disabling plugins from the Plugin Browser itself. However, you can edit your .uproject file so that it looks something like this
...
"Description": "",
"Plugins": [
{
"Name": "ModelingToolsEditorMode",
"Enabled": true
}
],
"Modules": [ ...
Then the tool can be found under the modes toolbar.
That sounds strange, I have not updated in a while tbh.
Id love to see how you created this scene and more tutorials on how you created the assets in this scene. So cool.
Thanks, I have a time lapse somewhere on my pc but its not well edited. and some of it never recorded, so I will probably make a different scene using similar techniques and then show that when work is less busy
@@CB3DART that would be amazing! Thanks so much
Hey. I really like the tutorial, but Im new to UE and i have no idea how to get that left side panel that you have. It's probably really simple i just dont know my way around yet haha.
Pleased that you liked it, with regards to the missing panel, did you enable the modelling tools in the plugins menu? are you using UE5?
Would be great if the displace tool could intelligently concentrate the subdivisions based on the displacement texture. I tried this method with a material on a plane, the material is a metal sheeting with periodic curved seams, so 90% of the plane could be really really low poly, but the curved seams need a heap. Seemed mad to subdivide a 1000x600unit plane 200+ times (had to apply the displacement tool a couple times to get that high).
Yeah I think I talked about this in the video but if not then totally agree a weight based sub division would be good. I did talk about using the simplify (Decimation) feature though. Basically if you subdivide the mesh to get the look you want then use simplify to automatically remove any polys that are "wasted" on flat areas, etc. It works very much like having a sub div that is weighted but it requires a few extra steps.
Good to see the banding issue still isn't fixed -_-
:-(
can you use premade models from .. say maya and add the displacement?
This will work on any shape but with displacement the normals of the polygons, the shape/number of polygons and the UV's of the mesh have a big effect on the displacement quality and "cracking/gaps" If you use a cube with chamfered/filleted corners and good UV's then you should reduce the issue with cracking on the edges.
How UE chose the right channel, for displacement?
I think they have added a option in the newer unreal 5 engine versions that allow you to select a channel to use on the texture. This was not available when I did the tutorial.
Does this only work on planes? I tried to do it on a brick material which I slapped on a cube but no matter what I did, it seemed to be pretty random and ugly as can be. :/ Also created seams at the corners where you can peak through the mesh.
No this will work on any shape but with displacement the normals of the polygons, the shape/number of polygons and the UV's of the mesh have a big effect on the displacement quality and "cracking/gaps" If you use a cube with chamfered/filleted corners and good UV's then you should reduce the issue with cracking on the edges. I did a quick test using a cube from the modelling tools and applied a displacement texture to it, set a pretty high displacement amount and it seemed to work for me. Have you tried the latest versions of the tool?
The steps at 13:00 are probably due that the displacement map is sampled using the nearest value instead of using a bilinear filter. This will be really nice when UE devs will change the sampling method here.
Yeah, hope that its something they can fix pretty easily.
Any tips on reducing visible stepping in the displacement of the mesh? Tried NO Mipmap / HDR compression on the texture but am still seeing mad stepping in UE. The displacement map I am using works fine (smooth) in other apps. Tried .Tif and .Psd
Yeah, as I mention in the video its something I struggled to fix in unreal also. I am not sure if it been improved in later versions of the editor? I have not tried it in a while.
@@CB3DART Yeah, 5.0.3 and its still very stepped. Oh well, one of these days. Thanks for the tutorial anyhow!
MOREEEEE
haha
Hey couldn't you delete triangles using the mask as a texture Instead of the difuse when you use the radius delete?
In the tools ideas and suggestions section of the video, I talked about wanting to use the mask as a selection method to "automatically" remove the unneeded parts but I could not seem to see a way to get it to work. Do you know a way?
how to manipulate tessellation on runtime if it's have been removed from textures??
in 5.1 you can use world position offset, this is not the same as tesselation and not sure how performant it is but might be worth looking into.
How we create texture like before using teslation method. Tesxtures like brick walls i cannot able to create bumps on it . It looks very flat
Sadly it will would likely need more software, you can create displacement textures manually by sculpting/modelling in free programs like blender or paid programs like Zbrush. A more automatic way is to use software like substance Alchemist (Which I think is now called Substance Sampler) an alternative is ArtEngine (both are paid software but might have free trials to test them) I am sure there are free equivalent software but I have only used Substance and Artengine so I cant say what other software is best. I would recommend searching for "image to material software" and see if you can find something that works for you.
THANK YOU SO MUCH, IT LOOKS LIKE EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE LIKE THIS NOW, JUST ONE QUESTION, HOW ARE WE SUPPOSED TO MODIFY THE MESH ONCE IT IS MODIFIED WITH THE OFFSET, IT DOESN'T HAVE A HISTORY OR SOMETHING
Thank you, I am not 100% sure what you mean but I think you mean after you have accepted the displacement? If so, I dont think there is a way to go backward, so you would need to be apply it to a new plane. However if you are just wanting to reduce or increase the amount of displacement you can do that by scaling the plane in the Up axis then recalculating the normals, ofcourse this might no produce exactly the same results as redoing it but it can work sometimes.
Is this kind of method also working with imported 3d meshes with uvs?
I would like to avoid creating and importing 20+M tri models just because i need displacement details on the mesh...
This should work on any mesh but with displacement generation, the normals of the polygons, the shape/number of polygons and the UV's of the mesh have a big effect on the displacement quality and "cracking/gaps" you get in your resulting mesh
@@CB3DART can i set(increase) the tesselation of the mesh in UE, right?
but if not, it's still better to ad the displacement map in UE instead of bake it into the mesh, and every time i want to change something on the displacement i would have to rebake, reexport the mesh
After inputting my displacement map and clicking Accept, I get a message stating 'Cannot modify built-in engine asset'.
Does anyone else get this or know how to get the displacement map to commit?
What asset did you use to do the displacement on? did you create a plane in the modelling tools or did you take a plane/object from the engine folders? if so it might be that you can not edit these and its giving you an error
Anyone taking message "virtual texture must be disabled ont he selected Texture2D to use it as a displacement map in this tool" while trying to apply displacement map slot? Also not working for me on preview 1 :/
Hi, I have not done much with Virtual Textures in combination with the modelling tools, so I cant speak about this specific message but if its causing a issue with a texture, if you find that texture in the content browser and then double click it (if I remember correctly) there is a checkbox for enabling or disabling VT on each texture. Try disabling that. (obviously if you use that texture in a shader that needs VT then it will likely cause issues with that shader.)
im waiting like 5 to 6 seconds every change i made. even creating a simple cube. is that normal?
Hmm, obviously its hard to say with out doing comparisons but it sounds odd.
I want to know how to put displacement into a PBR texture from scratch without having to use bridge, everything created in blender and imported into unreal 5. I don't want to use textures already created by other people to make a real video game, otherwise I would use it for cinematics and finally there is no no video explaining what i'm looking for.
Not 100% sure what you are looking for, but from the sound of it, what you want to look at is how to make height or displacement maps inside, either photoshop, substance painter (or similar package if you want to do it with out using 3d models) if you are ok with 3d models then you want to make a model with the depth you require for your displacement and then "bake" that displacement onto a plane (you can use other shaped objects to bake onto but plane is the basic and most common one). I would google "baking displacement in blender" there is lots of ways to do it, its very similar to baking a normal map but instead of normal information, you are baking height difference information.
I thought it was pronounced 'dee-cal' rather than 'dekkal' ? Maybe I'm wrong lol amazing tutorial however, this is incredibly useful
Thanks! English is definitely not my strong point, haha, think it might be a uk English thing but could also just be my crap way of pronouncing things