« Posts tagged mesh

[R&D] Zbrush to Maya: Tiling Meshes

Tiling Rock Mesh

I’ve wanted to try this tutorial for a while and now that I have I thought I would share it with you guys. Creating seamless textures (http://www NULL.terrymatthes NULL.com/unreal-2/materials/seamless-textures-in-photoshop/http://) is one thing, but tiling mesh surfaces isn’t always as easy as it may seem. Osart has posted a tutorial (http://osart3d NULL.wordpress NULL.com/home-page/tutorial-creating-perfectly-tiling-meshes-in-zbrush-for-use-in-videogame-environments/) on his blog (http://osart3d NULL.wordpress NULL.com/) that walks you through the process with a couple of different paths you can take when it comes to developing your low poly version of the mesh. The process involves using Zbrush to create a tiling displacement map. The only part of the tutorial I got hung up on was the UV section. At one point he asks you to “normalize” a group of UVs. Normalizing the UVs is done by selecting the particular UV shell you want and then going to Edit UVs > Normalize under the Polygon menu tab. This scales the shell you have selected so that it takes up the entire 0-1 texture coordinate space.

The tutorial is full of really really great stuff. You should go RIGHT NOW and check it out. Below is a tiling rock mesh I made using Osart’s Tutorial (http://osart3d NULL.wordpress NULL.com/home-page/tutorial-creating-perfectly-tiling-meshes-in-zbrush-for-use-in-videogame-environments/). To make the normal and ambient occlusion maps I used xNormal. The diffuse map was painted in Photoshop. If you have any questions I would try and get a hold of Osart, or I could help you as well.

The next step I’m going to take is to bring this mesh into the UDK and create a material for it. I’ll append this post with those results over the next few days.

Tiling Rock Mesh (http://www NULL.terrymatthes NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Rocks_togeather2 NULL.jpg)Weekend Update!

I’ve imported the mesh as an FBX into UDK and softened all the verts. Rocks have a funny specular pattern and it wasn’t something I could create within the UDK so I created a separate specular map. The following material uses a normal, diffuse, and specular map. Instead of explaining the whole map I thought I would just post it along with a shot of the rock mesh titled several times in the UDK.

Rocks Material (http://www NULL.terrymatthes NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/rocks_material NULL.jpg)Rocks UDK (http://www NULL.terrymatthes NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/rocks_UDK NULL.jpg)

Unreal Unit Meshes – “UBlocks”

Unreal Block Meshes

After digging into the 2DPlatformerStarterKit (http://udn NULL.epicgames NULL.com/Three/DevelopmentKitGemsPlatformerStarterKit NULL.html) I began thinking about how I should go about creating my 2D test level. This level would be a staging ground for all sorts of pre-production tests. Things like lightning, particle systems, and mesh design would all be roughed out here. I always find if hard to visualize what sizes my meshes should be while working in Maya.  I was thinking that a quick way to rough out the size of a level and it’s meshes would be to use pre sized blocks like LEGO (http://www NULL.terrymatthes NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/legos NULL.jpg).

I’ve made several different sizes of cube type meshes that area all using the same parent material. Each square on the grid texture represents 64 units in the Unreal engine. If your Maya grid isn’t setup  to work with the UDK change your grid settings to match these values…

Maya to UDK Grid Settings – Length and Width:2000 Grid Lines Every:64 Subdivisions:8

(http://www NULL.terrymatthes NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/ublocksweb NULL.jpg)

UBlocks in default UDK Scene

The material network is pretty self explanatory, but I’ll go over it quick. There is a texture coordinate node that is being multiplied my a custom parameter node. This lets you control the parameter node’s value separately in all instances of this material. The “U” and “V” coordinates in the “Texture Coordinate” node are represented in the texture by red and green. Multiplying this node’s output will multiply each color channel in the texture. Increasing the value of red and green will tile the material. The new multiplied red and green values are then plugged into the grid texture’s UV input.

Shader network for UBlock parent material (http://www NULL.terrymatthes NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/ublocks_mat NULL.jpg)

Shader network for UBlock parent material

Download UBlocks (http://www NULL.terrymatthes NULL.com/public/UBlocks NULL.zip) – I don’t mind if you redistribute the meshes with your projects, but please link this post or include the original ZIP file in your download.