SunTempleReverseEngineering
Preface
I have seen a good article about reverse engineering UE4 tutorial assets. So I got inspired by that and try to do the same thing.
Source From
[Unreal 언리얼]태양의 사원 리버스 엔지니어링: http://blog.naver.com/PostView.nhn?blogId=cccani&logNo=221315412825&from=search&redirect=Log&widgetTypeCall=true&directAccess=false
Summary
So I download the SunTemple example project and opened in Unreal. Then I opened SM_Pillar model.
About modeling the top part of pillar, the leaf decoration seems like used same brush. And AO & Normal has been added to low poly model.
Let’s move to M_pillar material.
First thing I have noticed is that they are using customizedUV, and I don’t know how that works. So I went to UE4 documentation.
The document says that customized UV is only manipulating Vertex shader, which has benefit when tiling textures.
While a UV Coordinate node can be either part of the vertex or pixel shader, the CustomizedUVs feature is only run in the vertex shader, and offers a performance increase over running the same calculations in the pixel shader. This offers an excellent way to speed up even just tiling a texture. https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/Engine/Rendering/Materials/CustomizedUVs
Mobile specifically, using customized UV has full-precision benefit.
Additionally, everything in the pixel shader on mobile is evaluated with half precision floats. This causes blocky looking textures and some other artifacts, when pixel shader math is done on texture coordinates. The Customized UV inputs however are done with full precision so they get around this problem. https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/Engine/Rendering/Materials/CustomizedUVs
CustomizedUV example
And about normals, two normals has been mixed. However M_Pillar and M_Arch has different way to mix normals.
Someone wrote a article about how to blend normal maps properly in UE4.
http://www.jackcaron.com/techart/2014/11/14/ue4-normal-blending
Based on this article, it seems like normal blending in M_Pillar seems a bit wrong. Also as far as I know, you should not add two normals.
Next, move to statue.
I thought it has been textured in Substance Painter but this project is a bit old so they have crated procedural texture. I was bit surprised base_color only contains cracks.
Based on AO map which is using Red channel, Green and Blue channel has been used just for masking. Also those GB channels has been hand painted.
In my opinion, In 2019, it would be much easier just paint in Substance Painter than creating procedural material.