Nanite blend materials
Completed
Do the blend materials support Nanite?
-
OK I'm confused, this video from Epic shows vertex painting working with UE5 and Nanite, however I'm not able to get it to work with the Quixel blend materials. Thoughts?
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/q9DegP
https://youtu.be/xUUSsXswyZM?t=1462
-
Hello, RTG_Dan
Thanks for reaching out. Please note that Displacement in Vertex Painting is not directly supported by Nanite. Would you kindly point me to the time marker in the video where vertex painting is utilized in the referenced video?
-
Ian - Product Support Specialist, click the link to go right to it, or 23:45
https://youtu.be/xUUSsXswyZM?t=1425
The technique is to bake your maps into your mesh in your DCC. In the example given AO, Thickness and Curvature are baked in, then blended with materials in Unreal (e.g. paint, rust and metal).
Similar to the non-Nanite blending that Bridge presently uses, but with the advantage that it has a huge savings in texture data since it's part of the Nanite reduction system.
The downside is that you don't get in editor customization to the same degree - only the amount sliders, not choice over the vertex data which is already set.
I think it looks you folks additionally need a Nanite material blend (asap I hope as we're in the middle of this) to support UE5.
-
Hello, RTG_Dan
Thanks for taking the time to get back to me. Please note that the method utilized in the video to create material variation on the assets is not the same as vertex painting as it stands in UE4. As previously mentioned, Vertex painting is not currently supported by Nanite.
Instead of traditional vertex painting as we're familiar with in Unreal Engine 4, the tutorial you've provided states at 23:55 "In this instance, I'm baking masked data into the geometry and using that to blend between several worldspace textures."
This workflow requires baking maps such as Curvature, AO, Thickness, etc from within a DCC such as Blender before exporting the mesh into Unreal Engine. Then, by using a Vertex Color node in the material editor, you are able to extract the mask information and procedurally texture your asset using a range of sliders. This workflow is more akin to the procedural texturing techniques used in Mixer than it is the more traditional vertex painting method from Unreal Engine 4 as it is solely dependent on the masks you've baked into the geometry.
Please keep in mind that a current limitation of this workflow is how Nanite removes vertices itself as you move the camera further and further away from the mesh. Because vertices are being removed, so is the color information baked into them from your DCC which can result in flickering and a misrepresentation of your baked maps. Please note, however, that we are currently aware of this limitation. -
Correct on the workflow, I also detail that above. At any rate I have a mesh in Blender with baked maps in the vertex data ready to test with Megascans assets in UE5, but I need a material and some guidance on that.
"Please keep in mind that a current limitation of this workflow is how Nanite removes vertices itself as you move the camera further and further away from the mesh. Because vertices are being removed, so is the color information baked into them from your DCC which can result in flickering and a misrepresentation of your baked maps. Please note, however, that we are currently aware of this limitation."
Thanks that makes sense, I was thinking along those lines that something like that might be an issue.
However it begs the question - any help from you folks on utilizing this technique? Just a basic blend material as appropriate for Megascans assets would be helpful so we can test if it's a technique we can use.
-
Thanks for getting back to me. While we don't provide a material setup for this type of workflow, the material setup shown by Arran Langmeade on his linked ArtStation page would suit your purposes for this type of texturing. For additional assistance on building your own custom material to suit this workflow, we recommend reaching out to the Unreal Engine forums.
Please sign in to leave a comment.
Comments
7 comments