HOW to MAKE UDIMS for UNREAL ENGINE

hey I'm Jared today we're going to take a look at UVS and udims so for those of you who've been following the channel a couple months back I released a video showing how I went about sculpting the details on my neomorph model well the next obvious phase that we're going to be moving into is going to be creating UVS so that I can start to get my bakes done for this character so that's where we're going to be headed next with this video for this project I actually wanted to try something out a little bit different than my normal work which was going to be using udims inside of ue5 I was actually unfamiliar with the fact that udm were supported inside of unreal until someone had pointed it out to me on stream for this sculpt it seemed like a really good candidate because I really wanted to try and push the level of detail that I put into the model I really wanted to see if I could show all of that little fine crisp detail and pull out as much information inside of ue5 as possible with that said let's take a a look at getting started inside of Maya for the mesh with this asset I didn't actually spend any time creating a low poly for it I just created a z remesh for this project in particular I didn't have any plans to animate this character and I really just wanted to work fast so I used the quickest solution so to Aid with keeping things fast I decided to Z remesh the model from zbrush and then just take that mesh that I had used for my high poly sculpt and take the lowest sub Vision level and build my UVS off of that the UV mapping process for this character was actually pretty straightforward mostly because the fact that it was an organic model so I didn't have to worry about things like assets or accessories on the character the first thing that I needed to do to start my UV process was create a base to start working off of and that I could start making my cuts on my UVS the first Cuts I started by making were Cuts around joint areas like the shoulders and the the hips once I had those cuts I wanted to make sure to try and squeeze as much out of each texture set as I possibly could so to help with that I added cuts on the wrists and the ankles so that I could just get a little bit more resolution for those areas independent from the rest of the body lastly was the cut for the head as that was going to be needing some separate space from the rest of the body as well after going through and creating my initial Cuts I made some seams on the insides of the limbs where I could start to lay out some of the UVS the Torso I use seams on the sides to cut the mesh so that I was able to place both halves on a single tile space same with the head I split the head right down the middle and created a UV seam to split it directly in half once I had all the seams set up I can start getting the UVS unfolded and placed when placing my UVS I just wanted to ensure that I had consistent texal density between all of my UV shells so I started by getting the Torso fit into a 0o to1 space once I had that done I was able to grab the level of texal density that the mesh had and start building all of my other tiles using that info using the texal density that I established this allowed me to figure out how I wanted to pack each tile from there I set up each part of the model in different UV spaces so that I had a udm setup overall the process for getting the UVS was pretty straightforward now the next thing that I had to worry about was having my high poly geometry retain that crispness for the baking so to help with that what I did was I split my high poly model up so that it more or less matched what my UV seam placement had from there I would extend the geometry cap just a little bit further to ensure that I was able to capture all of the detail up to the seam so for example you can see here with the arms what that looks like once I had everything split up I went through the process of decimating each part of the split mesh now there are a couple of reasons that I work this way one is because I want to ensure that each piece of the model has the crispest detail possible the other is because this is going to allow me to export each individual piece of the model as a separate fbx file this process will allow for the model to be split up into more pieces that'll make it a little bit easier to load all of this information into memory once I start my baking process if I was to have to keep this model as one entity the final export would have been a lot heavier and harder for the computer to manage now the next step in the pipeline is going to be baking and while baking is important I've already covered this part of my workflow in some of my other videos so make sure to go check that out if you're interested that being said I did want to mention a quick side note that when working with UD dims you do want to ensure that you have the Ed UV tile workflow enabled when you import your mesh as long as you have that your mesh should be loaded as you'd expect and your bakes should bake properly when baking inside of painter I approach my settings the same way that I would would with any of my other bakes in any other project one thing that you may notice though is that there are a couple of bakes like with the thickness map that could potentially pose some differences between each part of the udm seams with that I just went into painter and manually fix that to alleviate that issue if it did arise now at this point in the process I normally would do one of two things I'd either start texturing my asset from this point and just continue forward in the pipeline or I would head to my render engine and start to set up the scene so that this would allow for an iteration Loop now because with this project I knew that I wanted to use UD dims I had to go forward and set up my project inside of ue5 just to ensure that my udims were set up properly and working inside the engine so to do that the first thing that we're going to want to do is come over into ue5 and we're going to come up to our project set settings once we have that open we're going to search for virtual then when we come down here to our virtual texture setting in here we're going to enable these four switches the main one that you do have to ensure that's checked is enable virtual texture support once you've turned these on you will get a prompt to restart the engine so restart that and you should now be able to use your virtual textures now once we've got our virtual textures enabled the next thing that we're going to do is create a material we're going to do this so that we can start to test out the udm and just make sure that the material and the udims are working properly so the first thing I'm going to do to create this material is I'm going to right click and hit create new material once we have that we're going to want to bring over our textures and start slotting in and checking our UDS so back over and painter I'm going to export out all of my textures which if we did set up painter properly everything should export with that tile support once those are exported back inside an unreal we need to import our textures now so the first thing that you should notice once you import your textures is this little VT in the right corner this means that the textures are now loaded as virtual textures so right here now I'm just in a process of testing so the first thing that I want to do is I just want to import one texture set so that I can ensure that my texture sets are working and I can plug things in the material just to make sure that everything is working as intended once we have our texture set loaded in the next thing we want to do is just drag and drop all of these in and start to slot them into the correct Channel once we have this we can see that we're getting the result on our model the textures are a little bit jumbled on this part of the model because we aren't loading all of the textures in but we are getting a result that we would expect so from here to get things finished up we're going to start importing in all of the rest of our textures one thing that you'll notice is once you import all of your textures you'll see here on the little texture icon that it looks like all of your texture images are squeezed into this small little box that means that we are viewing this as our udims now if everything is loaded in properly you should get a result similar to this where you have all of your textures propagated to the model the way that you would expect so now you can see here that I've ultimately exported out multiple texture sets that all work on this model and it goes across all of the texture UV seams and we now have a result that we can really squeeze a lot of fidelity and texture resolution out of so now after doing all of that we have our model set up inside unreal with the ability to use udims the next part of the stage is going to be creating our final textures back inside substance painter so in the next video what we're going to do is we're going to move forward with our character working on creating and completing our textures this model was a fun one to really experiment on so if you're interested in seeing the final textures make sure to subscribe so that you can see those next steps hopefully you found this useful and I'll see you guys in the next video

Channel: Jared Chavez

Views: 14,283

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Id: fonCA0jiEF8

Length: 10min 39sec (639 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 01 2023