Unfortunately nanite only works with static objects, like rocks, cliffs etc. So you still have to UV unwrap guns, people, etc. but it does take A LOT of work away though. Unfortunately i don't think it works very well with low poly meshes (Someone correct me), so you still have to unwrap anyway.
As someone currently studying 3D environmental art for my 3rd year at university, UV unwrapping is by far the most tedious and annoying thing for me to do. This is annoying because of how important it is... Its all good trying to unwrap a cube or any other basic shape, but when you get to higher poly game items like First person view gun models or characters, it is such a pain. It is very much a part of my workflow where I spend a couple of hours doing it with netflix on in the background.
At some point it will click and you will learn to love doing it. For me right now its honestly one of the favourite parts of making game assets, its "rest time" of not really having to think much, very relaxing.
Try to use Rizomuv, it’s really worth it, I was unwrapping a pillar when halfway through I realised that I can do it automatically and it worked like a charm only few clean up, not jus that it even orients them perfectly. Lots of good features too.
@Flash At the start it was difficult to comprehend, to a point where I was even dreaming about UVing lol, but once you get into texturing and get experience you will start to understand the sort of UVs you need to prepare for yourself and it becomes a lot easier.
It's retopo for me. I will do anything necessary to avoid retopologizing my mesh, even if it means scrapping the work. I've memorized every song on my multi-hour long work playlist with the accumulated time I've spent doing it.
Quick tip for an 3D beginners out there for UVing more organic stuff like creatures or humans. Look in to clothing patterns for seam placement on humans, and pelting animals for seam placement on... well, animals. Especially with things like taxidermy, pelting animals requires you to do as little damage to the skin as possible while also being able to flatten it out, this is pretty much exactly what good UVs are for simple assets :)
As a normal gamer I do this. I would always get crap for mentioning stuff like this when people say games look good, and I would say "does it pass the up close inspection test" and they told me I was being too harsh. But things like this stick out to me, and are organically noticeable.
@@gdog8170 UVs are basically impossible to avoid if you want to use textures. The devs of the engine also implement texturing this way because that's basically the only way. The only way to make them disappear for good is to duplicate data across seams. This is easy to do on a seamless planar texture but as the model gets more complex, this is basically time inefficient (nor effective). Also good luck on doing that on 50GB of assets and see if the game ever releases.
@@gdog8170 Nice, I think the seam test is fair enough, mine is the quality of global illumination in some dark settings. Both are very expensive to get right. I think we can all enjoy a game with some barely apparent seams 👍
I legitimately took 2 whole classes on 3d modeling in college and couldn't wrap my head around UVs. This video explained UVs so much clearer and better in 3 minutes. Very well explained.
triplanar mapping also really helps hide seams. Doesn't work that well for specific patterns, but for stuff like rocks it's great. The example of mesh intersection artefacts shown in the beginning of a tree branch is a bit of a different problem though. That is a vertex normals issue. There are ways to average the normals of two meshes that have a mesh intersection, using distance fields. This will become increasingly important IMO, especially for nanite meshes that overalp/intersect each other.
@@corentinambroise4777 yeah you don’t use it in engine, you use it during the texturing phase in Substance Painter, Mari, or 3D coat, or blender or wherever you like to texture. You bake the triplanar projection to the unwrapped uvs. It’s a very nice way to hide obvious seams. You can always do a bit of hand fixing in those programs for any artefacts that may appear from a bake as well :)
@@rationaleuler7199 Why? All game-ready assets are made up of triangles. And even if you model with quads-only topology, in the end the engine automatically triangulates the mesh. Also, trying to keep all quads for a final game-ready mesh is unoptimized and uses way too much polys. Check out some wireframes from famous games and you'll see how horrendous topology is. It's because it doesn't need to be modified anymore. As long as the textures and shading look good on the model, topology doesn't matter (this only applies to static, non-animated assets; animated assets still need to be all-quads for deformation to work properly).
I'm having PTSD flashes from my Maya classes 10 years ago. Nowadays the software has become so much more reliable to do UV mapping and such, but back then you had to do it manually because the software was still starting to take over and were crappy at best.
Control is one of the games I love for its stunning visuals and environment design but it was indeed notorious for sutface glitches and quite appropriate to be the background of this video
I heard all this terminology while modding the Elder Scrolls series. Never bothered looking it up myself but your videos actually explain it so well that the little interest I have isn't lost the moment I see a 300 word paragraph with 30foreign word. Thanks a bunch.
UV meshing is easy once you understand what it is you’re doing, but it’s a classic case of ‘if you want a good looking product, get ready for hours of tediousness and repetition’
In your left 4 dead 2 example at 2:46, that stretched brick wall is not a UV-wrapped model, it is a "Brush"-- a convex primitive defined by simple vertices in the map editor; scaling/stretching of textures on Source engine brushes are arbitrary and up to the mapper's own discretion
Funnily enough they use some Vector stuff to actually apply lightmaps and textures, there is no "UV map" for them to begin with I'm glad you pointed it out
If the normal map, and texture match exactly at the seam cut, then the seam is invisible, but doing this would require special attention to every single 3D model, and usually a fast "good enough" is way more desirable than wasting time trying to get perfection. Edit: I just saw 2:30 you mentioned this
Yes but how would consumers run it at 60fps when u got million poly rocks everywhere? Not to mention not everyone has the latest and greatest hardware like devs do
@@11alekon That's what Nanite does. It only renders the triangles you see in clusters. The closer you are, the higher resolution they get. Further away, it automatically lowers the triangle count allowing the frame rate to stay high. You should look more into nanite and how it works. It's incredibly amazing how it works. It's going to change how games look from now on.
@@TheThouZands Exactly... I feel that soon we will end up with indie games 10x too big because "we don't need to do lowpolly anymore". It'll take up unnecessary space on the hard drive and have longer load times
@@Gojira_Wins that's fair, but do you know how long it takes for companies to switch software versions? On top of that, companies like to use their own engine. Not to mention at the moment ue5 got quite a lot limitations and bugs.
Normally is not a super big problem, but the problem can scale up depending on what you end up doing with the mesh. Sometimes you need direcctional maps, micro normals, procedural textures... . Every extra map you put on the texture can be a problem if you have bad cuts on the UVs
The best part for Blender users is that you can automatically unwrap the mesh and I didn't even know there were seams before that. I knew that the texture gets cut, but not that it gets wrapped around a certain place of your object. It should be possible for you to hide seams if you fine tune the mapping of an object's seam.
If we created a new function for 3d modeling called like UV locking or something that would allow texture data to be saved to directly to the model it could be less painful
You made a video about texture seams? lol. Very interesting :) The best way to hide seams for objects that don't move is to not use UVs at all by creating a world-aligned texture. It's limited to objects that won't move though, so there's that caveat.
This issue only applies if using premade 2D textures instead of baking new ones from highpoly to lowpoly. If baking normalmaps and generating albedos from cavity maps, then the seams will not be visible anyways. So even without things like nanite or triplanar mapping, visible seams can be entirely avoided if the correct methods are being used. Visible seams is just lazyness or lack of knowledge on how to avoid them from the developers. For handdrawn textures seams can also be removed by entering a 3D-art program like mudbox, substance or 3D coat and just use a stamp brush or smudge over the seams.
Don't forget that developers make massive games in relatively short periods of time. Consider that it may be less about laziness or lack of knowledge, and more about budgeting, prioritization and deadlines :)
i don’t know that much about 3d modelling , or like it, but my goodness you made this video so easy and entertaining to watch. and that narration? OOFT. you killed it bro!
Showing control and how there's no visible seams or stretching or any flaws at all is great contrast. Seriously there are only like 5 other games that look that good.
Seam can be invisible if you create texture and UVs in correct way. It was always like this that why i don't understand "why does this happen to video game textures?" question.
Its all trade-offs. If you create a bespoke texture for every rock and tree, then you will avoid all seams. However, this means every variation of rock and tree require a bespoke texture, increasing artist workload and also game memory to call all those specific maps. Clever UV mapping tricks allow you to use the same tiling texture for multiple assets to save time and get better performance at the cost of a few visible seams that most players won't look at long enough to notice.
I have worked abit as a 3D generalist and this really showed me that 3D modelling wasnt my main interest. I love knowing how to do it for personal projects, but on a daily basis it just wasnt my thing. however as a generalist i got to try out a lot of stuff including VFX and material creation! now im on the journey to become a VFX artist! Cant wait blowing up shit is so fun!!
I always enjoyed messing around with these, I was at a period of time where I was power learning and trying to make rocks look great, I knew that rocks have alot of peculiar angles and UV wrapping and texturing would master your skill for it, once I could deal with rocks, wrapping other things became pretty simple.
This is very interesting, but how does this solve the problem of 50 people touching the same mass of viscous sauce as they crunch the remaining doritos, some even just l driving a finger through the garlic sauce and licking it because it's just so good
i just mirrored the texture of the rock so seam is visible only on top where noone is supposed to look in my model but honestly whole thing was an improvisation because rock was actually a macro shot of smaller rock
@@Channel-ng2cd who gives a shit? I've had a lot of downloaded games that had files sizes weigh in at 40-50gb.... None of them coming close to the detail levels of the UE5 demo.
One way of avoiding seams is painting the texture directly or with procedural textures based on geometry position and not in uv, this way you can unwrap the uv in any way you want, but you will need to use aways the específic baked/painted texture on the mesh
Fun part about this is somtimes you can have a perfectly seemed object but if your smoothing isnt correct or your base normal or UV islands arnt set up correct that can also create a seam. overall though if you can get good at UVs it goes from being a pain in the ass to something that can be used to unlock so much potential in your work saving memory and time. just ask vfx artists those guys are sorcerers with the UV space
fun fact: with how maps work in Left 4 Dead (or... Source engine in normally.) Most maps are built of "Brush Models" which are primitive shapes made by the mapping tool and textures can be adjusted manually with how they scale, it does work a little different though, squished or squashed textures with brush models are usually a problem with how the developer applied the texture in the editor, normally when it's {x0.25 y0.25} (default value as well) no squish or squashing will happen, no matter it's shape. However when your resize a brush model, sometimes it will try to scale the texture accordingly but this is usually unreliable resulting in weird results {x0.3531 y0.2523} Which is what caused the squished textures in that Left 4 Dead screenshot. Why would people change the values then? usually in order to make the textures look bigger or smaller than usual. And you could also probably make some models in the mapping tool if you're both sadistic and patient enough.
I usually make the texture in an unwrapped view, then I go to the 3D object, look for seams, and then use Blenders Smear tool to smear the seams on the 3D object, that way they are hidden from all sides
1:25 and of course, the tool for automatically reducing the number of polygons can't be bothered to avoid merging faces separated by a seam marked edge.
So like, I get it was an informative vid. And it was VERY interesting to learn why I see some seams on some games...But I kept getting distracted by the background game....what was it?
I am surprised that there is still no technical solution to hide these seams. For example, a blur procedural shader that would smooth the texture in the seam area.
Is it possible for custom randomized texturing? For example, multiple color options to choose from and multiple textures. If it is possible, there may be a possibility to avoid this issue.
Seams doesn't have to be an issue. Unfortunately the most common issue is when 2 UV islands aren't facing in the same direction in UV space, thus creating these ugly seams in combination with normal maps. Normal maps use different colours to indicate facing directions to simulate depth, but when you Unwrap models, they will be poking in all kinds of directions and even if you try your hardest, sometimes, it's near impossible to avoid it completely. Most artists aren't even aware of it until it's all done and textured in substance and then exported back into your program when you notice these.
I'm personally a big fan of 3D procedural materials/shaders/textures for a number of reasons, this being one of them. Sadly it's not easily done with all software. I first learnt to make them with Blender, but realized it was impossible to preperly recreate in Unity without writing a shader from scratch. I did find out earlier this week that Unreal Engine does make it possible out of the box (at least UE5, not sure about older versions). Another reason is that you can make much higher detail without having to bloat your game with high resolution textures as much. Sure there's disadvantages too, so I recommend you decide for yourself what you prefer for which situation.
I used to be a texture modded in GTA 3-4 era and textures are very tricky when it comes to mip maps, eleven if you uv something correctly, that is no guarantee the lower res texture arent going to be shit.
thats why some devs like DICE uses photogrammetry cuz their games are graphical rich, full of textures and recreations of places, battlefield, star wars battlefront. those games have very complex maps and using uv mapping is stressful to do 😂
When I bake textures from procedural material, or from triplanar mapping with blending or its texture paint, this issues are not present. its just pre made square flat textures mapped through uv onto object, this why seams are visible, so its just end of texture sort of saying.
It is possible to avoid seams. It just requires high level knowledge of how UV pipeline works. Indeed, many game dev companies require good knowledge of UV unwrapping in a way that you will see no to barely noticeable seams.
Is there somewhere I could learn the vocabulary you are using to describe this problem? I am a fluent English speaker but I have a hard time understanding what you are describing since I’m not used to words like mesh and texture in this context.
0:10 It might be a texture glitch... Me who still hates Lego games for not putting Lego Bricks on the ground instead of HD Textures that doesn't even fit: •-•
Texel density play such a big role in the overall credibility of an environment. Yes uv mapping is the worst, alongside rigging probably, but rushing it is asking for trouble.
they are cool but hard for a solo game maker like me and it took a long time , so i just add a material and make object flat color and make it better by lighting😅
I still dont' get how texture seams can still be a problem; yes, part of it will be due to the UVs being laid out in a weird way, but what I mean is Mudbox can paint over where the UVs seperate, like your example of a rock, so that the texture isn't smeared or something like that. I did studied in 3D and wwas shown this.
That's why you make procedural textures, which if needed, could be baked. Biggest problem with those is that it's way harder to make them realistic. But, it's easily tweakable and can be applied to any object.
Ive seen mipmapping kinda fix this in old games and my example being prey the original one running lowest settings every character has a seam running down the middle of them and turning on mipmaps smoothens the character models out it's probably different though
Been playing zelda 64 games and i notice texture seams everywhere. The developers had to work with very limited software to texture everything as best they could
yes I'm aware of nanite thank you
Lmao...
Glad to see content creators that actually read their comment sections.
😆
i'm not. could you turn nanite into a 3 mins video like this? will it make me stop crying over uv unwrapping?
:D
Nanite does have its weaknesses sometimes you have to still do the old fashion UV unwrap
Unfortunately nanite only works with static objects, like rocks, cliffs etc. So you still have to UV unwrap guns, people, etc. but it does take A LOT of work away though. Unfortunately i don't think it works very well with low poly meshes (Someone correct me), so you still have to unwrap anyway.
As someone currently studying 3D environmental art for my 3rd year at university, UV unwrapping is by far the most tedious and annoying thing for me to do. This is annoying because of how important it is... Its all good trying to unwrap a cube or any other basic shape, but when you get to higher poly game items like First person view gun models or characters, it is such a pain. It is very much a part of my workflow where I spend a couple of hours doing it with netflix on in the background.
At some point it will click and you will learn to love doing it. For me right now its honestly one of the favourite parts of making game assets, its "rest time" of not really having to think much, very relaxing.
Try to use Rizomuv, it’s really worth it, I was unwrapping a pillar when halfway through I realised that I can do it automatically and it worked like a charm only few clean up, not jus that it even orients them perfectly. Lots of good features too.
@Flash At the start it was difficult to comprehend, to a point where I was even dreaming about UVing lol, but once you get into texturing and get experience you will start to understand the sort of UVs you need to prepare for yourself and it becomes a lot easier.
It's retopo for me. I will do anything necessary to avoid retopologizing my mesh, even if it means scrapping the work. I've memorized every song on my multi-hour long work playlist with the accumulated time I've spent doing it.
@@IGuessIsMe Yeah nothing quite like a week spent only doing quad-draw, makes a person want to hurt people...
Quick tip for an 3D beginners out there for UVing more organic stuff like creatures or humans.
Look in to clothing patterns for seam placement on humans, and pelting animals for seam placement on... well, animals.
Especially with things like taxidermy, pelting animals requires you to do as little damage to the skin as possible while also being able to flatten it out, this is pretty much exactly what good UVs are for simple assets :)
Great tips!
Instructions not clear, I skinned a man and now I'm being chased by the police
@@notjaller Bobby Kotick wants you on his team STAT!
@@notjaller time to go to a rimworld and make some armchairs
@@notjaller Don't worry that's normal for a 3D artist, the instructions weren't unclear.
Designer: It's not like they're gonna stare at this rock for hours and see the flaws in it.
Stylized Station: You sure 'bout that?
As a normal gamer I do this. I would always get crap for mentioning stuff like this when people say games look good, and I would say "does it pass the up close inspection test" and they told me I was being too harsh. But things like this stick out to me, and are organically noticeable.
@@Bobdylan12121 complain to UVs' system then and not the game or the devs lol
@@gdog8170 UVs are basically impossible to avoid if you want to use textures. The devs of the engine also implement texturing this way because that's basically the only way.
The only way to make them disappear for good is to duplicate data across seams. This is easy to do on a seamless planar texture but as the model gets more complex, this is basically time inefficient (nor effective). Also good luck on doing that on 50GB of assets and see if the game ever releases.
@@HyperMario64 Ik, I model stuff myself I was just talking to the dude above me who decides if a game is not or not because of seams
@@gdog8170 Nice, I think the seam test is fair enough, mine is the quality of global illumination in some dark settings. Both are very expensive to get right. I think we can all enjoy a game with some barely apparent seams 👍
I legitimately took 2 whole classes on 3d modeling in college and couldn't wrap my head around UVs. This video explained UVs so much clearer and better in 3 minutes. Very well explained.
you musthave had incredibly bad teachers
Actually, UV doesn't have anything to do with this. Well, it mighty since there's 2 different ways to solve this.
@Zachary Gough not all colleges offer Game Design or Game Systems Design as a major, but you're taught UVs in those majors
"wrap my head around" kek, that pun probably wasn't intentional but made me laugh anyway
Bruh you are just lazy
UVs is easily one of the worst parts about 3D
Rigging
UVs, rigging and weight mapping.
Where did you learn to speak fax?
No rigging/animation
UVs are great. They are generally a sign you are close to texturing. It can also be relaxing as solving a puzzle.
triplanar mapping also really helps hide seams. Doesn't work that well for specific patterns, but for stuff like rocks it's great. The example of mesh intersection artefacts shown in the beginning of a tree branch is a bit of a different problem though. That is a vertex normals issue. There are ways to average the normals of two meshes that have a mesh intersection, using distance fields. This will become increasingly important IMO, especially for nanite meshes that overalp/intersect each other.
Yeah triplanar did wonders for some chainmail/helmet textures I made
@@orbit1894 y but triplanar is not easily usable in videogame because of his cost
@@corentinambroise4777 yeah you don’t use it in engine, you use it during the texturing phase in Substance Painter, Mari, or 3D coat, or blender or wherever you like to texture. You bake the triplanar projection to the unwrapped uvs. It’s a very nice way to hide obvious seams. You can always do a bit of hand fixing in those programs for any artefacts that may appear from a bake as well :)
I absolutely love triplaner. Also, did he say triangles in the video? My eye twitched at that.
@@rationaleuler7199 Why? All game-ready assets are made up of triangles. And even if you model with quads-only topology, in the end the engine automatically triangulates the mesh. Also, trying to keep all quads for a final game-ready mesh is unoptimized and uses way too much polys. Check out some wireframes from famous games and you'll see how horrendous topology is. It's because it doesn't need to be modified anymore. As long as the textures and shading look good on the model, topology doesn't matter (this only applies to static, non-animated assets; animated assets still need to be all-quads for deformation to work properly).
I'm having PTSD flashes from my Maya classes 10 years ago. Nowadays the software has become so much more reliable to do UV mapping and such, but back then you had to do it manually because the software was still starting to take over and were crappy at best.
I want to know the game name only
@@Majin_buu_u its not a game
@@myslef7636 you mean that girl game is not a game? But it looks like a well made game.
@@Majin_buu_u Maya is an application for 3d modeling and animating not a game
Maya was still starting to take over 10 years ago? Not 30 years ago?
Control is one of the games I love for its stunning visuals and environment design but it was indeed notorious for sutface glitches and quite appropriate to be the background of this video
Every time I would encounter one I would just pretend like it's the hiss causing it so it would fit in with the lore
Nobody will remember that POS in a decade. 🤣
I feel so smart when i can answer the question before u explain it. I feel like watching your videos has leveld me up as a 3d artest
"UVs are pretty cool"
I thought the same until I had to start doing them.
I heard all this terminology while modding the Elder Scrolls series. Never bothered looking it up myself but your videos actually explain it so well that the little interest I have isn't lost the moment I see a 300 word paragraph with 30foreign word.
Thanks a bunch.
Triplanar mapping can sometimes save you if you've got a chaotic enough texture for the rock.
Yes for a stone the triplanar is good enough
Otherwise with the stamp it's very easy to correct a too visible seam
UV meshing is easy once you understand what it is you’re doing, but it’s a classic case of ‘if you want a good looking product, get ready for hours of tediousness and repetition’
In your left 4 dead 2 example at 2:46, that stretched brick wall is not a UV-wrapped model, it is a "Brush"-- a convex primitive defined by simple vertices in the map editor; scaling/stretching of textures on Source engine brushes are arbitrary and up to the mapper's own discretion
Funnily enough they use some Vector stuff to actually apply lightmaps and textures, there is no "UV map" for them to begin with
I'm glad you pointed it out
Short and to the point. Love it!
If the normal map, and texture match exactly at the seam cut, then the seam is invisible, but doing this would require special attention to every single 3D model, and usually a fast "good enough" is way more desirable than wasting time trying to get perfection.
Edit: I just saw 2:30 you mentioned this
I would add: mostly the normal map and the vertex normals
Great summary, UVs explained in 3 mins and you pretty much covered everything. Box analogy works great for me when I try to explain it to someone.
What game is that in the background where the girl is throwing rocks?
Its called “Control” if anyone was wondering
Seeing Control, a great game I only just discovered last month and haven't seen anywhere beyond where I first found it, it gives me the happy
Finished it today, I loved this game so much and hope I'll enjoy dlc's
this 3 minute video has taught me more about UVs and texture than hours of blender tutorials
0:25 "but game designers can't add a million polygon rocks into their scene"
Unreal Engine 5 Nanite: "Hold my beer"
Yes but how would consumers run it at 60fps when u got million poly rocks everywhere? Not to mention not everyone has the latest and greatest hardware like devs do
@@11alekon That's what Nanite does. It only renders the triangles you see in clusters. The closer you are, the higher resolution they get. Further away, it automatically lowers the triangle count allowing the frame rate to stay high.
You should look more into nanite and how it works. It's incredibly amazing how it works. It's going to change how games look from now on.
wait to see the size of your game
@@TheThouZands Exactly... I feel that soon we will end up with indie games 10x too big because "we don't need to do lowpolly anymore".
It'll take up unnecessary space on the hard drive and have longer load times
@@Gojira_Wins that's fair, but do you know how long it takes for companies to switch software versions? On top of that, companies like to use their own engine. Not to mention at the moment ue5 got quite a lot limitations and bugs.
wow- a concise, clean video with no outro? subscribed for style points!
I used blender since the beginning and uv mapping was extremely easy and fun
I love UV mapping with Blender too!
Never learned it, never know where to put the seams
Yeah, UVs are really cool
But fuuuuck are they a lot of work
Can't wait for AI to take over with that, it's way too much a slog
Normally is not a super big problem, but the problem can scale up depending on what you end up doing with the mesh. Sometimes you need direcctional maps, micro normals, procedural textures... . Every extra map you put on the texture can be a problem if you have bad cuts on the UVs
The best part for Blender users is that you can automatically unwrap the mesh and I didn't even know there were seams before that. I knew that the texture gets cut, but not that it gets wrapped around a certain place of your object. It should be possible for you to hide seams if you fine tune the mapping of an object's seam.
Thank you for these short videos been loving them recently!
If we created a new function for 3d modeling called like UV locking or something that would allow texture data to be saved to directly to the model it could be less painful
The videos in this channel are so informative and well presented, really great to watch!
You can also use tri-planar blending if it’s suitable for the texture in question
arrête de ramener ta science
You made a video about texture seams? lol. Very interesting :) The best way to hide seams for objects that don't move is to not use UVs at all by creating a world-aligned texture. It's limited to objects that won't move though, so there's that caveat.
I watched this video 1 or 2 years too late, haha. Already had to learn all this by myself. Texel density is also a huge pain in the a** to learn.
I just click one button in 3DSMax to scale everything automatically and then rescale stuff if I need to. Are you doing it manually?
This issue only applies if using premade 2D textures instead of baking new ones from highpoly to lowpoly.
If baking normalmaps and generating albedos from cavity maps, then the seams will not be visible anyways.
So even without things like nanite or triplanar mapping, visible seams can be entirely avoided if the correct methods are being used.
Visible seams is just lazyness or lack of knowledge on how to avoid them from the developers.
For handdrawn textures seams can also be removed by entering a 3D-art program like mudbox, substance or 3D coat and just use a stamp brush or smudge over the seams.
Don't forget that developers make massive games in relatively short periods of time. Consider that it may be less about laziness or lack of knowledge, and more about budgeting, prioritization and deadlines :)
The fact control is playing in the background speaks volumes
i don’t know that much about 3d modelling , or like it, but my goodness you made this video so easy and entertaining to watch. and that narration? OOFT. you killed it bro!
1:04 ah, the memories of opening one of these in ms paint and making clothes for that one block game.
Painted candy wrappers are my favorite example of UVs
I used to hate UVs, now I love them. It's one of my favorite tasks now, I just get into a flowstate with them.
Your channel is the oasis in my desert of curiosity.
Showing control and how there's no visible seams or stretching or any flaws at all is great contrast. Seriously there are only like 5 other games that look that good.
Seam can be invisible if you create texture and UVs in correct way. It was always like this that why i don't understand "why does this happen to video game textures?" question.
Its all trade-offs. If you create a bespoke texture for every rock and tree, then you will avoid all seams. However, this means every variation of rock and tree require a bespoke texture, increasing artist workload and also game memory to call all those specific maps. Clever UV mapping tricks allow you to use the same tiling texture for multiple assets to save time and get better performance at the cost of a few visible seams that most players won't look at long enough to notice.
The glitches in the first sample seem to be cause by flat normals on the object surface as well
Hey man thanks a lot. I was really overwheld and confused but now it all makes sense. Thank you.
LOD settings: *sees rock*
"I'm about to end this man's whole career"
Excellent choice for a background game. Criminally underrated
What game is it?
@@nealnelson6998 Control
I have worked abit as a 3D generalist and this really showed me that 3D modelling wasnt my main interest. I love knowing how to do it for personal projects, but on a daily basis it just wasnt my thing. however as a generalist i got to try out a lot of stuff including VFX and material creation! now im on the journey to become a VFX artist! Cant wait blowing up shit is so fun!!
Thanks, you explained this concept much better than my professor did!
I always enjoyed messing around with these, I was at a period of time where I was power learning and trying to make rocks look great, I knew that rocks have alot of peculiar angles and UV wrapping and texturing would master your skill for it, once I could deal with rocks, wrapping other things became pretty simple.
Great video! To the point, extremely informative, and only 3 minutes!
This is very interesting, but how does this solve the problem of 50 people touching the same mass of viscous sauce as they crunch the remaining doritos, some even just l driving a finger through the garlic sauce and licking it because it's just so good
i just mirrored the texture of the rock so seam is visible only on top where noone is supposed to look in my model
but honestly whole thing was an improvisation because rock was actually a macro shot of smaller rock
Unreal Engine Nanite might have something to say about the possibility of using million triangle rocks?
Yes
To be fair, filesize is still a major problem in that situation, the unreal 5 demo was 100gigs lol.
@@Channel-ng2cd Agreed. However, The shipped file get reduced though.
@@Channel-ng2cd who gives a shit? I've had a lot of downloaded games that had files sizes weigh in at 40-50gb.... None of them coming close to the detail levels of the UE5 demo.
@@Jadebones Not all games can be excused such a file size, specially stylized games. Makes the feature much more limited or to be used with care.
>Click Video
>"If you've ever played any video game before you've probably noticed
>This 0:06 "Genshit imbecile "
>Close Video
As Maya user, auto seams detect was my friend for those environmental Zbrush decimated objects.
As a 3d modeller this is the kind of thing that keeps me awake at night
One way of avoiding seams is painting the texture directly or with procedural textures based on geometry position and not in uv, this way you can unwrap the uv in any way you want, but you will need to use aways the específic baked/painted texture on the mesh
I don't understand a thing in this video but still somehow appreciate game artists even more
Fun part about this is somtimes you can have a perfectly seemed object but if your smoothing isnt correct or your base normal or UV islands arnt set up correct that can also create a seam.
overall though if you can get good at UVs it goes from being a pain in the ass to something that can be used to unlock so much potential in your work saving memory and time. just ask vfx artists those guys are sorcerers with the UV space
fun fact: with how maps work in Left 4 Dead (or... Source engine in normally.) Most maps are built of "Brush Models" which are primitive shapes made by the mapping tool and textures can be adjusted manually with how they scale, it does work a little different though, squished or squashed textures with brush models are usually a problem with how the developer applied the texture in the editor, normally when it's {x0.25 y0.25} (default value as well) no squish or squashing will happen, no matter it's shape. However when your resize a brush model, sometimes it will try to scale the texture accordingly but this is usually unreliable resulting in weird results {x0.3531 y0.2523} Which is what caused the squished textures in that Left 4 Dead screenshot.
Why would people change the values then? usually in order to make the textures look bigger or smaller than usual. And you could also probably make some models in the mapping tool if you're both sadistic and patient enough.
Thanks for the Control footage. Now I want to play it again. Just when I thought I'd kicked the habit.
great now I'm gonna stare at every 3D object in the games I play, looking for seams
I usually make the texture in an unwrapped view, then I go to the 3D object, look for seams, and then use Blenders Smear tool to smear the seams on the 3D object, that way they are hidden from all sides
1:25 and of course, the tool for automatically reducing the number of polygons can't be bothered to avoid merging faces separated by a seam marked edge.
So like, I get it was an informative vid. And it was VERY interesting to learn why I see some seams on some games...But I kept getting distracted by the background game....what was it?
Just 3 minutes and so well explained!
I've found the best program for getting rid of these lines in some background objects is Substance Painter. It's so easy and such a god send
God, I remember encountering this issue when texturing in Blender, would always try to find seamless textures to make it less noticeable.
im at that point of my life where where i always expect videos about UV unwraps to mention procedural textures
That game which you show looks sooo good
Especially around 2:42 , this is how Star Wars has to be like
It's called Control, it has been known to be nice. I think it was free at some point on the epic games store
Hang on a second, I never use seams when making UV maps and it turns out fine. Is there something wrong with me?
I am surprised that there is still no technical solution to hide these seams. For example, a blur procedural shader that would smooth the texture in the seam area.
There is. Normal map can remove seams
Wild how I learned a lot of this just screwing around in second life ten years ago
Is it possible for custom randomized texturing? For example, multiple color options to choose from and multiple textures. If it is possible, there may be a possibility to avoid this issue.
Uv unwrapping is the bane of my existence lol
This guy really just explained why a few pixels look off in a video game.
Special Texture Techniques like Tri-Planar Mapping are also good in some cases (Rocks/Landscapes)
Seams doesn't have to be an issue. Unfortunately the most common issue is when 2 UV islands aren't facing in the same direction in UV space, thus creating these ugly seams in combination with normal maps. Normal maps use different colours to indicate facing directions to simulate depth, but when you Unwrap models, they will be poking in all kinds of directions and even if you try your hardest, sometimes, it's near impossible to avoid it completely. Most artists aren't even aware of it until it's all done and textured in substance and then exported back into your program when you notice these.
The main important thing is that such errors do not happen in the visualized animations
Ever since I learned game creation, I can't help but look for seams when I play, it's a game within a game.
I'm personally a big fan of 3D procedural materials/shaders/textures for a number of reasons, this being one of them. Sadly it's not easily done with all software. I first learnt to make them with Blender, but realized it was impossible to preperly recreate in Unity without writing a shader from scratch. I did find out earlier this week that Unreal Engine does make it possible out of the box (at least UE5, not sure about older versions). Another reason is that you can make much higher detail without having to bloat your game with high resolution textures as much.
Sure there's disadvantages too, so I recommend you decide for yourself what you prefer for which situation.
I used to be a texture modded in GTA 3-4 era and textures are very tricky when it comes to mip maps, eleven if you uv something correctly, that is no guarantee the lower res texture arent going to be shit.
thats why some devs like DICE uses photogrammetry cuz their games are graphical rich, full of textures and recreations of places, battlefield, star wars battlefront. those games have very complex maps and using uv mapping is stressful to do 😂
When I bake textures from procedural material, or from triplanar mapping with blending or its texture paint, this issues are not present. its just pre made square flat textures mapped through uv onto object, this why seams are visible, so its just end of texture sort of saying.
It is possible to avoid seams. It just requires high level knowledge of how UV pipeline works. Indeed, many game dev companies require good knowledge of UV unwrapping in a way that you will see no to barely noticeable seams.
Actually now with UE5 we can put millions of polygons into a scene. Look up Nanite rendering! Super cool stuff :D
Is there somewhere I could learn the vocabulary you are using to describe this problem? I am a fluent English speaker but I have a hard time understanding what you are describing since I’m not used to words like mesh and texture in this context.
0:10 It might be a texture glitch... Me who still hates Lego games for not putting Lego Bricks on the ground instead of HD Textures that doesn't even fit: •-•
Texel density play such a big role in the overall credibility of an environment. Yes uv mapping is the worst, alongside rigging probably, but rushing it is asking for trouble.
We can also use triplanar projection to hide them
they are cool but hard for a solo game maker like me and it took a long time , so i just add a material and make object flat color and make it better by lighting😅
I still dont' get how texture seams can still be a problem; yes, part of it will be due to the UVs being laid out in a weird way, but what I mean is Mudbox can paint over where the UVs seperate, like your example of a rock, so that the texture isn't smeared or something like that. I did studied in 3D and wwas shown this.
This is why Procedural Materials are getting more popular, it allows for seamless texture randomization.
That's why you make procedural textures, which if needed, could be baked. Biggest problem with those is that it's way harder to make them realistic. But, it's easily tweakable and can be applied to any object.
rip the textile density for it has perished when i had autodesk maya classes...
some times it brakes near the seems because it is a normal map issue.
What game are you playing in this video?
It is called "Control" on steam
How. Soni get back the ones I accidentally x out
Ive seen mipmapping kinda fix this in old games and my example being prey the original one running lowest settings every character has a seam running down the middle of them and turning on mipmaps smoothens the character models out it's probably different though
Been playing zelda 64 games and i notice texture seams everywhere. The developers had to work with very limited software to texture everything as best they could