Games Ghost Knight Victis - Heroic Dark Urban Fantasy - Action RPG

I had to go and redo the UV because I left some holes in the model that I had to fix. That meant rebaking the normals, and I thought I might as well go and bake ambient occlusion. Now I got some nice self-shadows.

I only used procedural materials in Substance Painter so far, so it was easy to transfer my work to the updated model.

This is only smart materials right now, just with simple tweaks. Only after this will I start any manual painting, because I am a super lazy guy.



And man, I really wish you can hide thumbnails in the Layers window. It keeps on having to update them every time I switch to a different channel, and it’s slowing down the whole program.

 

(sorry I forgot posting here, I'll slowly drip-feed my backlog of updates here)

Done texturing this armor, here's how it is inside Unity (sword not textured yet).

 

I mistakenly thought that even if I did a bad job hiding the seams, that it wouldn’t matter thanks to Substance Painter. I mean, I could paint across the seams, can’t I?

These upper leg armor pieces for example, I put the seams at the back.



But it turns out it was really difficult the paint the seams away, because they’re coming from the seams in the UV layout. Here’s the baked normal map to show it more clearly:



I could try to edit this normal map and mirror one side to the other, but it isn’t so easy in Substance Painter.

In the end, I realized I was just making things harder for myself, so I redid the UVs for the affected areas. Now I hide the seams at the front, at a part where there’s naturally a sharp edge:



It’s hardly noticeable now:



Now the back part doesn’t have ugly seams:



So I guess, skillful judgement on where to put UV seams are still important.

 

Had a bit of a panic attack when I was checking the textures. There were these stretch marks on certain parts.

I thought there was something wrong with the way I exported the textures from Substance Painter. I kept re-exporting them over and over with different settings to see what I did wrong. I thought maybe I needed to re-do the entire texture from scratch.

Then I realized I had used this in Unity’s mesh import settings:


I was previously playing around with the settings and I set it to High cause I thought that was a good thing to do.

As it turns out, this Mesh Compression setting is lossy. The higher you set the compression ratio, the more artifacts you get.



Mesh Compression only compresses the way the vertex data is stored on file. Once the game is running, it still occupies the same amount of RAM as a non-compressed mesh. It doesn’t reduce the amount of polygons, and it doesn’t increase runtime performance.



So I just set it back to Off, and things went back to normal.

In all honesty, the high mesh compression looks horrendous. I can’t imagine where I might need such a thing. Maybe if I was making a game for web or mobile and needed to keep the build size low, I would try this for props and other static objects. Also, it’s probably more beneficial for a cartoon style shading where you might only be using solid colors for most parts of a texture. If so, then the artifacts from high mesh compression may end up not being too noticeable.

 

Textured the Greatsword.





Here’s how the whole thing looks like in Unity. I will still be adding fire particle effects on the eyes and the chest.