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Trying to understand the pipeline for hard surface materials and most importantly decals

Discussion in 'Shaders' started by LazyOnion, Feb 24, 2020.

  1. LazyOnion

    LazyOnion

    Joined:
    Mar 6, 2018
    Posts:
    22
    I m developing a game taking place in ancient Greece and I m kinda stuck in the world building aspect.
    I 've read this reddit post from star citizen, multiple talks about assassin creed odyssey and I ve noticed in different games the use of tileable materials to create huge environments (for example the rome fantasy pack in the asset store and others), but I can't wrap my mind around how extensive should the usage of decals be in all of these.

    So here is an example: let's say we create a simple box with bolts holding it, and we want to add rust dripping from the bolts on the them. I would normally just create this with a single material and 3 textures (albedo - normal - metallic), but this doesn't follow the tileable approach.
    So should the box have decals for the drips, the box model have 2 material slots one for the rusty bolts and one for the wood?

    To add on this, in the star citizen post, there is a reference to a kind of shader that holds all decals in one texture and applies only the selected ones, does this work as a simple splatmap or does anyone have any idea how this should be approached?
     
  2. unit_dev123

    unit_dev123

    Joined:
    Feb 10, 2020
    Posts:
    989
    as i understands, the hrdp sample scene contains simple (very naive) planar decal. maybe better option on store.

    i would suggest try and see which proc works better for you
     
  3. LazyOnion

    LazyOnion

    Joined:
    Mar 6, 2018
    Posts:
    22
    Stumbled upon this https://www.artstation.com/artwork/l3wwa which explains the whole process, but I dont think its possible with render pipelines before the update for the deferred lighting support.