Creating Custom Decals for Video Games

1. Introduction Trailer: My name is Emil Sigues. I'm a senior Tri vim dartist and I will be your instructor in this course. In this course, we will go over various ways to create decals for our game levels. At the end of this course, you will be able to create almost any type of decal and set them up in UnleegendFV. Now we will be covering a bunch of topics in the course, including the following. Creating procedural leak decals using substance designer, creating hand painted leak decals using substance painter, creating edge damage and welding decals using sebush and marmoset, creating road cracks and pothole decals using substance designer, creating pum decals in nuleEengine, which stands for parallax occlusion mapping. And it is basically a technique where you use height maps to make the decals feel like they are made out of geometry, creating image based decals, creating normal map only decals that can be used also on tmains setting up various decal materials in In reel legend five, using atlases to optimize our decals for our scene and showcasing how we use decals in our level. And of course, there's a bunch more stuff scattered around within this tutorial course. The general takeaway of this course is that at the end, you will have the knowledge on how to create a wide variety of decals to use in your games so that you no longer feel limited with your decal creation. This course comes with all of the source files. However, the showcase environment used in this course is from the unreal marketplace, so it will not be included in the actual source files. With a total of over five plus hours of video content, I feel confident that at the end of this course, you will have to know how on how to create various types of decals and use them in your game engine. This course also comes with out generated subtitles in English, Chinese, Russian, and Spanish. I hope that you will enjoy this course, and I hope that it will have a positive impact on your life. 2. 01 Creating Our Procedural Leaks Part1: Hey, welcome to the very first chapter. So as you might have guessed, in this tutorial, what we will be doing is we will just be creating various different types of decals, various different ways to give you a very nice and large understanding on how to create well, various types of decals. And we are going to get started with a classic, which are some leaks. So yeah, let's get started with our, do some Russ leaks, some dirt leaks dirt sorry I mean, some of those dark leaks, stuff like that. And I will be showing you two techniques. One of them is procedurally inside of substance designer, and the other one is how to do it inside of substance better. Now, for this, we first need some reference. And if we just go ahead and go to textis.com over here, we can find some reference. And ironically, this is not only reference, if you want to very quickly have decals, you can actually literally use these decals over here. But we are going to make them by hand because I wanted to show you not like the basic way, which is, for example, if the basic way is, let's say that we go over here to Leaks and dark, you would literally just download it structure. You would throw it to the Photoshop, generate a mask from it, which literally just means making the background black and making the leaks white, and then you would already get it into unreal, the same way that we will be doing later on. However, because, of course, it's text.com, you are quite limited with what you have to choose and you don't have any control over it. That's why I wanted to show you custom ways on how to create these leaks. But what are we looking for? We are looking for something, I guess in the direction of this, if you want, I can 1 second, create a reference folder in the source files. I'm just going to middle click this one. Yeah, and this one. So something in those directions, I think I want to get. And once we've done these, we can very easily also generate any other type of leaks. So here, and this basically the mask that you need to get. That's fine. So I'm just going to download this so that I can Here we go. Okay, so there we have our reference. And yeah, also we are just going to turn them into like ras leaks. But, technically, raus leaks, they do look always a little bit different. So you can, like, change some of the values if you want, stuff like that. But it's going to be something basic. So knowing that, let's get started with the first technique which is going to be procedural. Now the procedural way of doing it is we can just go into substance designer. We can create a new substance graph, and you can just leave it empty. Like we do not yet need metallic roughness because decals often don't have a norm map. They often don't even have a roughness map, you can generate it, but okay. Proceed draw leaks. Let's do something like that. Well, we can leave it nice and high at four K if we want to. Doesn't really matter. Like, we can always downscal it into the engine. I'm just going to close my tree if you. I don't need it. Here we go. Okay, so empty graph, just like that. I'm going to save my scene already. So right click Save There we go. Okay. Now, what we are going to do is, as I said before, this is going to be procedural. We are going to use a technique which is called the uh Oh, what is called non directional I forgot non uniform blur. Yeah, non uniform blur technique, at least that's what I call it. And I will basically show you. Basically, it allows us to manipulate specific pixels and push them downwards. And based upon that, we can, of course, create various different types of leaks. The first thing that we need to do is we need to create the base of the leaks. For this, we are going to get started with just, like, a simple shape. We just need to get like 1 second. Let me get my reference. Here we go. This one is a good one. So basically, as you can see over here, these leaks, they always have a little bit of, like, a shape going to them like that, and that's what we are first going to create as a base. By the way, I do apologize if I sound a little bit different. Is because I'm recovering from COVID. So speaking is still a little bit iffy. But okay, so creating this shape, what we're going to do is we have our shape, and I'm just going to make this bit bigger, set my Y scale down a little bit, so that we just leave with like this bar over here. Next, I'm going to press space and add a transform to D to this. Hey, I do expect that you know the basics of substance designer if you follow this titoyle but I'm sure that's fine because decals are such a specific thing. Most people would only follow them after they already know the basics. You want to go to tiling mode and just had to know tiling, which means that whenever we move it, it does not try to repeat itself. And I'm going to move this up up until here because I like to just have my decos at the top. It makes it a little bit easier to work with them. Next, what we need to do is now we are going to basically create that pattern. And for this, we can use a very simple directional warp, for example. And if you set the warp angle all the way up to like 90 degrees over here, then we can grab probably like a simple purlin noise for my noises, probably like a bit bigger. And then when you set this into the intensity, you can already see what's happening, see? So you have this. But now if I go to my directional warp and set the intensity very large, you can see that we can slowly start getting and if I play around to it by scale, these random bumps over here. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to set my directional warp even stronger. Yeah, I think something like this, it's fine if it hits the roof over here. Like, that should not matter too much as far as I think as far as I know. So I'm going to go something to go there. I do not like this where we have, like, a little piece sitting here. If you ever have that, you can play around or with your scale, which I can also do over here. What you can do is you can play around with your random seat over here, which you also like art some changes. I think something like this looks quite fine. So we just have some randomness going on in here. And once we've done that, what I'm going to do is I think I can already just like art and Edge detect. And the edge detect basically allows us if we just set the edge roundness down and the edge width down. This is those pixels that I was talking about that I'm going to well, turn into leaks. Yes. Sorry. Brain freeze. So we got this pretty much. And I will now just go ahead and I will show you the technique so that you can understand what we're going to do. And then it's just a matter of adding variation. So if we add something called a non uniform blur gray scale over here, what you want to do is you want to have your white mask, which is this one plugged into your gray scale. And then for your blur map, you basically want to once again, drag in your mask. But this time just select the line, press space and add invert gray scale so that it is inverted. And when you do that, now you can see that you just get this blur over here. If you would set your samples all the way up, you can see that it just becomes a standard blur and your blades, you can also set all the way up. The one that I want to do is I want to set my anastrophe and asymmetry, I believe, also on all the way to one, and then I'm going to set my angle. Now you can see that if I set my angle to around minus 270 I yeah, 270. You can see that now what it does is it drags along all of these lines. Now, at this point, you can use your intensity to basically control how strong you want them. But there is, of course, a breaking point, as you can see over here where it's too strong. However, I have a way that we can also fix that kind of stuff. So that's no problem. So now you can see that you get like this effect. Now, you can often use your anastrope over here to give it a little bit of smoothing, see? So if I tone this down, you can see that it just gives a more smooth effect, and now like this, it gives the really lining effect. So I'm just going to set this to like 0.98, something like that. Okay, perfect. So we got this one. Now, as I said before, variation, how are we going to do variation? That is actually quite simple. You just want to go ahead and add a blend in between, and you can just go ahead and hold Shift and then drag this into your blend. And now what you want to do is you want to plug in your Etche detect down here. And then in the top, you just want to grab a noise that will break up this line. I'm going to go let's do like Cloud two over here. Set the scale like a little bit smaller. And then if we are like a histogram scan, we can use our contrast by setting a contrast all the way up and then playing around with that position. If you throw this into the top of your plant and set this to be subtract, here you can see that now and also based on the scale, we get at these lines. So what we want to do with these is, let's say that these are going to be big leaks, so we want to have only very few lines. Now, what happens is that simply translates, and now we only have a few big leaks over here. And you can imagine that what we are going to do is we are just going to keep layering these different leaks, and then you get big leaks, with smaller leaks, with even smaller leaks, with the actual base, something like that is what we are going to get out of it. So let's say we have this. I'm going to maybe nicely organize this also. So we have this one. Let's call this base, shape, sorry, I'm just right clicking. I'm selecting my stuff. Did I forget anything? Yeah, technically, you want to also I like a histigram. I will just do that because we are going to duplicate this one. You might set a Hogram scan and set this 2.5, and it's just that you can control the intensity of your leaks a little bit. So for now, this is going to be a structure. We can right click, frame, and call this one leaks score large. And once we've done that, what we can do is we can pretty much just go ahead and duplicate this entire thing. Call this one leaks underscore. Medium, and for my leaks medium, what I'm going to do is I'm going to let's see. Let's set my position down. Let's go to clouds two and set a random see to make it different and then also set the scale. So for this one, my goal is to just have a bunch of smaller leaks over here. And now this non uniform blur, we have a really strong intensity, as you can see over here. This nonuniform blur. We just want to tone down the amount of the intensity, and we will also break up all of these lines later on. So see we have this. Let's go back into our position of our histogram scan. Sets a little bit less. Something like this should be fine. Once we've done that, begin, once again, duplicate this one and call this one Leaks underscore smile. And for our leaks small, this is going to be like the very base over here. I do not need to have breakup. I kind of like what to have them always present. So what I will do is I will just press backspace on my blend and delete everything else. There we go. So now we get something like this. Now, this is, of course, way too strong over here. I can set my position down a little bit. So to break this up, let's add a blend, and we are going to actually add the breakup after we've done the leaks. And for this, we are going to use probably just like anastrophic noise over here. And if you turn on rotate, you can pretty much play around with the Y amount. Now, this way too sharp, so we need like a blur high quality gray scale behind it over here. And then when you plug this in here in your blend, you can set this to be subtract, I believe. Yes, subtract, but I probably need to play around with my opacity. Yeah, I see. And that breaks it up a little bit. I'm just going to play around a little bit more with my settings over here. So, one, one, let's go to the Y amount settings. Okay, that's fine. And my blur is, here, let's set my blur a little bit stronger. I think that's the one, here, see. So then you get these kind of leaks. And then, of course, when we are combining all of this stuff together, that's when you start to get really interesting effect. The only thing is that it does not feel strong enough right now. Stone down my blur and tense a little bit. And let's just go ahead and probably use my Hcam scan of my leaks to increase the position and make them a little bit stronger. Yeah, okay, let's try this for now. So we got this one over here. Now, let's go ahead and start with our first combining. So what I'm going to do is start off with a simple blend, and we are going to start by blending our directional war before we actually add the edge texts. This is going to be like the solid part of our leaks, and we are going to plant this into the background. And then what we can do is we can blend our leaks large into the foreground and set this to be, for example, maxlten often or you can just do art. Yeah, it often does not matter too much, but I like to do Max Lighten. And then I can use my HcaM scan now to kind of, like, roughly match the intensity a little bit. You can see her here, and now it's just a matter of stacking. So we are blending again, the medium ones, Max Lighten. And for the medium ones, we can once again, play around a little bit more with my intensity, and you can later on also just play around with your position to get more or less of these medium leaks. Then we are going to blend it again using our small leaks over here. Max ten, there you get a C now we have our small leaks, and I feel like something is still missing. Yeah, I feel like something is missing. Let's go ahead and split this one up into two. So the first one is going to be quite soft. See, I'm just playing out with my passe. There we go. And then if I just duplicate this one, what do I want to have a multiply, maybe? That's also interesting. So the multiply basically, it just overlays it, so it will break it up. Now, okay, let's do subtract. So yes, the first one subtract, and the second one is like a really strong subtract like this. And I like to sometimes do this kind of layering where I use the same stuff over and over again. And then if I do max lighting in here or maybe even an art, yeah, you can kind of choose if you want to do like an art or Max ten and that will just increase some of these extra pieces over here. Now, it doesn't look too interesting right now, so we need to, of course, do a bit of balancing and stuff like that. I'm going to get started by just clicking on my blend and it's like, play around with my position and play around with my HGRm scan to see if we can get more or less of these strong leaks and what do we want? Then we have the second one, the leaks medium. Now, what you often see is that the larger leaks are often surrounded by some of these smaller leaks, but they are still larger than the base line over here. And that's kind of what I want to get. So over here, I changed my random seat. Sometimes it might be interesting to not change your random seat so that those leaks are really surrounded around these areas and then play around a bit more with your intensity, although it's not yet exactly what I want to get. You know, let's play with my random car after all. It didn't create what I wanted to. So let's tone down my hiscum scan again. I think what we can do is we can probably add our damage to this, and that will break things up a little bit better. So to add your damage, you basically want to get started with a simple directional blur over here, and this direction blur if we set our angle to like 270. You see, I will just push everything out a little bit more. And if we just play around now with our intensity, it will give us a nicer fade across this area. I cannot see that this fade over here, it's way too strong, so that's something that I'm also going to work on to reduce the sheer whiteness of it. But as you can see now at the direction Bleu, this is already starting to look a little bit better. The only one that I really do not like is my leaks medium over here. There it's way too straight and everything like that. And I guess maybe I can do, like, a blend and plug in again, like my leak small and set this to, like, a multiply this time. Or maybe I should just do a subtract again. Here, like a subtract. Yeah, let's do subtract. There we go. Just to break up that very straight shape. Yeah, here, see, that's already working a little bit better. Normally, the big leaks do not need it. But what we can do is we can just give it the functionality just so that if we do want to play around with it, it's always nice to try it out instead of just accepting that it will not work or something like that. So subtract. There we go, see? Because it also gives some of these lines, which you often see in here because these leak decals, they are basically over time. It is just slowly leaking away more and more stuff. I can now also play around with my position and this blend to get a decent effect. And I will first add some damage, and then I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to balance things out. So for damage, very simple. Just do like a slope blur gray scale, and we're just going to basically mess up the lines a little bit. And I'm going to get galvanized. I want to get something quite noisy, maybe Grinlik paint. Yeah, you could probably use this one over here. And then if we go ahead and add a blur high quality gray scale because this is way too sharp. So blur high quality grayscale and just give it a little bit of a blurring on those sharp edges. Throw this into your slope blur. And what you want to do is boost up your samples, set your mode to minimum, and then tone down all the way your intensity. And then when looking up close, just carefully move your intensity back up a little bit, maybe like 0.05, something like that. And as you can see over here, that will like these small bits. Which is looking fine. And then what we're going to do is we are going to add a second slope gray scale for micronise. And for this one, I'm going to use one that I often use for micronise. Where are you? It's like a fractual sun. Where are you? FractualFractual. I guess I should go by, alphabets. Oh, yeah, here, fractual sun base over here. Yeah, we can plug this in here, samples all the way up, mode, minimum, intensity all the way down. And here, you can see that this one, it gives an overall damage if I said it's very low, 0.02, from a distance, it gives you almost like a glass effect, but it also gives you like a dirt effect. 0.01. Now let's do 0.02. Here, I see. And that already makes the leaks feel a little bit more grounded. So that's quite nice. Okay, so we have this. Now, what I want to do is I want to go ahead and I really want to get this effect where you can see the leaks are going longer, shorter, longer, shorter. So that's some thing that I want to work on. The nice thing is that we already now have the framework in place so we can right click, call this damage Right click, call this Combo, and let's have a look. So everything will be guided from our base leaks over here. I think the amount that we have is fine. If you want, you can play around a little bit more like your random seat. If you think you like, Oh, I want to get, like, a nicer yeah, this one I quite like. Let's do six. So we just have a few clusters over here. Okay, so that's fine. And I can also play around with my opacity to make them strong or less strong. Now we go on to the second one, and I'm just going to temporarily push my, not this one. Push my hiscum scan ups that I can see. Okay, so in those areas they are located. I just want to get, like, a favorable effect. Here, let's actually go back to basics over here. So we got this one. Then we have this one. What I'm going to do is I'm going to set this one to six also. Because then they should be often around my stronger leaks. Now, I'm going to make my stronger leaks a little bit longer by going into the non uf Bleur and setting my intensity a little bit up. And then these shorter leaks, I'm going to make, well, a little bit shorter over here. So those will be surrounded around this point and then maybe make them a little bit more intense in terms of their breakup using the blend at the end. Let's see, and then we add the next one. I think the next one makes everything a bit too even. So that's something I want to work on. Let's go to our non uniform blur. Let's tone this one down even more and then also just play around a little bit more with my subtract over here. And then I add the second one Yeah, the second one over here, which maybe set my subtract even stronger. And let's see. If I now go all the way to my damage, that is even worse. Okay, so we are losing a lot of stuff because of our blends, so we just need to keep going back into our non neu Vbleu Ah, there we go. See, and if I push this one, this intensity of the medium leaks up a little bit. And I don't know. Maybe's my Hcrum scan. There we go. Now we get something that looks a little bit more logical. So we got that one. Next week, we get something that looks a little bit more logical. So we got that one. Next we can try no new fonbleu over here. You see, now it's starting to look like leaks. So it's just tweaking. Like the system is here. It's just tweaking a bunch of stuff to make sure that it all looks a little bit interesting. Okay, so we got something like this. Now let's break up this look that we have over here. And we can do this in quite an easy way. So this will still be like the same system as before. Going to create a well, actually, we don't need to. We can just duplicate only these two. So we are going to create again, like a line over here and let's just move it somewhere here. This line is going to be quite a bit thinner. So it's just going to be like this very thin line and then place it all the way at the top. And these are just going to be like plain straight leaks I'm going to grab probably, let's steal all of this from our small leaks over here. So we got this one. We don't need an edge detect. So we are pushing this down. Here scrum scanning can go a bit lower. Then what we're doing is we have a subtract and we can set our subtract like Wi Small, and then we can use a non uniform blur. No, wait, this is not good. I want to have it even stronger. Let's see. So non uniform bleu our shapes. Let's make the, let's do this. Let's make nonuniform bleu way stronger so that the out ends are very strong. And then maybe we can also play around with my His come scandals play around with my his come scan little bit. Actually, 0.5 is just fine for it. And then if we add a transform that has an absolute tiling mode of no tiling and pushes up, there we go. See, there we go. Yeah, now we are basically just pushing these up so that we only end up with, like, the nice leaks at the very top. And just call this like, I don't know, flat leaks or something like that. And we can use this to basically break up this stop shape. So if we blend this again, using this one, multiply or subtract. M doesn't seem to do anything, to be honest. Oh, way, that's because it's art. I need to go subtract. Okay. So here we have a subtract. And then what I can do is I can go ahead and I can push push this up until we get a little bit of subtracting effect. It's a little bit too strong, so I need to go into my non uniform bleu and tone this down a little bit. And there we go, push this down. And the nice thing is with this, what we can also do is later on we can generate those slight dark colors that you can sometimes see over here. So we can also do something like that. Okay, so we are breaking this up a little bit like that. It might look a little bit strange, but it should work totally fine. And then after our damage, yeah, there we go. Then it looks like that. Okay, cool. So we got this stuff. Now what we need to do is we have the most important thing which some mask. And if you press space, you can see that it's also perfectly tiling, which is really nice. So you can just repeat it. And that's something that you cannot get from these type of details over here. Unless you do a lot of modifications, start working on our color. So let's save our scene. And for our color, what we're going to do is quite simple. You want to basically blend your mask with some kind of a noise to break things up. I think I guess we can use our Grunge leak paint that we already used before over here. Yeah, let's do this one. But I'm going to add a histogram scan in between so that I can control it a little bit. So here we have our Grinsleak paint, and I'm just sending position to 0.5, which is default. Let's make it like a bit stronger. Throw it onto your blend, and we probably want to go for, like, a multiply. And this will basically break up colors because if we just do this, the colors will be very flat. They will be s plain because what we're going to do is we are going to use a grunge map Grinch map and gradient map, and gradient colors to them 0-255. Because these are all perfect gradients, it would just be a very flat color. But if you throw in a noise like this, it will all of a sudden just have different colors in between here. So I'll show you what I mean. We have this one. We can add a gradient map. And what do you want to do is you want to press the gradient editor. So as you know, probably if you've used substance sign before, when something is black, you can assign it to black. When something is white, you can assign a color to everything that's white and everything in between, and then it will just create a nice gradient. Now, what we can also do is you can use your big gradient. And with that, if I swine gets all on one screen, I can go in here. Press pi. Okay, I can do that. So I need to do this off screen. But basically what I will be doing is I will be pressing pick gradients and I will just be dragging onto my leaks over here. Because it's the same program, I cannot do that onto my leaks over here. Because it's the same program, I cannot do that. So if I just do that now, there you go. See, you get something like this. And I want to just keep doing this until I get at least something that is like a decent. It's like a base. Yeah, this is too strong because I drag too many times. So I'm just trying to find a nice balance. Between the stuff. To get like interesting base colors for my leaks. And this might take a second to really get white. But once you get it, it should be fine. It can be a little bit extreme. That's fine. But I don't want to have it like too noisy. And also, what you can do is you can then later on, use your hair crumscan. And with that, you can kind of, like, decide if you want to break things up a little bit. You can see over here I'm just trying to break it up. So yeah, like medium to dark brownish leaks, and then I will make the background probably a little bit darker myself. Okay. Come on, give me something that works. Close. Let's go in this area. No, that's too strong. And we can, of course, also do manual editing, but I always like to just first get a very solid base. So over here, let's say that I have this as as a base. Now what I can do is I can just click and drag and just delete some of these pieces over here. I make the background a little bit darker over here. Okay. Now what you can do is you can basically just use these leaks. And drag these pieces around here to get a sort of like an interesting effect. An interesting effect. Yeah, you can see me on purpose, dragging all of these areas a little bit closer so that the leaks stand out a bit better. You can always always go in and, like, art an extra point. And then, for example, in this point, if you say, like, okay, I want these leaks to be I don't know, like, a little bit lighter or a little bit darker. I guess they would probably be a little bit lighter. You can also do that. But mostly what we're going to do is in a bit, we are going to just check it out inside of Unreal engine, and then we know, if we are off the mark or if we want to have more or less. I'm just deleting a lot of stuff here and, like, the background because all of this stuff is, like, way too strong. There we go. See here, you just want to get like subtle leaks, and it might look a little bit strange now, but we are not there yet. We also want to probably balance out some of the colors a little bit, So what we can do is we can just balance it out by changing it a little bit. Same for discolor like this color, it's a little bit too strong, so we can tone that down. Sometimes I might decide to just delete random areas to see if it, improves so here, let's say that this area over here does improve a little bit. Let's push this one back. This one also, and this one also over here. This effect, I want to push everything a little bit more towards, like, the orange, but we can change this kind of stuff after this also. And then slowly you can get sort of like the leaks that you want. Let me say it like that. So we got this. I'm going to probably it's try and make these outlines a little bit darker. So let's say that we have something like this. I kind of like need to really preview it inside of Unreal engine to get a good effect, preview it inside of Unreal engine to get a good effect. But what you can do is you can add a replace color range note behind it. And then for your source color, you basically just click on pretty much like the main color of your decal. And then for your target color, you click on the source color. Set the source rage up. And then now whenever you want to change something, if you just click on the target color and in here. As soon as you change it, you can see that you can quickly change your leaks to a different effect like that. And once we've done that, what we're going to do is maybe add one extra blend and remember how we have these extra small leaks. I'm just going to plug this into the top. Now, because it is a gray scale, I need to select this line and turn it into a gradient map and then press D to dock it. Press, probably, like, subtract, like some of these extra dark leaks at the top, like that. Okay. So we got that one done. And basically, what it will look like is if we, for example, blend this and let's just like a uniform color that's black at the top. And then our mask at the base, do an invert grayscale. This is what your leaks will really look like in terms of the background. So right now, what I notice is that, yes, this is too strong of like a base, but we are quite overt now. So what we will be doing is in the next chapter, we are just going to go ahead and we are going to balance this out a little bit more and then set it up inside of unreal engine. So we call this base color. And 3. 02 Creating Our Procedural Leaks Part2: Okay, so let's go ahead and continue. So I'm going to start by I wanted to get a bit of this really large flat area because as you can see over here, the leaks, they start way earlier. Now, hopefully that can be as easy as gabbing I think after this point, actually. I don't know which point because we do have a direction wap over here. So let's try this point first. Let's add the transform over here and tiling mode, no tiling. Let's go all the way to, like, my leaks over here in my mask, and then we can just grab our transform and move it up and see how it behaves. Oh, that does not behave very well. That is unfortunate. Okay, so that is not the right place to place this. Now, I can try over here, and I know that will not look exactly correct, but I just want to try it out before I start doing other stuff. So Hmm. That's a twiggy one. I guess I could make it less thin in my shape, maybe. I'm just trying to basically find the balance. That's it. So let's say that we make it a little bit less thin. And if we then in our directional warp, maybe set the intensity down a little bit. Let's see, does this work better? Still does not really work that much better. That's really unfortunate. Let's go into my direction warp. Let's see if I tone it down or up. Yeah, so if it's hard Yeah, it's tricky. It's tricky to get exactly the effect that I want. I can also just play around with my seats. So I guess there's, like, a sense of luck involved in it. But it will looks like, yeah, we cannot accidentally hit the top parts over here. I can try and go back into my shape. Yeah, so see now I'm hitting the top part, which will most likely mean that it is cutting off. Yeah, see? So it is cutting off those shapes. I guess what you can do is you can lay on even more of these leaks, but I feel like at this point, I just want to try and balance out my settings. Like, that's a little bit too strong. Karma, you can do it. I know. Something like this, I think something like this might be a little bit better. Yeah. Okay. Let's try something like this, and let's actually preview it inside of unreal before we move on. And maybe now at this point, I do want to make my large leaks a little bit stronger. So let's set this from 50 and just type in 60 because if you type in custom values, it will just become a little bit stronger. And we can also go into our Home scan and just play out with our position a little bit more. There we go. Okay. Anyway, so we now have these leaks over here. I would say the last thing that I want to do is, I feel like I do need to add, a little bit more darkening, especially in these center bits over here. So let's go ahead and go into my gradient map. And let's, for example, Click. Let's say, let's click here and then just make this a little bit darker. Oh, that's nice. So that one adds like darkening here. Let's click another one over here and just see what this one does. Okay, so that one asks like some darkening around the edges. That's fine. I also want to try and, like, find. Maybe it's over here, the center point. Yeah, I think we're getting close to it. Don't know maybe there's, like, another center point over here. Oh, no, that's that one. That's Undo that. Maybe it's this one that is just too light. There we go. Here there's another center point. So you can click another over here, and there we go. Uh, yeah, you know what? I'm going to know that. Let's leave it like this. Let's just see what this looks like. So what we're going to do now is we are going to export this. Now, you can decide to also create a roughness map if you want, or you can even create a norm map if it is needed for something like this. I don't think we will need that for now. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to add a note that is called the RGB, if you just type in RGB, you get the Alpha merge note. Now the Alpha merge node, what you can do is you can plug in your base color in the RGB and then plug in that mask that you created into the Alpha. So this way, you don't have two textures, but you only have one, which is more optimized. Then if you just press space and ded output, you can just call this ak 01 score base, for example, copy the identifier also into your labels that it has the same naming, and then all you need to do is just right click Export outputs as Bitmap. Then we can go into our source files. Now we'll make a folder called textures. Leaks on scorso one. And at this point, it's just balancing out. I know it's a little bit boring sometimes, or at least in a tutorial, turn on this box over that we automatically change our output. But it's just something that happens. Like you just need to kind of leak them out. I will say that I have had to play around with it a little bit more this time than normally. So normally, everything falls into place a little bit quicker, but this time, the top part is being a little bit more annoying. Maybe one thing that you can do is you can use your directional blur to also reduce that, as you can see over here, stat of that that we can do that. What we're going to do now, we are going to create a material, so we have this. It's going to Unreel and we are going to basically create a material for decals, and then we are going to preview it. Now, we will be using Unreal Genive because it has been officially released, and this is just a brand new project. There's nothing in here just completely new project. What I'm going to do is I'm going to in my content folder, create a folder called decals. In this one, I want to make a folder called textures and another folder called materials. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and textis Like 01. Let's import my textures. So if you click on texture, just simply drag it in here. There we go. Easy does it. And then if we go into materials, we need to create our master material, and this material we can use for all of our decals. So if we right click At material because it's going to be super easy material, decals. So if we right click art material because it's going to be super easy material, decal underscore master. There we go.'s open it up. No, it's on my other screen. There we go. Go to textis and just rag in our decal over here. Okay. Awesome. So what does this decal need? Now, first of all, it needs to work as a decal, and for that, we want to click on our decal master. Material domain, we want to set to deferred decal. Blending mode, we want to set to translucent and the shading model. Oh, God, they changed the where I can fight this value. Am I doing this white surface? Oh, no, no, yes, I'm doing this right. Sorry. So the shading model can just be default lit, I believe. The reason why I'm a little bit hesitant is because they changed around works inside of Unreal engintFV specifically. So if you use Unrual engen four, there is something called debuff decal color, normal roughness, something in that direction. But it looks like that they simplified it in here because this happens to be my first time setting it up inside of UnrelEengine five. Um, which curious. Well, not the first time, but normally when you port over decals from real engine four to five, it will automatically convert it. So RGB goes into the base color, Alpha goes into the Obste. Now, for our roughness, we can choose. So we can do like a scale perimeter, which if you do S click and then call this roughness, this just a simple value that can give us our roughness map. So if we set this to like 0.7, this is often enough. What you can also try to do sometimes is what was it? It was like a D set weight node over here. And you plug this into your desaturation, plug this into your desaturation, and then you add a constant, which is zero, and you plug this into your fraction. You can just right click and press start previewing node. It needs to be one. That's why I did that. One here. So now it is like desaturated. And then if you multiply this, using your roughness amount over here, and sometimes you can also do a simple contrast. I forgot what it was called contrast because they're so cheap contrast. That's it. Sometimes you can also add like a cheap contrast in here if you want and add another scale peimeter and just call this roughness unscaed contrast. I'm just pressing SClick. If you want, you can also go in here and type it in. Believe the default needs to be one, but I'm not completely sure. Basically, technique if we just start previewing this one. Our default needs to be zero, I think. There we go. You can see that over here, we can just basically play around with our roughness and stuff like that. Let's say that we have something like this and then we can just play around with it. That's another way that you can very quickly generate some roughness that is a little bit more interesting. Then if you want, you can proceed to come it and just call it roughness. Yeah, we don't need a norm map or anything like that. So this is already fine. One thing that you might want to do is you might want to add a multiply in your base color like this, and then add something that's called a constant t vector, which basically just like a color overlay. You do need to right click and convert this to a parameter. And the reason we need to do that is because LSB cannot change it inside of our engine. And we call this color overlay. This is nice if I ever want to make my leaks, for example, black, or I want to just make I can do that in here. So now I can save my scene. Then if we go in here and let's say that we go and create a simple cube that sets to zero, zero, zero. Just make it like a wall. I don't know. Something like this. Okay. And now, basically, for your decal master, if you right click and create them T instance, we can call this leaks underscore 01, for example, and simply drag this on here. Now, you can see that you have your decal, if you just rotate it. 90 degrees. You can see that now we have our leaks, and I'm just going to turn off my snapping and my snap scaling. So we have our leaks, and then based upon this, we can, of course, just do some balancing. I'm going to make my leaks a little bit larger, so I'm just scaling this up and down. You can see that it will just kind of overlap everywhere. Okay, so these are our leaks. I'm going to now go ahead and work on this a little bit more when seeing this. So yeah, I don't like the base that we have over here. Um, I wonder. So first of all, I'm going to just tone this one down. And I probably need to also do that over here. Let's tone the strong colors down. Basically, what I wonder because it is a decal. So technically, this should work. I've never actually tried it is simply art to transform here because normally I don't have this problem. But that's the thing with procedural like sometimes it's a little bit unexpected or something. I can try like tone this down like this. Now, we will then lose these bits, so we might need to play around with this. But technically, what it will do now. So if I now go into reel, go to my textures and right click and press reimport you can see that now, it has this. So that's pretty cool. So like this, we can add some more leaks, but, yeah, we have some of these really strong points that we should not need. Like, this should work totally fine. We should just need to play around a bit more. Maybe, like, play around my scaling a bit. And let's tone down the intensity a bit, that kind of stuff, it should not need to be this intense, so we got some stronger leaks. Even stronger leaks, we are those. Yeah, that all looks pretty okay. We had some damages. Maybe if fugit okay, we had some damages. Maybe if we just add like a few bigger leaks, so we can go in our here's Crum scan and maybe, play around with my position. Because right now it does not give me this effect yet, and that's why I don't like it. Like, I need to get an effect like that. But I keep getting this really strong top line over here, which I do not like. I'm going to set my transform before I add those extra little details at the top because else I lose those. So let's set my transform here. And at this point, yes, it is procedural because we can quickly change it. However, it's not procedural yet in the terms that we cannot just do custom adjustments like this, like you can see over here. So I do not mind doing these kind of adjustments. It's totally fine for decals because you off super specific procedural decals. So we got something like this, and now's play with my pearling noise, and I just need to get a favorable position. That's the goal right now. To get, like, a favorable look and feel to the things. Okay, so those are like the strong ones. I feel like maybe I want to produce these smaller ones. Let's uh play around a little bit more with my new from Bleu over here. Like, I like the large ones over here, but I feel like they are not completely grounded. And I feel that it is because of these bits over here. So I'm just trying to, like, kind of balance them. Normally, I would just, like, pass the video here and I would just do that and it magically works and stuff like that. But right now, I don't really want to do that exactly. I just I want to give you guys, a little bit of, like, a preview. On how we can work with this. So right click. There we go. Yeah, I think that looks pretty pretty decal, pretty decent for, like, leaks, as you can see, as I said before, like, play around with it a little bit. So let's say that we have this. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to go a little bit more in, like, this color direction. That's probably the next thing. One thing that is a little bit ning is that this sun, it's like, super yellow because it uses temperature. Yeah. So if I set it to a little bit more of like a actually, let's turn off use temperature. Let's make it white. There we go. So that we can see a little bit more accurate. Okay, so right now it is a little bit too orange, and I want to go a little bit more for like a brownish. And the cool thing is, what you can also do in your color replace, you can try to just click on the target color and actually click on your reference and see if that maybe helps. So target color over here. Okay, and then we get something like this. And what you can also do at this point is, if you want, just to as like a mimic, you can add, for example, like a uniform color that's a little bit grayish. And we are basically just mimicking as if we have the wall that we had before, and then we simply blend this using our RGB and our mask, just like this. And now you can see how it roughly would look like. And now, this color works a little bit better. It's a bit tricky to see what it looks like in here, because, of course, a lot of stuff you don't see, these colors look very strange maybe, but when there's actual intensities and opacities and everything going on, they become a lot less strong and so we got this one, and I think the first thing that I notice is that here, they fade out a little bit too fast. That's the first thing that I notice. So I might actually want to go in here and carefully add one more hist cam scan behind it. Set us to like 0.5. And if we then just have a look over here and just carefully see what it happens. Okay, so that's too bad. So, it first pushes out the one collar I don't want. You can, if you want to do, like, really intense stuff like this. Yeah, just for fun. Here you can see how you can quickly generate different leaks. And now you get these really strong leaks over here. I don't know exactly why it is orange. There must be the sun or like the sky or anything like that. So I'm just going to fake it a little bit. So I'm just going to fake it a little bit. So normally don't do this, but I did not create a scene. I can, of course, create, like, a brand new scene if I want to, which maybe it's better if I do that. Let's just select like our cube and our leaks ControvNw level and just make it like a basic level, press. Okay? Don't Save Contrav. See? That's why I did that because you can see that there is quite a difference in, like, a plane level when no other lighting and volumetric lights and everything get affected. But anyway, so here can see really strong decal in action. And at this point, if you want, you can just play around with it and you can get you can close this video and move on to the next one. But I'm going to do is because I just want to make sure that this is looking nice. I'm going to basically play around a little bit more with my histogram scans. And sometimes I might want to also like twice his scrum scans in, like, some other ways. So let's see. So I'm arding them over here. So sometimes twice like, Okay, maybe we can ard in his scrum scan over here. See if we can push it out because then hopefully the damages, as you can see, we kind of push them back in. And it's just all to play around with your colors here. See this I quite like. So this is a nice control for our leaks. So it all depends where you kind of place it. It will have different effects. So here it will get rid of, like, most of our damage. And then based upon this, you can also if you want to change your damage, and you can always go into your gradient map. And for example, like these outer lines. They were roughly around see around this point. You can always see if you can, for example, mess around with the colors. Yeah, see? Yeah, you can see that these are like the stronger colors over here. So I would recommend just play around with it. That's honestly it. Ooh, that's really strong. But yeah, let's say that I'm going to leave it at this because it is still tutorial, and it's not like for production or something like that. If it was production, I would, of course, make it absolutely perfect based upon whatever my lead or my chirect or whoever was in charge wants to. So I'm going to save my scene. Go in here, right click reimport. There we go. We have some nice procedural looking leaks over here. And because they are completely table, you can literally just grab another one, and that's the power of procedural. And just like that, we have some really nice looking leaks. Okay, so that's a general idea to get leaks roughly similar to this, at this similar to this. At this point, it's playing around with it, balancing it, maybe adding a little bit more variation in between these pieces and stuff like that. However, I will go ahead and I will leave it at this because we have a lot of other decals to go through. So let's go ahead and continue to our next chapter, where we will go over on how to do some very quick leak decals inside of substance painter. That one is a bit easier, a bit more ify, so less control. But 4. 03 Creating Our Hand Painted Leaks: So in this chapter, what we're going to do is we are going to go ahead and make some leak decals inside of substance painter. So we did these ones inside of substance designer, which are fairly procedural. And by the way, off camera, I did, like the ones that we already had. I just added them into my mask. I subtract to basically create a little bit of, like, less intense leaks inside of, like, these Wi tick areas. But that's something that you can preview in here. I won't go over it too much. One thing I want to do that is also valid for this chapter is I just want to quickly go into my decal master material, and I like to have a multiply in my Al valve, my opacity with a scale pemter that I'll call opacity over here and sets to one. This way, I can control how strong that it is. So if we now go ahead and press Save, we can go ahead and also control that because if I go to my DCA presentation, you can control your deca strength by moving your decals further away from the wall or more, as you can see over here. But sometimes it is nice for you to also go ahead and go into your leaks if you open up Leak 01, for example, you can go to your bestie, and then if I tone this down, I can control how strong I want them to be. And also, if I want to have them, very strong, as you can see over here. So let's set this to like 0.9 for now. That's always like a nice tran, to give it a little bit of ci through. It works especially well when our cube or whatever was an actual wall and everything. But that's something at the very end of this tutorial course, I will show you some use cases. I'm going to move this a tiny bit because it's overlapping a little bit. There you go. You do get with overlapping sometimes like a dark line, but it's not too bad. Okay. Now, what do we need for substance painter? We need well, substance painter. We also need a simple plane that is horizontal. So over here, I just have a basic plane. You can find it in assets, but it's literally just a plane. Automatically planes in pretty much every treti program already have been textured perfectly. So all you need to do is just grid plane, go into painter, and then if we go file and new template. Yeah, we can just use the PBR metallic graphness, but we will probably just adjust it to our needs later on. File, we can go ahead and we can just select our plane. Document resolution. If you want, you can just go four k. NormaP format doesn't matter, but I I automatically set to open GL because that's what I always use and just press Okay. So we got this M UI might look a little bit different It's just because I dragged around some of my viewpoints over here. How are we going to create leaks? Very easy. We want to go ahead and just delete our base, go into our text set settings, and we only need a base color, and we need a you can just click everything else away. We need a just like an opacity or something like that. It can even be a different one. I just don't know. Oh, yeah, here, obste. Now, it says unsupported by shader that does not matter. I actually don't really care about that because I'm going to swap this around later on. So we have our base color and we have our Obaste. Now, if we go into our layers, we basically just go ahead and go up here and create a fill layer. And this fill layer over here, I'm going to set my opacite to black and my base color to black. There you go. And just call this BG for background. Then we can right click and duplicate this fill layer, call this one leaks. And for this one, for now, I'm going to just set my base color and my opacity to white. But later on, I will, of course, make this look nicer. So we got our leaks. All we need to do now is just go down here and add a black mask to our leaks, and we are going to use a classic of substance painter, which is going to be our particles. So for this, I need to often go to brushes because they move it around again, type in leaks. And now you have a few different leaks. So over egac this one is one that I actually made, and that's what we're going to do. We are going to create a custom leaks because, yes, we can have like our leaks. So let's say let's say that we grab just like this base leaks, double click on it. But this one, if I drag it on, that's not nice. It does not look interesting at all or realistic. So that's what we're going to work on now, and we are going to later on, turn it into for example, this is not the one I made for this tutorial, but let's have a look and see what this one looks like. Okay, so this one I made. It's still not perfect, but it's one that I made a while back. So anyway, for our leaks, what we want to do is we have a bunch of settings here. So first, we can see that I first of all, want to set my spoon spread down. What that will do is it will make sure that the leaks only are created wherever I press, as you can see over here, instead of just like all over the place. Next, what I want to do is I want to work probably on the life of it. So if you scroll all the way down, over here, you have your particle life, and if you set that up, what will happen is that the leaks become way longer because they kind of fade out. I like that. Now you also have your particle life random and set it all the way up. This means that if I do this, it should randomize roughly the particle life, see, here, it is randomizing the particle life over here. Now, next, let's see if we do a little bit of spread over here, let's see what that behaves like here, see? So it's like spreading out a little bit more in between. And it's good to keep track of this. So this is spreading out a little bit more in between. And it's good to keep track of this. So this is without spread and this like with the spread. Turbulence power often just like arts, a little bit of turbulence scale, messiness. That's what it arts. So if I go here, here see now it starts to add a little bit of messiness to that. That's fine if we play around with that. You can add wind, if you want, but I would not recommend because then what happens, as you can see over here, the particles, it's cool. Oh, God. Sorry about that. Unwanted pop ups are always annoying. So as you can see over here, you can set like the wind, but we are going to leave that off. Gravity factor is one, which means that it moves down. That's fine. Inherent velocity random. So that one, it will add some random rotations to them at the very beginning. But I think for leaks because we have gravity, it does not really matter too much, so we can probably just leave it off. Fadeze Let's do fade size random, so that will control the fading that we have at the tips most likely. Yeah, to have that random. Okay. So we got something like that. Now, see, so this one basically makes our leaks a little bit thicker. I think at this point, I just want to play around with the DT a little bit more. Okay, I'm going to set that. Yeah, I guess 0.1 was already fine. And now what I'm going to do is, I'm just going to quickly convert my mask back to black. I want to go up, and for the particles, you can only change the size or by right clicking. Oh, no, wait, even right clicking, you cannot do it. You can change the size up here. And if you change the size you can change the size up here. And if you change the size of your brush, your particles will become like a little bit bigger, as you can see over here. Now, as you might have guessed, what I can do with this is I can set maybe my particle life a little bit less, and then we can have a base for our leaks, and then what we can do is we can just increase the leaks more and more. So let's say we have this one. Yeah, that looks pretty good. So we got this. Now, if we want to go ahead and we want to save this kind of stuff, all we have to do is in our particle over here, just somewhere, right click, and we need to save this as a brush preset, yes, brush preset. Over here. Yeah, that should be fine. And now what you can do is if you just right click naming Hello. Why is it not working? Oh, wait, here, rain freeze. Here we have the name, and we can call this one, for example, leaks underscore 01 underscore short, something like that. Just something. I don't care. So yeah, ikzero one short. And now, even if, for example, double click on your original leaks in which you would change all the settings again, you can now just double click on LikZeroO short, and it will contain the same settings as you can see over here. So at this point, it is pretty much going to be something like this. We are going to go in here and just like sometimes create like Oh, sorry, you need to be careful about that. You do need to have the particles continue. It depends on the speed. So as you can see, if I do it very slow, I get, very dense particles. But if I go ahead and do this, like, very quick like this, there we go. See, I get, like a little bit more organic particles. Now, having this, I can then do is I can now, for example, quickly go in here and set my particle life a little bit bigger. And then, like, sometimes in some areas, create like longer particles over here to give us like these extra long leaks effects. So I'm too quick. I'm always like that. Here, see. And you can go in here, and then you can even go down here if you want and give it another click. And like that, you can customly almost, like, paint in your specific leaks. Now, of course, this kind of particle stuff and creating decos like this, it only works with very specific things like leaks and maybe like broken glass you can also do it with. But yeah, as you can see over here, it does work licely. So we can just kind of like keep playing and make this one, a little bit longer. Here we go. So just like that, we can kind of create whatever leaks we want. And now, at this point, what you can do is you can do this two ways, or you can just paint this in. Or sometimes it is fun to just set your particle life, like, very low and then kind of just like paint in here to get like okay, when you said it's even lower, to get a nice almost like a transition going on over here. Where you can see that there's, like, some extra difference still going on. Now, this might seem like weird, but it's mostly around these areas where it counts for. So the rest we can paint in, it's mostly just to make the transition not as harsh as we would have normally. And what you can, of course, do is now what we can do is we can add extra what do you call them? On top of this, which we are going to do in just like a bit. So over here, we can do something like this, for example. And now let's say that I go turn off my particles, go to brushes, and, for example, grab like an artistic head brush. I I set the size bit down. And now I can, first of all, let's say, fill in, like, the top over here. And I know that I'm probably making the same mistake as that I've done before, where it now looks way too dense. So that's something that we can also work on a little bit more. And you can kind of just, like, paint this stuff in, however you want to say. These are a little bit quicker to make, but of course, you need to make them completely by hand. So if you have, like, or if you only want to make one quick leak or it needs to be a very specific leak, then this is a great way. This technique you can also use in normal texturing, of course. So don't forget that it's tifine. But if you need to have perfectly tlable leaks. So don't forget that it's totifine. But if you need to have, perfectly tlable leaks that you need to create many different variations for, then I recommend using the procedural way because that one is just so much easier. So we got these leaks over here. That's fine. Now, we don't have access to all of the same filters. So if we go down here, we can try like art a filter, and let's have a look. Yeah, you can do, like, a blur directional, by the way. And if you said this I don't know what 270 or 90, doesn't really matter. Yeah, we can, like, add some extra blurring, if you want. I think, in this case, yeah, it doesn't matter too much. Maybe like a tiny bit of blurring. Next, we can go in here, add another filter. There should be a slow blur gray scale over here. This one. There we go. And for the noise, we have a lot of noises here. Grunge, leaky paint. Hopefully, that one is also included in here. If you go down to your textures, grunge, leaky paint. Ha, it's also in here. That's a nice thing about having same programs on multiple. You can plug it in here. You can set the source type to custom noise. Then you want to go ahead and set the blending mode to min, it's the same settings as before, pretty much. Now, the only annoying thing is that we cannot actually blur this one. So we might want to just twy like a different one. But as you can see over here, we can set the intensity. So that's all the same. Now at this point, as I said, because we cannot blur it, we might want to tw like something a little bit different just to see if it works better, but that's what we can play around with. If we go in here, we always have like, what's that classic one grunge map team or what's the moisture noise? No, it was not 013. I think it was like the moisture noise. Over here, moisture noise, maybe? No, still does not give me the effect that I want. You can just, if you want to randomly drag in different noises, just to kind of, like, see what they do. Here, like some leaks, for example, you can drag it in. It's just playing around with it, honestly. I think but now you've been used to that, I will be saying that quite often that you just kind of, like, need to play around with things in order to get them to look exactly the way that you want. Let's say that we do grunge concrete old and then set the density, like a little bit down to 0.03. Yeah, something like that should be fine. And if you want you can do another sign. And if you want you can do another sloper let me just cheat. Fractal. Oh, yeah, fractual su base. We can also try that. At least at this point, you can, for example, duplicate the effect. Let's say that with this effect, instead of doing a fracture some base, let's do something that's a little bit bigger. Let's Grinch leaks, for example, and play around to your balance in contrast and have this only some areas. So Grinch leaks does not work. We need something that's not too strong. Yeah, there we go. That could work. Okay. So yeah, we got something like that. Of course, as I said before, it's not as flexible as it is creating other stuff, but that should be pretty decent. Okay, so we got Now, again, if you want to, like, break up these areas over here, what you can do is you can, again, like some extra leaks. You can do this in two ways or you can add a paint layer here. But what I like to do is I like to just duplicate my leaks to keep all of this stuff in here. And then if I go ahead and I don't know why it's probably so slow because it's four K, although this is really slow to generate. Okay, it's done. So what you can do is you can set your base color over here to black, pass the s to black. And now there's a few things that we can do or we can go in here. And yeah, we do need to temporarily, set this color back to black. We can do, like a manual painting. If we go i Likzer one over here. We can try if we set it's lower to do a manual painting, but I want, but I want to show you two ways just so that you know. So first of all, the manual painting way is just by doing this kind of stuff and then just making it very soft. And when I say soft, I mean going in leaks and then setting, for example, the base call and everything. You'll see to be just barely see true, as you can see over here. Another way if we just go ahead and duplicate this again and turn off the original one is if we go set to black mask and then just add a fill layer to this. And then if you go in here, you want to go ahead and find a nice grunge map that has some kind of leaks in it. And that's here, let's try these leaks over here. And then with this crunch map, you can go in and add again, like extra variation to break things up. Now you can just go into your grinch map and you can go ahead and set, for example, the tiling mount or just play around with your balance. Play around your contrast like a little bit. There we go. See, so that way, in our pasty, we still get some interesting effects, and it's just up to you to play around with it. Or what you can do is you can use both of them if want. I think just having this one for now is fine. So we got our leaks over here. Now, we know that our our pasties and everything are now fine. So we have white and we have black, and then we have a background that's all black. So now what you can do is for your base colors, you can go ahead and you can, of course, play around with your base colors. Now, creating the base colors inside of substance painter is not as easy as doing it inside of designer. So what I tend to do for d is doing it inside of designer. So what I tend to do for this one is I tend to have anchor points, which might be easier. Yeah, let's do that one. So you go in here and you art like an anchor point, then this one yeah, I will also add an anchor point over here. And then we just create like a custom base color in here. The way that you can do that is, let's create a folder. Let's call it base color. Oops. Base color. Okay. Then we have our original, which we'll just call base and our base, we don't need opacities for this, just go into your base color and color picker and I'm just going to go outside of my view and just grab from my scene like a base color. Okay, so let's say that we have something like this. Now what we can do is we can duplicate this and call this gng on this for example. And then it's basically, yes. You add a black mask not a filter, with a fill layer, and you just start grabbing different ganges and start layering them. So let's say we have this one if I set my base cool now a little bit darker or like a slightly different color, you can see that we already have grunges. So this one is not as dedicated, but it will still give you a good effect. You can do it again. But yeah, this technique is really It's also nice this technique for people who have not who do not know subs designer. And for the rest, it's just nice if you want to use it on models. So for example, we got this one. Let's say that I now go in and do another grunge map over here, and I said the scaling, maybe like three. And let's say for this one, for example, make it, that's a little bit strong. Let's go into my grunge map and just tone down the balance a little bit. There we go, see. So we can just like, play around with a bunch of different stuff. Let's say that I duplicate my original one again, throw it on top. And this time, I want to get some of these leaks that we already used before here over here, see, and maybe make another darker color. It looks a bit strange on a flat plane, but of course, remember that we will be using masks for this. So let's say that we now got this. To be honest, we don't even need to use our anchor points. Now, I think of it because it will mask out these pieces inside of our scene. Like, if you want to see how it looks, you can always just add a black mask. And to this, you can add a fill layer and this fill layer. We'll have, like, your anchor points, see? So then you can roughly kind of, like, get the general effect of it, but it will not be as accurate. So, personally, I'm just going to remove my mask. I'm going to remove these anchor points. And so for these pieces, let's go ahead and turn off the colors. Because we don't need those anymore. So we have our pastes, which we can just go ahead and call here folder called leaks and just nicely organize them, leaks and base color. Perfect. I'm going to save my scene. It's really slow whenever we transform leaks or move leaks around. I don't know why because even though they're particles, they should just be masks. Maybe it's Oh, wait, I know why that is. It's probably because of the slope gray scales. But anyway, so source files saves Leaks underscore zero, two. 1 second. Let me just quickly check my Those ones are called procedural leaks, hand painted. Leaks, even though they're not technically hand painted, but now to post, we can go to our export textures, output template, and just press a little plus sign over here, and then double click and call this Leaks underscore Export. Now, all you need to do is you need to have an RGB plus A channel map. You can get rid of this name, and then if you press the little dollar sign, you can choose, Okay, how will this be called as the project, which is hand painted leaks, as the mesh, which is just called plain as the texture set, which is the one that we want to have or anything else. So we can say texture set, underscore Bye Color, for example. Now, what will happen color. There we go. Is in our taxi set. It's now called default material. But if I call this ix underscore 02, it will be called ik underscore 02, underscore base color. So we can go in here. Likek leaks, where are you? Ix Export. RGB, we want ix export. RGB, we want to have our base color. Just click and drag it in here and just set this to RGB channels. Alfa we want to have our past. Over here. And just select great channel over here. And now that that is done, all we need to do is go in settings. I'm just creating some folders on my other screen. S go ahead and select whatever you want to export it. Template, you want to go for leaks leaks Export. I always like to export as target files. You can just use whatever size your document is, which is four k in this case, and you can press Export. And that should give us exactly the same type of leaks. So if we go into textures, leakso to base color. You can see that now we have these os going to materials, Lixzero one. Let's just go ahead and duplicate this and call this Lik 02. And then I realize that I forgot to do one thing. I need to go in my DCR master on my texture, right click and convert this to parameter. Sorry, let's not. Let's call decal over here. There we go. And then just go ahead and save this so that now we have an input where we can change this round. So if I just drag this over here, you can see that now if I go to textis, I can have my leaks 02 sitting in here and save. And then if I just go ahead and duplicate this wall over here. I'm just going to move these a bit out of the way. I can actually just duplicate a existing decal. And then if I just go ahead and leaks zeros materials, leaks 02. And then if I just go ahead and leaks zeros materials, leaks 02, drag it into our decal material. And there we go. These are our substance painter leaks. Now, our subs painter leaks are not as well tilable although pretty decent, but it's not always perfect. And now, what you can do is you can just go ahead and start by playing around and bouncing. I can see that my opactes way too strong, so I can go in my leaks. And here we have the opateRmember. Of this one, I'm going to go ahead and set this a little bit stronger. You can also go in here, and you should also be able to select yeah, see? Yeah, you should also be able to select this. And I want to set this one, to be honest. If you click on our PC down here, I should be able to set this to multiply. There we go. So that it does not show up in here and it will only show up because else we will get that in our der look. And then if I export this again, go into painter painter, go into Unreal, I mean, right click, reimport Tada S, procedural and then we have these ones. Actually quite like having this look. So you can, of course, also apply to these leaks and play around with it. I am going to actually do that. I'm going to apply that later on to this one also. At this point, you can click away just very quickly because I want to show you because it's fun. If you go ahead and you want to use this crunch map inside of designer, but it is not used in designer, you can right click Show Explorer. And then over here, it will open up the folder and have it selected. And then if you go into Designer, you can just click and drag it in here. At which point can just plug it in here. Also said it's to multiply. And then play around, and maybe you want your tiling amount a little bit stronger. And let's see so many programs open over here. It should translate. So if I now reimport. Yeah, it does translate, but it's a little bit too soft. So just like that, we can go in here, play around a little bit more like a contrast and everything and get a nice, interesting effect. And then I can always go into real reimport, and I can just go into Fs and Bal and my materials, Leak 01. And just play around with your paste, like a little bit more. S 1.15. There we go, see. Now it's already starting to look a little bit closer to what we had before. And yeah, so it's closer to what we had before. And yeah, so it's up to you to kind of, like, play around with it and get it exactly nice the way that you want it and all that kind of fancy stuff. Like say that I'm not going to make it as intense, for example, and then we can get something quite nice. Because it is important, or at least for me, it is important that when I have these two leaks, I want to have the quality to be similar to each other because else it just feels a little bit stranger if I show you if I show you two techniques, but the qualities are so different. That's why it's nice to just get a slight variation in things. And you can always also go in here. Let's say that I set my tining amount one less. I can always go add a blend on top of my base color plug this into, like, a gradient map, throw this into, like, the top, and then just play around with my opacity to also bring in, like, a little bit of lighter colors in my base color. And then if I go ahead and just do one more reimport, I'm sure that's fine by this point. Okay. Open up my leaks, 1.1. I'll just have this on my other screen. There we go. And you can just keep balancing it out like this until you get exactly what you want. I will not keep you guys here for too long because most people will have already clicked away. But there we go. See? White, white. So now they look similar. Okay, and that is two techniques to create leaks. Pretty nice, if I say so myself. So yeah, very powerful techniques. They all have their pros and cons. Pros for this one is that you have more control of where your leaks are. Con is that the damages are harder to create animal manual work. So if you need to create a lot of different leaks, it's not as handy. This one, you have less control over exactly where your leaks are, but you can very quickly tweak them, make them bigger, smaller, all within values. Unlike this one where you need to repaint it and everything. You have a little bit more control over the exact damages that you want to create, and also you have a bit more control over the color. So those are like the differences. In our next chapters, we are going to do a little bit of sebushw. I'm going to show you how to create edge damages and how to create welding decals. So let's go ahead and continue with this in our next chapter. 5. 04 Creating Edge Damage And Welding Decals: So in this chapter, I will show you the concept of edge damages and welding decals that you can use. And this is a super powerful technique. If you for example have very large structures, instead of doing unique sculpts on those, you can use these type of techniques to very quickly still add small details to it. So for the edge damages, what we will do is I will just, like, create a cube and show you. And for example, for the welding, I have, like, this little piece over here of a pipe that we can use, and the welding would, for example, be perfect to be like in here. And I will basically show you how to do. Now for this, what do we need? If we go to whatever TD program you want, you basically just want to start off with a very simple cube over here, just make it like a small cube, and I'm just going to make it ten by ten by third. It depends depends how long that you want the decal to be. I'm just going to do 30 because I don't need it to be super long. But if you make it longer, you get, for example, pushing more variation and stuff like that. So we have this very simple cube over here. And what I'm actually going to do is, in this case, I'm going to actually combine my welding, and I'm also going to combine my edge damages into one. So we will have, for example, the edge damages. We will sculpt them inside of Cebush on here, and then the welding, we will have on here. And then I will show you how to convert this to two D using baking for which in my case, I will probably be using Mum's at toolbgPbably, no, I will be using Mom's at toolbg and then I will show you how to actually use them on three models and stuff like that. So basically, you have a very simple cube over here. Easy, does it? You just want to go ahead and you want to export it, or you can directly create a cube inside of C brush. It does not really matter. So I'm just doing this because it's a bit easier for me to define the exact metrics and stuff. So I can just go in here, OBJ cube, underscore, four, un score, sculpt, and just export it using the ZBrush export and just export it to Zbrush like normal. Okay, so what are we going to? We are first going to create the actual details, and then the actual logic comes. So for now, I don't have too much to tell. All I'm all I want to say to you, sorry, is that I'm going to import my cube. Drag it into ZBrush, make sure to press add it after, and there we go. Now, we definitely need a lot more polygons. So I'm just going to go to jom tree, and let's just go to dynamesh, and let's just go ahead and press dynamesh, and I need a bit more. So let's up my resolution to like around 1,000. And let's press dyna Mash again. 1.6 million is fine. So this one, this is not going to be an actual mesh, so you can go as high as you want for this. Now at this point, I will probably go ahead and switch over to my drawing tablet because you really do need a drawing tablets. For this, I find I'm going to make my material over here just like a basic white. It's a bit nicer. And then, basically, the one that you want. So this menu, it might look a little bit different. I only have some brushes down here, and that's pretty much it. If you have the default menu, you can find all the brushes that I'm using, of course, in your brushes. So we want to go ahead and we want to grab the for this one, I tend to just use a trim dynamic. So this is just like some dding edge damages. So this is quite basic stuff. So you want, like a trim dynamic, and then in your Alpha, you want to grab like a nice square Alpha, for example. And what it will do 1 second. Let me just switch over to my draw tablet at this point. If we go over here and let's say that I like damage it, here, see you can see that I can add some quick damages. Maybe if I just undo this, I will make my br size a bit smaller. If you set your focus shift up here a little bit stronger, you will get like sharper fall off. So you can see that over here, I can add some edge damages. Now, I feel like I don't have enough resolution, so I can actually go in here, press divide now I have 6 million. So now, these edge damages, excuse me. A few things that you need to keep in mind is that you cannot go for two unique details unless you have many different edge damages. The reason why you can go for unique details because decals are often used over and over and over again. That's the goal of the decals. It's to have very low resolution but very high usability. Now if we are using this over and over and over again and it has a very unique detail, you will be able to see that repeating, and that's what you don't want to have. So we are going to go for generic details mostly. So you don't really need to care too much about the top, so I'm just going to leave it over here. And then what I like to do in these kind of cases, let's say that we are now making concrete. I often just go straight, and then sometimes I go sideways, straight, sideways, and then I like to also sometimes just, like, rotate my pen around a little bit. And you can see that you can very quickly get these kind of details. Or details. Sometimes it's also nice to just go straight for, like, a longer bit if you want to get some softer effects. Now, of course, this decal, I'm not going to make as perfect because I just want to show you some different techniques. But you can see how quickly that you can create like a damaged edge. So just like this, you can also go, for example, for like a slightly larger details if you want. So let's say that I have, something like this. But as I said before, if I do very large details like this, this might already be too large and that it might look repetitive. But in this case, I just want to show you the technique. So you can spend your time to make this look very nice. So I can go ahead and go in here. Sometimes you can see me that I just, like, kind of sideways, almost like that there is a little chunk sticking out of it or something like that. But yeah, just in general, over here, you can see that oops now I just have a pretty decent looking damage decal and you can just refine it as much as you want. I would recommend having a look at like reference. Ironically, this is actually how often concrete damage looks on corners I find whenever I look at reference. It's just like these little chunks that get taken out of the corner, and naturally the corner is never as sharp as it is in three D. So naturally, this corner already had like a slight bevel to it. So for us, it's just a matter of how much they want to push it. And I'm just gamifying it a little bit, meaning that I push it extra hard. Now, what you can imagine is that when we actually create our digal, we will only be baking like this area over here. So that's basically how you should imagine it. So that is what we bake. All of the rest, it will not actually be included. This means that if you want to, for example, have multiple different decas, you can also sculpt the other corners with slightly different sculpt. And then later on, you can have all of those into different texture seeds. So, for example, what I will do is just very quickly because I want to showcase it to you, how to do that kind of stuff also. Let's say that I go for a larger one. I make my brush size a bit larger, and I like, for example, just do this super sloppy and super quick. But it's just to show you that, for example, you have, one that's like, very subtle details. And now let's say that I want to go for, like, some really large broken concrete details in here. I can also do that. See how quick? But of course, if you're making this for, like, a video game and you are planning to use this thousands of times, for example, when I was working on D division, we had a text sheet like this, and that text sheet has been used many thousands of times. Then, of course, you want to make sure that it is perfect. But you can see very different looks, and now we have these two looks, we can just go ahead and work with that. Now the next thing is, let's say that I want to have some welding over here. Now, for the welding, so for the welding, you can do two things. So you can do the thing that I will show you, which is completely free, or you can do what I normally do, which is I download some welding brushes. So if you want to create some very basic welding, often the way that you can achieve an effect like that is you can grab the clay brush, and then what you can do is in the Alpha, you want to get a hard Alpha over here. And then, basically, if you just click, set my focus shift a little bit lower over here. Okay, that's a little bit too much. You need to kind of find the balance between the intensity and the focus shift. But as you can see, what you can get you can get some wy small welding effects, although it is still not exactly what I want to see. You can also play around a little bit more like your orientation. I use this orientation here. I will show you where to find it. But if I go ahead and just find the right location for it. I'll show you where to find this. Yeah, I can as you can see, see, I can do more of those classic welding that look a little bit like they are sitting sideways. So this one it's time consume it's a bit tricky. This orientation, you can find. I have it in my menu, but you can find it in Stanza Oh, God. Picker. You can find it in picker and then orientation. In here. So this is like one way if you want, but it's quite time consuming and not very nice that you can like some welding. And then maybe if you do some softening over it, some shift smooth, there you go. You can sort of get the welding effect. However, what I often do is or what I just did like a while back. Let me see if I can you know this so that it's gone is I tend to just buy a welding brush. There are so many different welding brushes out there. So, for example, over here, I think I got this one on Gumroad from McGavis. But you can literally just go to Google and you can literally just type in S brush welding brush, and you get like a bunch of different welding brushes that you can just download. They are very cheap. They're like $3 or something like that, so it's nothing. But yeah, so you can nicely find this. Oh, it looks like that he has a new version. And there you go. So you get a bunch of different types of welding, and that will often give you a better result. I'm not going to pretend that I'm amazing at sculpting, so for me, this is quite amazing or quite nice. So, yeah, we will be using that method, although you can, of course, do it by hand. So for that method, first of all, before I do that, 1 second. Don't have that pinching out effect that you have over there. Okay, so for that method, all you want to do is you want to download the brushes or whatever. If you do that, or you can just do it by hand. And I'm just going to load my brushes in here, I'm just going to open them up. The annoying thing with weld brush is that it can only open up one at a time, and I keep forgetting that. So we can go like weld one. Let's say weld one is fine. Like, I'm not going to worry about that. Now, for this weld, as you can see, it's quite nice because all you have to do is you can just drag and then you can see that we have this weld. Now, if you don't like it, we can always go ahead and try see weld two. Just like a double weld and just like that. You can load in your brushes. Oh, sorry, I think I'm a little bit too close to my microphone, so I hope that the audio is good. Let's say that we use this one. I can play around with my intensity. There we go. Okay, and then play around with my size. So we have our welding over here, and now all that we need to do is or you can do it by hand. Normally, by hand is nice because it will give you like if you try to go straight by hand, it will still look more organic, as you can see over here. However, because we are using a decal, it might be handier for you to just click sorry, click and hold Shift and then click again. Don't know why it's not working this time. Come on. Okay, don't know why it's not working this time, 1 second. Okay, weird. It is working now. I think I just messed up the release. So you drag, hold shift, and then you just release shift again and there you go. Then you can get a straight line. I must have just not realized that I was doing it. Drag hold shift. Just said like round zero and then release shift. And then you can get a really nice, exactly straight looking line, which is great for you via unwrapping. So just like this, we can also add welding. So we track hold shift, release, there we go. So we now have a welding. And just like that, you can just keep populating this mesh with different types of edge damages if you want, you can add some wood damage, some metal damage, whatever you want. But I guess that by now, you get the basic concept. Age damages are on the corner because it's easier to sculpt, and flat damages like welding and everything can just be on like a flat area over here. Sweet. Okay. So we got that done. Now what we are going to do is we are going to go ahead and let's just export this one. So just press Export. Here we go. And just call this one. He damage underscore HP and save. It is 6 million poly so it might take a second to do, but that should be fine. And once that is done, we can also already while that is exporting go in here. So it is the exact same cube as that we have over here. So the nice thing is we are going to create a more optimized version, and you can do this in any tree program. Like, this is the most basic stuff ever. We are just going to grab a cube UVnwrad. That's literally it. And I will show you how to do that. But first, okay, done exporting. I need to optimize this a little bit. So let's set my subdivisions down to one, delete higher, and yeah, 1.6 million polies Max should be able to handle that. And I'm just going to go ahead and just edge damage, underscore Temp, and I'm just going to export that. The only reason I'm exporting this version is so that I can input it into Max and actually preview it. But if I input 6 million polies inside of Max, it's not going like that. So at this point, I can just input this and just input the temp version. Edge damage Temp. Okay. Go ahead and just press Import and give the second. And then what we're going to do is we are going to create a shape. So, oh, it looks like that the importing that sometimes happens. I think we need to set our importing to 1,000. I don't know why it changed the scale, but there we go. So if you set to 1,000, it will become the correct one. Now let's first of all, select our low poly and I can go over here, and I'm just going to turn on my edges and faces, and I'm just moving my daring tab out of the way. Okay, so on our corners, it is often nicer in terms of the baking and everything if we give it the bevel and also to do that later on in our shape. So what I can do is I can well, because this is three years max, I need to convert it to an added poly. And then I'm just going to select this corner and this corner, and I'm just going to give the quick chamfer which is the same as like a bevel. Go down here, quick chef and just make it quite small, something like this, that is just like behind your hypol doesn't need to be perfect. It's just that it reads a little bit better. Now, once I've done that, you can click on or you can do like a iframe, or you can, for example, select your mesh, and you can make it Ctruh which I'm doing right now over here. And then all I want to do is I want to add a swift loop and I want to have the swift loop nicely on the outside at the very least of the borders, of our shape. So if this is our shape, excuse me? Are you working? There we go. I don't know what happened. If this are shapy we just want to have this nicely on the outside, so that we are basically having the faces nicely going around our damaged model. And we can do the same over here. And you just want to make sure that, of course, you are not cutting off your nice details. So just double check. Everything's fine. And then for your welding, same thing also, but for some reason, my swift loop is a bit broken. For my welding, I'm going to add another one here and another one here. Awesome. And the cool thing is that later on, we can actually turn this low poly, also already into our decal meshes, because these decals work a little bit different than the decals you have inside of real. Now, if I go ahead and, for example, isolate this, this is what we have. And that is literally all we need. So all I need is I need to select these bits, contra I, for example, and just delete everything else. Cool. And then if you want, you can go ahead and you can, separate these, which I like to do so that they become their own little meshes. Okay, at this point, the hypol over here, we can just delete. I don't care. I want to select these meshes. Very important. Add a smoothing group of one to it. No matter if it is blender or Maya, you can do it. In Max, you just add a smooth modifier and sets to one. So this is the goal that everything looks completely smooth. So once you've done that, we can convert straight at a Poly. And now all we need to do is UVs, which is a free plugin that you can use for the UVnwrapping, but you can also use default unwrapping. I'm not going to go into that because this is not a modeling tutorial. All you want to do is you want to select one, unwrap it, select the other one, unwrap it, select the other one, unwrap it. Then if you have this, it is as simple as now that you've unwrapped it, you just nicely multiplace it into the corner over here, and then we can take it from there. So we nicely placed into the corner, and then it becomes nice and optimized because later on, what we can do is we can just drag this into a different resolution. So right now we will be baking, for example, in four K by four K just because I like higher resolutions, but we can always go lower. But then later on what we can do is we can, for example, just set this into like a one to eight by 64 or something. Over here for these bits, if you want, you can turn on snapping and move these by 64 or something. Over here for these bits, if you want, you can turn on snapping and move these. What I tend to do because the tiling is never perfect anyway, is I tend to simply move them slightly above ratio over here, so that they become sort of tlable. But with decals, you won't really notice that they are not perfectly tilable. And there are other ways to make them tilable, but that's very annoying. So I'm not going to really cover that because that's very time consuming. It's the same way that you clean up photogram tree and cytosubstice painter and everything. But honestly, then we would be spending like an hour or something on just like random stuff. So we got these pieces done, and this is basically our low poly. We can go export export selection and just call this Edge damage underscore LP. And this time, I'm going to set my preset to be Maya and g damage over here. And what I will do is I will go ahead and also in Zbrush, do another saves, Edge damage. Okay. Awesome. Now, my tool of choice for baking is Mama set toolbg. However, you can do this in whatever baker you want, pretty much. The reason I like Mama Setubek is because of the cage functions. They are very nice and bakers quite quick. And also, Mum Setback can handle 6 million polis, even more. I'm going to import my Edge damaged low polen hi pool into a clean Mum set toolbag scene and give the second because the 6 million polis is, of course, still a bit heavy. And then all you need to do is temporarily, I'm going to set my sky to like a collar that makes it easier for me to see. And then I'm just going to go up here and press the new bake project. And it's called edges. Temporarily, I'm going to set my sky to like a collar that makes it easier for me to see. And then I'm just going to go up here and press the new Bake project. And it's called edges. I'm going to drag in my high poly into high, my low poly into low. And then, first of all, click on your low and just turn off the outer bake. So this to none. Now, your goal is to turn on the eye icon on the high so that you can see it and to make sure that your cage over here is covering the entire high ply, which is a classic. It's classic baking techniques, stuff like that. There we go, see, so we nicely push it out. And you can see that once we have baked this, it will just be translated into two D plane, and we can use that two D plane. So at this point, all we need to do is go to etches, and I'm going to make a folder called Etch Oops. Damage. Call this Edge damage. And we are going to get started by baking it at four K, and then in Photoshop, we can just like, shrink it down. So I like to set my samples to 16 bits. We've done that and we pretty much only need a normal map I guess if you want, you can use an ambient clusion map, but I never do. No, no, wait. It's actually no ambient seclusion map. Just leave the norm map because these type of decals are almost always norm map only. There is a base color that you can use, but often you would just use a norm map for this. Yeah, and I tend to make my mask inside of Photoshop myself. So having this done, it's nice like four K high resolution, why not? And go ahead and did I already do this? Yeah, I did. Okay. Sorry. And I'm going to go ahead and press BIG. Over here. And then it should give us an edge damage normal. So let me just quickly open up Photoshop. And here we are inside Photoshop. So as you can see, here's your normal map. So quite simple, quite basic, especially the welds came out nice. You do always have a gradient because we go around the corner. This one is a bit tricky to avoid, but often it's not really a problem because we use a mask to kind of fade it out. So anyway, now what you can do is you can use your crop tool over here to, of course, reduce the resolution because this is insane. If you would be like every technical artist in every game would be crying if you are having such a large texture, but you're only using something that small. So what I can do is I can go in here, and I just want to try and go for like an even number. So here you can see my wit. So I think we will have to go for like 512. And what I can do is if I cannot get it precisely, which sometimes happens, I can go ahead and I can go in here and set the Go ahead and I can go in here and set the Oh, God. What was it? 512? No. I'm already messing up ratio. I'm never good with this. All what you can do is you can just, like, zoom in and ty to get like 512 over here. Normally, I'm actually here. There we go. So I'm really lazy and I normally just do something like this. I try to do the logical way of typing it in, but I'm not good with that kind of stuff. But yeah, now you can see that now we have reduced damage from 4k24k to 512 by four K. And, of course, in engine, you can reduce it even more. So we got this one over here ready to go. That's fine. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to bring my drawing tablet again. I'm going to get started by just doing a simple save. All this edge damage normal. And then all you want to do and you can do this wherever you want, pain, photoshop, whatever. I'm going to add a solid color. I'm going to make this nice and white. Then I'm going to probably set the apes like a little bit down, and then click on your mask and just press Contra I to invert your mask. So this is going to be a mask. So now all we need to do is zoom in, grab our whatever pen, and then go ahead and right click and just go for like a soft. You want to go for like a soft brush and make it a little bit smaller. And then it's just a goal of basically X painting in white, you can see over here. It doesn't have to be precise. Of course, it will look nicer if you do super precise. But because it is a norm map only, the softness will fade it out. So you won't really notice that it is not looking nor map only. The softness will fade it out, so you won't really notice that it is not looking as perfect. So you can go in here. I just need to make sure that my past and everything is correct. Maybe sometimes you can set your brush size a little bit smaller to blend it a little bit better. So there you go. You can twine and set your bestie all the way up just to make sure that it is working correctly. I kind of depends how you like to work. Yeah, so you basically want to paint in all of these damages or details that you can see over here that you want to have included inside of your mesh. And then it will nicely fade out, and we might need to, like, even add an extra bit of, like, blurring on here. But yeah, you get the general idea of this. You basically fade this out, and you want to do that with all of them. So I will just finish this one, pass the video, and then paint lock you do it. I know that this tutorial. Most tutorials I make, they are split up into 20 minute chapters. However, in the terms of organization for this tutorial, the chapters are a little bit longer sometimes just so that we can keep it all into one chapter. But yeah, that's already like two different types of degas, and you can use this for so many ways. So that's really nice. So I can go in here and let's say that I have this. Let me just pass the video and I will just do the rest. Oh, okay. Here we go. So it's a bit sloppy, but it is done. And then all you have to do is click on your background. Go down here and add another solid color that is just black so that now you have your mask. At which point you can just go ahead and I'm just going to save that's like a custom texture. So let's just do save a copy and then in here. I'm going to do a TGA edge damage mask in here. I'm going to do a TGA edge damage mask. Oh, yeah, by the way, let me also just do like a save edge edge damage mask. Okay, let's just quickly turn this off because I always like to only import TGA maps, not PSD maps inside of unreal. So that's why I'm just going to go Edge damage, normal and just export everything as TGA also. Or taka. And there we go. Okay. Do tablets can go away again. And now all we need to do is we can start by just going in. Yeah, let's go into real and just already like import these. So give me 1 second, Edge, damage mask and normal. Just import them. Okay. So those are imported. Now, these ones work a little bit different. So you can have them as meshes, but these are decals that we can also use. So let's say that we have a cube, and I'm just going to use that, for example, as our example. So here we have a cube, and it's going to be 30 oops, 30 by 30 by 30, something like that, doesn't matter. Here we go. Okay. So basically what you would be doing is these pieces would have our material of our decal on it. And because we have a mask, they will not have any hard edges. So all we need to do is we need to go ahead and apply a single material, and then your cube needs to be another material, which is normally, for example, your wall or whatever it is. So I can go in here, call this Decal, apply this material, and you can apply it whatever you want in your own program. I do like to always just go in and actually load in the normal map because then I know that everything looks correct or not. And if it is not, then I can actually load in the normal map because then I know that everything looks correct or not. And if it is not, then I can fix it. So you just open up the norm map over here. And there we go. And then over here for my cube, I'm just going to apply a different one. Now, if you have a look over here, it should show. Why are you not showing the UVs are correct, right? Oh, yes, the reason that the UVs are not correct are because we have swunken this down. So we need to go in map selector over here. That's a little bit awkward. So you just need to kind grab these pieces. Normally, you can get away with simply doing this kind of scaling. But often what you need to do is you need to just grab this piece. Oops. And then nicely move it into position. It's always be but just make sure that you are covering the entire area. Kind of forgot about that. Pretty bad because I should not forget about that. There we go, something like that. And yes, that might look not very nice. But in Tweedy, if I turn off my edges and faces, see, it will look totally fine. So that's the goal of it. So this one we can now close, convert the perimeter. So the way that this would work is you have, for example, your decal, and you would simply hover it just above your edge over here. I do sometimes like to actually bevel my main edge because else the hovering is always a little bit too far away, but you can often get away with just like a hard edge and what it will do. Because this mesh is smooth and it has a nor map, it will actually make this hard edge look smooth. But in terms of geometry, it does not really matter too much. So we have this one, and then of course, so we have this one, and then of course, let's say that I grab this one on this side over here. Yeah, and I can, for example, move this. So having this piece, you would then select everything and you would export it just like a normal model to unreal engines. So let's do FBX, DCL cube, for example, safe and pass OK, whatever, normal exporting. And then in here, folder. It's called meshes. Deco cube. Let's go ahead and import. That looks fine, yes. And then what you can do? Yeah, okay, so cube is a little bit small. I'm just going to open up my cube, and in my import settings and transform, I'm going to set it to like ten and then re import. There we go. Now it's a logical cube. Okay, cool. So we have a cube over here. Now, what we need to do is, yes, we need to have a gray material, but we can just grab a default material and turn it just like gray because I don't know why it is being white. So this is the material that is imported with our cube. There we go. And now you cannot really see it because we need to create a material for our decal. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to right click new material and just call this normal only decal master. Open this up, drag in your edge damage decals over here. And then in your only decarmster, you want to set this to defer decal. And normally, this is where you would select your D buffer. In this case, I'm going to set this to translucen, but I believe that because an five we no longer need to do that, we should be able to just read that as, okay, so you only want to have norm map. Now, if you want to control the strength of your normal, although this is sometimes a bit risky, you can add a flattened normal node over here with a scalar parameter that you call normal underscore strength. And because we re bake in open GL, we often need to set this to minus one, plug this in here and throw this into our normal, save your scene. And then last thing that you need to do is you need to quickly flip the green channel. So if we go into our normp here, I need to quickly flip the green channel of my norm map. And the reason I need to do that is because I bake in OpenGL, but Unwel engine reads in direct X, and the only difference between those two is flipping the green channel. Anyway, we now have our material and normal only master, and just call this edge damage in general. Anyway, we now have our material and normal only master, and just call this like edge. Damage creates an instance called Edge damage. And yeah, so for a deco, why do you only have one material? That is strange that it has only did I mess up my export? No, I did not because there is literally a deco. Oh. That is sorry, that's my bat. I forgot to check a setting. So I'm actually going to go ahead and delete this stuff. Yeah, let's force delete it. Import my decal cube again. I forgot because, of course, I just installed this version, so it does not remind this setting. Turn on combined meshes in your advanced settings and then press inbort. And then once again, I forget to set this to ten. But now because I combine the meshes, it becomes one mesh. We have our cube. I'm just going to select my normal only decal or, sorry, my edge damage, and then go up here and then just assign the edge damages. And as you can see, from a distance, okay, it does not work exactly I want. I think I need to make this smooth after all, but it depends kind of like on lighting, but you can see that it works a lot better. When you smooth this, it will work way better. So as you can see over here, it works well. So the edge does look soft, but it's floating so far away because we have this point over here that it's not perfect. And then from a distance, you can see that it starts to break up a little bit. But you can see that definitely from a distance, it's looking pretty good. So my recommendation, something that does add a little bit more geometry, but it also increases the quality a little bit, is to just go in here and give this a very quick small bevel also. It's just something I like to do. Many people and give this a very quick small bevel also. It's just something I like to do. Many people will disagree. Sometimes I also just don't do it because of requirements because it is less optimized. But for the people that know me, they know that I sometimes just, like, relax the optimization bit and then move this like a little bit closer. So we have done these. Now, you should have a good understanding of the general concept at this point. By the way, you can even give these weighted normals, and then it will look even better. But, yeah, that's the general concept of these type of edge damages. Now what I will do is I will go ahead and show you the welding, and then it is pretty much done. The welding is very similar. It's just a bit more annoying to place it. So we can go in here, and I just want to re import. There we go. It's subtle, but there is a nice difference. So that's how you often and how AAA games often adds edge damages even to, like, very large not do unique sculpting. That's way too expensive to have unique norm maps and everything like that. So this is a great way to add different edge damages. So for welding, I need to have a model to add my welding on. So let's just go ahead and export this model. Digal sourcefils assets. Pipe. I don't need collision. I don't need level of details. There we go. Okay. So I'm just going to export this model to Blender or blender to T Max over here. Import. Hopefully, it imports without problems. Yeah, it does. It's a bit big, but okay. And you know what? I'm just going to leave it this scale because that makes it easier for me to later on export it again. So do not have an original model right now, but you basically just want to place this plane roughly around this side. So if I go ahead and I'm just going to center the pivot of my plane, I will only show you how to do one side because the other side would be just like a duplicate. So if we go ahead and rotate this, now, this might not be the easiest model because of the bolts and everything, but I'm still going to show you if you would, for example, rotate this around over here, in these cases I would, for example, let's see. This is probably one of those cases where I would actually redo my UVs later on. That's probably this is one of the few cases. So I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to give it like a small cut over here and just delete everything else because it's easier to manage. So you can just do that. That's like no problem. You just want to probably so you can just do that. That's like no problem. You just want to probably place like one extra edge in between here and then keep these above ground. Here you go. And then it's just a matter of, for example, extruding this. And then for now, it will look very bad because, of course, we don't have our UVs yet. But if we just go ahead and keep extruding this around, this is another way on how to create way more precise details on specific meshes. And this is great if you, for example, have only tiable meshes. If for some reason, you can use only tiable meshes, which this mesh actually has, but you need to have very specific details. And, of course, this technique you 6. 05 Creating Crack Decals: Hey, so in this video, we're going to focus on this, we are going to focus on crack details and road damage details, which are still slightly different because these times they do include a little bit of like a base color and some other norm maps. Now, for this over here, I'm going to use substance designer. You can use ZBrush, but personally, I don't really like it probably because I'm not very good at sculpting specific cracks and everything in Z brush, and it's just so much faster to create various variations in designer, because often if you have cracks, you often want like a bunch of different variations. Now, for this, we need a base. So you can kind if you go to mega scans, so quick so that come the mega scans. So this is what we are going to use. But I first of all, want to show you to give you an idea. So if I type in cracks, now, these are photogrammetry, but same basic concept. So if I go decals, you can see over here that these cracks, you can see that they actually have a base color. And the reasoning behind this, that is the tricky thing between photogram try decals and between custom made decals. With photogram try decals, it has this color, but you can never be sure that it matches your actual road color. However, with custom made decals, it is much better because you are creating these cracks, but you are using the actual texture that you also have on your road, which means that it will perfectly blend in together. And that is basically what we're going to do. So we are going to download a I don't know, asphalt texture, for example, in here. And once we've done that, we are going to base our cracks on that and also our road damages on that. So knowing that what I can do is I And actually, I can also do this with another one. Let's also cracks and let's do gravel. So I'm going to show you two different ones. One is just cracks, and one is cracks with larger damages. Now, if we go to surfaces, we can go to asphalt, and I just want to get, like, a rough looking asphalt because, of course, it's, like, damaged. Oh, yeah. This looks quite nice. Okay. And I can just go, okay, resolution, that's fine. So we are going to get some rough asphalt, and our much larger damage. What I want to do is I want to have the insides of those damages actually show up as gravel. So it would be nice if I can go in here. Gravel. Construction. Yeah, maybe construction can give me something good. Let's see, gravel road. It's pretty good. Crushed stone, no. Gravel dirt? I think I'm going to go for the gravel dirt over here. So let's also download that one. Just a note, mega scans. If you are a free user, you are only allowed to use it if you use it inside of Unreal Engine, which is what I'm doing if you get it from the original website. Of course, Unreal Engine five has also built in a bridge to mega scans. But because I need to use this in designer first, I'm just going to do it this way. So I'm just going to open this up, and I'm going to need the albedo, normal and roughness. But I don't know, I'll guess I'll just, like, export everything in here. And same like my gravel, roughness, normal displacement. There we go. Okay. And now that that is done, we can go into designer and we can get started. So first of all, let's go ahead and already just get started by creating our quack structure. So I just want to have a few large quacks. Now, the way that we're going to do this, it's quite a simple system. If you go ahead and you want to go to Betws, you first of all, want to create like a pixel mask. That's what I like to call it. Let's do like a tile generator over here. Now, the tile generator, the reason we use it is because we need to create some pixels, and then we use something called the distance node to basically generate our shapes that we will become quacks. So I'm just going to say, how many pixels I want. The more of these pixels you have, the bigger your cracks are going to be. But I will show you a twig. So if you set this just quite high on the X and Y amount, say 64, pattern specific all the way down, make it really sharp because you want these to be sharp pixels. And then in your size mode, you can just set the scaling down. And now you can see that we have all of these small little pixels. At this point, all you want to do is just want to go ahead and do a position X and Y random to give it some randomization. You can do rotation. It does like a small difference. But what I want to show you is that if you use your random mask, you can actually reduce them very easily like this, then we can make it a little bit more organic. You can also probably plug in on a weight. And this one, you cannot plug in a mask. For that, you need the tile sampler. If you want to plug in, like, a specific mask to decide where you want to have all of these pixels. That can be nice if you want to have, for example, specific areas where you want to have more or less cracks. But let me just show you the base system because I keep rambling. So now what we want to do is we want to have a distance node, and we want to have this set the distance node in like a distance of 5,000 in the maximum distance. And we want to have this one. And if you scroll down, you just quickly need to go in here and set the luminance random all the way up. And what it will do is it will give a slightly different luminance to every single piece. We want to plug this one into the source input and then into the mask input, we want to add a histogram scan. And set this all the way up so that the luminance is gone again, so that it is completely white. So we have one that has different luminans and we have one that is completely white. And when you plug this into your mask because a mask needs to be white, you get this effect, which basically means that we can differentiate between all of our shapes. And what this and snow does is it pushes all of these shapes, I said low, you can see that these pixels, it will push it out until they are touching other pixels. And that's the general goal for this. So now what you can see is you can see that we get like cracks, basically. And we can really define this a lot more, but let's get started with like a basic one. So yeah, let's do like two cracks. Like, we have the large cracks, and then we have another layer of, like, smaller ones. So I'm going to go in this case, let's probably set my Y and X amount to like 32 by 32. And then you sometimes want to, like, play around to your scale a little bit more. So now the random mask becomes a little bit bigger. So let's say that we have some larger cracks over here, and now I want to include also some more smaller cracks. The way that I can do this is I can it's a bit too bad that I use a tile generator. I'm going to use a probably like a tile sampler in this case. The reason I like to use a tile generator is because this one is 0.92 milliseconds. While this one is 182 milliseconds in tile sampler. And you can see this by pressing the I because this one is 0.92 milliseconds, while this one is 182 milliseconds in tile sampler, and you can see this by pressing the I and pressing display timings. But for decal, it doesn't matter too much. Now, why am I using this one? This is because I want to set my X and Y amount really high, set my scaling quite low over here. Once again, give it a position random, a rotation random, but this is where it comes in the mask map threshold. What I can do is I can actually use a noise over here, and to decide where I want to have these extra bit of pixels so that we can have more smaller cracks in those areas. Let's say I grab, for example, a grunge map 01, play around my random seat, contrast a little bit more. So just set your contrast all the way up. That's fine. I can now plug this into of our outer edges because we want this deco to be able to be repetitive. Now, if you click on your tile sampler, you can now set your mask web threshold on, and then you can see that this will only have pixels in the places where we have this white. And then on top of this, what we can do is we can set our mask random to then also reduce the amounts. And of course, what you can do is you can set your color random all the way up, which is the same as the luminance. And then it's just a matter of grabbing your tile generator, plugging in this one, and setting the blending mode to be max lightened so that it will add it. And now what you should see is this effect. So you can see that you now have smaller cracks in these areas, larger cracks in these areas, and now it's just a matter of going into your tile sampler and mostly just playing with your mask random to still keep some of those large ones in but get some smaller cracks in here. And you can have those large ones but get some smaller cracks in here. And you can keep defining this as much as you want to get more or less and stuff like that. But, yeah. So now that we have these probably what you're wondering, Okay, but how are we going to turn these into cracks? Now this is actually quite easy because all we need to do thanks to all of these different colors, H is art and edge detect node. The edge detect is able to detect all of our shapes, and then if we press invert, we can now mostly just play around with our edge width over here to create these cracks. And we want to try and get like fairly thick cracks in this case, because it's tarmac. So we're just going to get like these cracks. And the nice thing is if you use your edge roundness, you can also make like some of these pathways where there's a little bit more density. Now, of course, this does not look very interesting yet. That's what we're going to work on now. So now what we're going to do is we call this base cracks. And now to break up the shape, we want to get a few things. Let's go ahead and get a multi directional warp gray scale. Where are you? There you go. This one, I want to get another let's do a slow blur. Let's get another slope blur. After this slope blur, let's do, like, a histogram scan. And okay, this comes from experience that I know what to do. So what I want to do is, first of all, some large scale deformative then what I want to do is I want to change the densities between these lines because now they're all the exact same widths, sorry, densities. I mean widths, so I want to change those widths a little bit. Then I want to clamp the values because I know that there will be like grayscales coming from it, and then I'm adding extra damages. So I'll show you what I mean. We plug in the dgetect in here in our multi directional warp, grayscarblah, blah blah, and multi directional warp Graycar blah, blah blah. And that's crab like a cloud too. Throw it into the intensity input. Now, by default, the directions are set to four. What you want to do is set the mode to minimum so that it only affects white. Ooh, that is actually it's not what I'm looking for, but that is actually already quite nice. So we can use that in the, I'm going to use it a little bit later also. But I forgot about that. So this one, I want to set the directions to one. So I'm going to, like, now, basically play around with my directions. I want to set my intensity quite strong around ten or 11. And then in your clouds, you want to start by adding a transform and press the X two button, which will basically scale up my transform. So this one should give us some quite strong deformations. Now, remember that Bigazascut is up twice. Now remember that Bigazascut is up twice. I I press space, this is no longer tilable. However, this is one of the few cases that does not matter. So here you can see that it's no longer tilable because we are going to fade out these outer edges. You can always, if you want, just add a make a tile photo grayscale note and just press D to dock it, and then it is perfectly tilable again. Okay, anyway, so we got this one. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to do one more multidirectional warp grayscale over here. I'm going to add my clouds too because I quite liked setting this to minimum and for like a subtle effect. You see? So we are now just really breaking up these edges. So yeah, that's quite nice. I like that. I did not really think about that I could use a multi direction wall for this because what I was planning to use is we have our slope grayscale, and often if you plug in a purlin noise for this with a min blending, what will have purlin noise for this, with a min blending. What will happen is here you set your samples up you set the motor minimum, and then with your intensity, you can see that it kind of cuts away large portions. And then based upon your pearl noise, you can set the smaller. If you make the subtle, it cuts away like some large portions. And then if you're art in his scrum scan, you can basically use your contrast to cut those portions out, see? So yeah, I will still leave it in. So here you can see two ways see? To still like the variation. Also sometimes have them a little bit interrupted and stuff like that. So it's up to you to kind of decide how you want to have this. So they look quite messy now, and that's what I want. Tarmac cracks are often quite messy. And lastly, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to add, like, just some general noisiness to this. For this, I recommend a cloud two or a moisture noise. Now, since you already have a Clouds two, we can try that one first because it means that we don't have to use an entire new node. And if you once a gets to samples all the way up to minimum, here, see, it will just add some extra small scale damages to 0.07. Maybe like 0.1. It will just add some extra small scale damages over here. Okay, that's pretty good. Now what we're going to do is we now have the base shape over here. So we later need to convert this to a norm map so that we can use it with our actual asphalt that we have. I'm going to get started by just setting this over here. Right click art frame. This one is going to be crack damages. Okay. So we got that one done. Now the next one that is I'm going to go ahead and, um probably, like, sometimes I like to add some really small stones in here. And that's something that can be quite interesting also to do this time. And it basically works like this. So I have this note, and it is basically like a pebble or like a stone generator note. I teach you how to make this on our YouTube channel. So here's an extra bit of promotion. So if you just go and find Fast Ricttoils, I will most likely also add this video to the actual files, and else this note is in your source files. So it's just like how to create a stone generator. Basically Bal, this is a 30 minute video. It would be a bit overkill for me to just literally again, show you exactly what to do. So this stone generator, we are just going to use it for some small stones here and there. And it's just like a note. It has a bunch of different settings in here. But the general takeaway is that you can set the amount, which is the amount of stones stones. And the more important one is you can set the scale. So in this one, I can set the scale to be really small. Like 0.9, set the amount to not be as much. So we have these small stones. You can add in some side variation to make them different sizes. Yeah, you can do like position. You can do, like, a bunch of different, like, roundnesses and, like, making them sharp. So let's say that I set my roundness a bit down. There's basically a lot of stuff in here, but I don't really care because my stones are going to be so small that it doesn't really matter. Next, we need to define where do we want to have these stones? Now, over here, as you can see, we have all of these cracks, but I probably only want to have the stones in the really large areas. We can twy and first of all, sorry, not in there. We can twy and first of all, turn on our not size variation map. Where are you? Sorry, I was hidden AO culling map. You want to turn that one on. So the AO culling map and then turn on Enable Customo. What you can do with this is you can plug in a customo which basically decides where the stones will spoun the same as over here, they will only spo wherever I have these extra bits. So AO culing map is correct, so I can just go in here and sometimes it is easier for me to add a quick blend and plug in our cracks in the base and then plug in like your height map in the top and the reason this is easier so that I can, for example, press, subtract and I can see or I can see what I'm doing. So it looks like it right now, we need to invert grayscal this map over here. Yeah, okay, so we got that, and then we need to set our scaling, like way smaller and play around a bit more with our spine rate. And then at this point, if I just set this to subtract for now, yeah, it's really annoying to actually see this, but it will be easier later on. So I'm just trying to get like here, like a small scale. Here so that you can see, some of these stones in here. Just something like that. It's a very subtle effect, and we can see better when we do our normal map. So we got our cracks, we got our extra stones in here. The last thing that we would need to do most likely to convert this to a normal map, is that we want to give this some depth because right now, if we throw this into a normal slot that we already had and said it to open GL, for example, or let's leave a direct X right now. It's looking very flat. Sometimes this is good. Sometimes you want this, not this time. So what I want to do is I want to give this some depth and the way that I can do that is two ways. I can try a bevel note, but that one is often quite strong. So we can go ahead and set distance all the way down and carefully push this in like this. Yeah, okay. It looks okay, but I do want to show you like another way. You can also play around with smoothing a bit. So this is one way, and we just will see the best way. Another way is to add a non uniform blur grayscale and plug in the same mask in both of the slots and then set your samples and your blades up and then your intensity down. And then what you get is you get this effect. And I believe I need to set my Oh I need to invert my blur map, or I need to invert my No, I need to invert the other. There we go. So I need to input my grayscale map. There we go. So I need to input my gray scale map. And then what you can see is over here, it has like this far off. And if you would, for example, invert this, you get sort of like the same effect. But okay, so these two, I think the bevel one is working best. What we can try and do is we can, if you just like, have a look. Yeah, yeah, so that works fine. We can blend together our slope plug cell, our original one. And then in the foreground, blend your Bevel map and you want the sets to be multiply or subtract. I think subtract. You want sets probably to be subtracted over here. And then if you plug this into your norm map, you will see what is happening. In your norm map, by the way, you need sets to open GL. Do I need inverts? One I can, can yes, I need to invert this, but then this one because it is No, actually, that should work because it is black. Why not? No, because technically, it's white. Oh, sorry, it's always annoying. Another way, you know what? There's two ways that I can do this. Yes, I can go ahead and try exactly inverting the maps and everything. Or what I can do is I can simply, instead of blending it here, add an invert grayscale to this node and plugging this into my norm map, which is now OpenGL. There we go. That's number one. And then simply having another norm map node just for the bevel. And for this one, we also want to go ahead and invert Grayscale. There we go. Now we have these two extra maps. Here, this is way easier. You can go ahead and play around with your smoothing a little bit more if you want, but we'll see. And then it's just a matter of It's a matter of going in here and adding a normal combined note. And then you can combine these two and set them to high quality. And now you can see that now we have these cracks and we have these dents going inside of it. Next, if you add another normal combined node, you can now plug in. I'm just going to generate my own norm map. You can plug in the height of your little stones, open GL. Plug in dose in here, and then you can see that we have these little stones, which are not actually very good. I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to add a histogram scan to my bevel note over here. And I'm actually going to use this because this one has a much better mask for only the large areas. Let's plug this one in here. So now hopefully the stones only generate in these large areas. So now hopefully the stones only generate in these large areas over here. Okay. Then lastly, I need to go in here and set my stone size. There is a point where it just breaks because it's so small. I'm going to for that, just turn off enable surfacing for now. And while you are looking into your no map, you want to now play around with your scale. Looks like we don't have a lot of resolution, so Yeah, and then play around also with your spine rate. And now what I'm going to do is, I'm just going to go in here and see if I can hopefully adjust this a little bit more. So just kind of like play around with my values to see if I can get the shapes of the stones back a little bit. Yeah, let's get rid of cutting. Let's get rid of the flattening. Turn on the enable surfacing, but then set our surfacing intensity like very low. Yeah, it's super subtle, but there is now just something in there. It might not look amazing, but you won't really be able to see it on like a large distance. So what we can do is we can add this one and we need this one, later on, also for the rest, small stones. So this one we can remove. Okay, perfect. So we got these pieces. We can go at an alter frame, call this one, normal map. And now that we have this one, what we're going to do is we are going to now import our asphalt. So I'm just navigating to my tarmac, and I'm going to import my albido normal give that a second. Here we go. Okay. And then what you can do is so you have your normal combine. We are basically going to add another normal combine. But this normal combine is a little bit different. So I want to have a normal color, and I want to blend. There we go. Blend this normal color with our Asphalt normal. So I do want to keep these ones together for organization. So just call these asphalt or tarmac. And we have this norm map note. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to blend these two norm maps together using this mask over our slope blur mask. And then if you just set your bassy down, basically what we're doing is we are flattening wherever there are cracks, we are flattening the wings, we are flattening. Wherever there are cracks, we are flattening the strength of our tarmac, which if you then plug it in here, you can see that now, we get this tarmac that looks very much like it is just completely broken up. But we can control how strong the stones are in here, because if I set this full strength, it will kind of, like, fade out. You won't be able to see it. But if I set it like a low strength, there are still some information in there, but we get, these nice racks. At this point, all we need to do is we need to decide for our actual blending out of this. And for that, what we're going to do is we are going to yeah, so we are going to create like a mask. Let's see, get rid of all of these. I don't need them. Don't need you, don't need you. And for my mask, in this case, I feel like the nicest thing to do is to probably grab a grunge map, and I will do the mask genererng map, and I will do the mask generationer, zero, zero, one. And then if you set your balance all the way up and your contrast all the way up, and then just set your brush pattern up. See? So you get something like this. And I guess maybe I want to play around with my balance a little bit more here and there. But you get this quite natural feeling shape. You can add directional warps and everything to improve it. But let's add a blend to our norm map, and it is blending again our normal color. But this time it is using this mask. It's invert gray scale. So we got this one. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and do a blur high quality grayscale behind this mask so that the fade out it is not as strong and it just has, like, a soft fade, but it feels a bit more organic. Now, you might think, Okay, but if I look really bad, you are right. It will. That is why we need a base color. Normal roughness. Oh, no, wait, we can throw our bestie into our base color. So Annan Alpha Alpha merge over here. Later on. So let's go ahead and start by probably generating our mask, and our mask is just going to be these cracks over here. Blend roughly over here. So it's these cracks minus this mask. So just subtract this one or actually art subtract this one. Multiply. Sorry, multiply this one. And now you can see that we have these quick over here. And then in order to kind of, like, have not such a strong fade and just kind of, like, fade them out, often the classic is simply to add a blur, high quality grayscale behind it that is very low. And add a histogram behind that with a position of 0.5 and a contrast of one, and then push your position or actually, contrast of one might actually not be nice. Let's it contrast down, but basically push your position out a little bit. And now what will happen is I can show you actually, if we, for example, blend our non map again, but this time using this mask, so quick input grayscale. This is how it will look. See? So now you have these cracks, and you can use your his Cram scan, along with your blurring to give it, for example, a stronger or a less strong fade off effect. So now you can see that now we have, all of these cracks nicely generated, and we can use them. So at this point, we don't need this one. I like to always just keep my normal map complete like this. Throw this into the normal, throw this into the Alpha, and let's just call this. Yeah, let's move this over here and just call these notes. Masking. Next, what we're going to do is for our base color, it is going to be quite subtle. I'm, because I don't want to have actual ground in here. I just wanted to stay as tarmac a little bit. So I'm going to go a blend, and I'm going to blend my base color. That's my roughness. I'm going to blend my base color using a uniform black color, and I'm going to grab yeah. Let's do this mask first, and then just at the opacity quite down. So this is just like to create some darkening and then maybe add another blend and maybe like a curvature or a curvature smooth. One of the two. Let's try them both out. Out of saving. There we go. Paving. There we go. Also, curvature smooth. And then what you can do with these is why are you so slow? For some reason, it's really slow. I don't know why. We can grab before we actually add all of our tarmac, this one. Throw this in here. Open Gel. So this curvature, you can see it will give us some harsh lines. This curvature. Yeah, I think the softer lines might be nicer and then add a gradient map behind it to convert it to a color map. Throw this to your blend and set this to art subtract. And what it will do is, as you can see over here, it will just add like you can even tone down your original black. Oh, you don't even need your original black color. And you can kind of see which one you like. For this one you needed your original black color. I quite like this. I think this looks quite nice. And if that is true, it means that we don't need ice. And if that is true, it means that we don't need our original black color, so we can get rid of that. And it's just like a very basic base color, so we can throw that one in here. So now we also have that one. And for our roughness, honestly, we can just use the same roughness. Maybe. What you might want to do is you might want to blend your roughness using a uniform white color. I don't know why my roughness is in color. You can just press grayscale on your roughness, because roughness are always in grayscale. So blend it with a white color. Again, using your mask. And then just set your paste down. White collar means that it looks even duller inside of the cracks, basically. And throw this into roughness. Okay. Awesome. 33 minutes. So it takes about half an hour to set up a proper crack generator like this. And I was at this point, we can literally just go back in here and change whatever we want to keep updating this. Now, I'm just going to show you how it actually looks like in real. And then in the next chapter, what we will do is we will go ahead and go over some potholes, like more larger damages. So source files, saves cracks. Yeah, just save that. And let's right click Export Outputs as Bitmap. Export them into the folder that you want, TGA, turn on automatic Export, and then we can just go at the Brad exxpot. Okay. Nice. So inside of real engine, we can go to our textures, New folder, cracks because this one has a few more textures. Drag the stuff in here. Quickly go into your cracks normal and want to and we are basically going to use this one. The way that we are going to do that is adding some switches. So input your normal and roughness also in here as placeholders. And basically what I want to do is I have this stuff. I can add a static switch parameter, has normal. And also another one has roughness. And if we just plug this one into the has roughness map is true and has norm map is true. And then if it is false, you want to go let's plug this one in here. If it's false, it will use our roughness. If it is true, it will use our map. So that's an easy one. I just need to try and keep this nice and organized over here. And yeah, we used Alpha, and then the has normal if it is keep this nice and organized over here. And yeah, we used Alpha. And then the as normal, if it is true, it will use this map. If it is false, I don't think we can just leave it open. I think we need to add like maybe you can leave it open. You can try. So you just throw this into, you can't. Then what we're going to do is, I have bad experiences with setting maps, so I'm going to greatly do this. You can set a constantr vector with a normal color, but for some reason, I've had bad experiences with it. So I'm just going to always like an output, and this output is like a normal color over here. That's like Wi small. So it's like eight by eight, and you just plug this into your output. You call this plain normal, and I tend to just input this into my project because it's handier to use. So I'm just going to quickly do that. Tick, Tick, play normal. Yeah, I feel more confident using this one. And it is so cheap because it's only eight by eight. Now, for these ones, you can right click Convert perimeter, normal underscore map, this one, convert perimeter, roughness, underscore map. And let's see. So we now plug these ones in here. We plug in our Alpha, so everything should pretty much work. If you want, you can add another multiply to your roughness map. And then the scale of Bremon call this roughness. Map strength, sets to one. And this will just give you the ability to also control the strength of your roughness map. So, as you can see, base color, normal roughness is between our original system and our custom system, and we control the strength. We can save this. And now it's just a matter of plugging in the right textures. So if we go to materials, we can grab our leaks one and duplicate. Cracks underscore 01. Now, I don't currently have the Asphalt texture in here. So what I will do is I will go to, we can actually just use it in here. This is pretty cool. So you can actually go to Quixbridge and you can directly import the same textures in here. So what I can do is I can just go Quixw Bridge surfaces Asphalt and as long as I grab the same one that I used before, which is this rough asphalt over here. I need to sign. Here we go. Then you can just after signing, press Download, and then you can just press art. And now it will automatically also set up a material and everything. That's why I want to do it this way because I'm just too lazy to set up an entire material and stuff. Next, let's for now, just use a simple plane over here. And we can just have this, on the ground like this, drag on your asphalt material. And yes, of course, the scaling, you kind of need to work with your UVs, which you can control in here, tiling, rotation. And like I said, this for exam two by two because of my scaling. And now, finally, if we go to materials, cracks zero, one, over here. Then what we can do with this is we can turn on our normal roughness, and then it will expose those values. Go to your cracks, and then we have our cracks normal, cracks roughness, and cracks base collars and cracks base collar. Cool. And now it should just be a matter of dragging these in here. Do I have an arrow? Oh, no, there you go. Tada. And now we have some fairly realistic looking quacks that work quite nicely on this tarmac, and it also fits in better with the tarmac. If I see this, I feel like that my original texture size needs to be like, Oh, no, wait here. That one needs to be a bit smaller. So three by three, for example. Oh, no. I guess two by two is fine because one by one feels too large. But yeah, basically, from a distance, it doesn't matter if the tiling is not perfect. This is because I'm throwing it on a quick plane. So based upon this, you can kind of see if your tiling matches up. And of course, with this, if you say, no, I want to have them more subtle, we can always go in here and we can say, I want to have them more subtle. We can always go in here and we can say, grab this one and, like, tone this opacity down a little bit. And what we can also do is we can also control the strength. So if I now re import this there we go, see, so it's a bit more subtle, and I can control the strength of my cracks one. Or not. Oh, no, I did not set that on here. Let's do that over here. Let's do a flatten normal meta scale perimeter, normal strength. Set to minus one, which is a default for open GL, in this case, or for flip normals. I know you would think it's one, but it's not. It's minus one for some reason. Save that one. Normal strength. And now what you can see is if I set this to, for example, minus two, if I set this to zero, the normal is almost got in just a base color pretty much. But yeah, so you say -1.5, for example. And now we have a nice norm map, which, of course, works well with our directional light over here. See? So it all works totally fine with all of our lighting modes and stuff like that. And just like that, we have created some really nice looking quacks. Okay. Awesome. So that is it for our quacks over here. Now, in our next chapter, what we will do is we will go ahead and just also create some extra damage it has potholes and everything. It's very simple to use. So it 7. 06 Creating Pothole Decals: So just like we create the quicks, what I want to do in this chapter, it's going to be super quick chapter, is we are going to create some potholes or something like that, just like some will big dens inside of your tarmac in which we are going to fill in, for example, gravel. Now we can actually use what we have here. So these are quacks. Yeah, let's use them, but let's just do a saves. So before we can do a saves, we need to go to the export outputs, turn off this setting, and in order to save this setting, you just need to press the export button once more. The reason we want to do that is because else if you save us, what will happen is that it will accidentally export our new changes and overwrite our cracks material, and we don't want that. Then we can just do a saves and we are going to call this one saves and I don't know. Potholes or something like that, and let's just go at and press save and give that a second. There we go. Then go in here and just right click and rename this also to pot holes. And now what we can do is we can do some adjustments. So for these ones, yes, you can use rack snating in here also, if you want. It's just a matter of adding those on top. I will probably not be doing that. The reason I want to have this graph is because I want to have these few pieces and I might just want to have here, like the stones are something I want to have. But I don't actually care about most of my cracks and stuff. So yeah, let's look. At this point, I will just leave this open because I might just grab some stuff from here, but let's just create our graph down here. I'm actually not able to use more than I expected. So first of, for the potholes, we just want to create a shape that will be our pot holes. For this, I often just like to use, like a grunge map or something like that. Just something that's nice. Like clouds two often works. Grunge map 01 often works. Grunge map 004 is also sometimes nice if you were to left like smaller stuff. So basically, I think 01, if you just play around your balance, these will become like the pothole. So what we're going to do is we are going to basically define the shape, and then we are going to make the shapes a little bit smaller. It's also why his come scan on our clouds too. That might actually be better. Yeah, let's do clouds too. And what we can do is with the shapes is now we can start by just defining them. Over here, we have the shapes and you can decide how big you want them to be. I want to twin and get them roughly in the center. That would be best. Maybe sum sorry, which one did I use? Set number four? Yeah, that can work something like that. Okay, so we have this. Now there's multiple ways that we can make this more into one chunks, and it's all basically do a blurring. So we can do the non uniform blur way. Or just like the classic blur high quality gray caraway. They both have their ups and downs, and I just want to basically use them or **** about. So the non uniform bloway as you can see over here, it really just, like, cuts off, especially if I make this larger. It just cuts off like these shapes over here and turns them into, like, large shapes. With this blowaway, what you need to do is you need to blur it, and then what you need to do is you will need to add a histogram scan behind it. With, like, a strong position to kind of get the same and contrast to get roughly the same cutoff effect. Now, for a non uniform blur Melco data histogram scan, because I like to show you guys how I prototype instead of just magically already knowing exactly what to do. So in the end, here you can see the difference. So one is a little bit more defined, which I think for potholes might actually be nicer if we have that just like a little bit. So playground with our balance and contrast. And yeah, let's use this one. But now we know two ways on how to do it. So we have these potholes over here. That's totally fine. Now all we need to do is we need to rip off our bevels that we have over here. Also, only this time we are going to set them a little bit stronger, like this. Uh, don't know if the bevel is going to work the way I want it to work this time. We can see and else we are going to use a different one. But basically, now that we have these bootles over here, what we're going to do is so we want to have almost like a layer of tarmac that is going down it, and that's why we have this one. And once we've done that, what we can do is we can transition it to gravel. So having this, what I would personally be doing is I would be maybe say, let's just duplicate all of these damage pieces. 1 second. I need to plug in this one over here. So damage piece. Let's have Okay, so this one does like some small variation. Then it adds some extra variation. That's fine. Slope grayscale, his crumb scan, cutting it. And then over here, just like, play around a little bit more with my variations. Okay, so we have now this shape over here. That's totally fine. I'm going to just move these noises down here and we will clean this up in just like a bit. So let's say that we now have this shape over here, and then we have the bevel, which I'm going to add over here. There we go. Okay. So once that is done, it is just a matter of grabbing some norm maps again, and we can just probably steal this normal node over here. Invert grayscale. And let's have a look. Okay. Yeah, I'm not a big fan of this one. I think what we're going to do is we're going to this time use a non uniform blur. This is why I keep showing you these multiple techniques because sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Let's do invert gray scale. So this one is like the base, and that's fine. So that gives us a nice action, like a rough cut out. So we got that one. Now for this one, let's try a non uniform blur gray scale over here, samples and blades down. And I think this one, if I like this in here, it will give me here, see, it gives me more like a fall off effect, instead of like a really harsh effect. This one over here, I just don't like it. It does not feel like a smooth f off. It feels like a tilted fall off. And that's why sometimes non uniform Bleur is a bit better. So here you can see that we really have that pothole effect with the fall off. And then what we need to do is we need to start masking some stuff. At this point, I'm actually going to delete this stuff. I'm going to delete this stuff. I'm going to get rid of this, this, this. This one. So these stones are going to be in here. Now, the first thing that we are going to do is we are going to combine our normals in a very specific way. And I'm going to do that. It's a good question. How am I going to do that? Like the best way to do it. Let me say it like that. Let's do a let's grab our non uniform blur. Let's add a blend. So it takes a bit of thinking sometimes, a histogram scan, plug in our non uniform blur and herome scan. And the goal is that I get that f of edge. So having this one, if I can push my position, like that. Yeah, something like that. And then blur high quality gray scaled already. If I plug this into my top and then my base over here into the bottom and then set this to be subtract. Okay. So that creates the outer shell. I feel like I actually I don't need this blur here. I need this after our blend. So we have the outer shell. I am blurring the outer shell. And then what I'm doing is I'm blending this. Sorry, blending this using a plain normal color and our actual there we go. That should do the trick. We are blending this together, and because this is going to be blended together, it will have a nice fall off. So if I do a normal combine over here, we are combining these two together. That's totally fine where they expected. So that will give us the pothole look. And then if we do another normal combine, we are then adding our tarmac on top of this for my tarmic, I just want to use my blurring to basically give it a little bit of, like, a file off. So we are adding my tarmac on top of this. That's good. And then if we would add our gravel on top of that, let me just do some quick cleanup 1 second. So we have, like, a note. I'm going to click on these notes so that it'll actually Yeah, let's just do this like completely clean. Okay. So we got this stuff over here. We are adding our tarmac on top of it. At this point, I probably want to also import my gravel. And then what we're going to do is later on, enhance it with small stones. That's basically the idea. So for my gravel, I'm going to quickly navigate base color, normal roughness and just import it in here. Import resources. Give that second to import. Come on. It's four textures. Takes a while. There we go. Okay. Nice. So we got those done. You can already select your roughness and set it to be a gray scale. So having this mask, if we now do another normal combine, we should be able to do another blend. And this time, blend our normal color with our gravel and we are going to use this one over here. There we go. So now we have tarmac that blends to gravel, and in our base color, it will also reflect that it will blend to gravel. And then the top parts over here, just to do proper blending, are going to become a normal combine once you get high quality. Well, let's set all of them to high quality. So those are going to be one last blend, and it's going to blend once again my tarmac it's by the way, the frame, call this one gravel. So it is going to blend my tarmac with my inverted version of this one. Or maybe we don't have the invert. Let's see. Oh, yeah, we do need to. So invert this one. Blend that. There we go. Okay, cool. So that might look very noisy, but it's actually not that bad. So we have this one now over here, so that should give us, like, a really good norm map. It might be a bit strong, but we can just balance out our actual normals if that is the case. So what I can do is I can go in here. Frame this Port mask. And then the pothole mask is like anomer. And to be honest, I expected that I had to place a bunch of small stones. But if I see this, this is actually such a rough gravel texture that I probably don't even have to art the stones or anything like that. So that would have been a bit overkill because normally, I like the stones to just enhance the pieces a bit, but honestly, this gravel is looking pretty good. So let's see. So we got this one now. I still want to have my mask over here. That's totally fine. And my mask is going to become a little bit different, actually. So let's leave that to the side. Let's first of all, work on our base over here. So, let's see. We have this one. Let's see. Can I already just, like, use this as, like, curvature? Okay, so that we already, like, add some extra darkening. Then I'm going to blend this together using my gravel base color. And my gravel base color needs to have Oh, God. Which mask was that again? This mask over here like that. Then what we do need to do is we do need to balance out the colors a little bit better. You can do this in multiple ways. Replace color, histogram scan. Sorry, I mean, HL node, for example. Let's try a replace color range. And let's set our source color to be the base color, target color to be the top. And then I just like to go, let's click on here and set our target color to be a little bit darker, maybe a little bit more brown, something like that, so that it fits a little bit better within this field because else it will feel very cut off. Now, in terms of a mask, what I want to do is I want to do it a little bit different. Because as you can see over here, these potholes, they are tilable but I don't want them to. However, I want to keep them intact. I don't just want to literally cut off because if I would blend it with this one over here, what would happen is that it would just literally give a harsh cut off on these areas, and that does not look nice. Now, a way that we can change that is by adding a flood fill node, and we basically plug in our meshes in here. And then from a flood fill, we go to a flood fill to gradient over here. Sorry, not flood fill. Flood fill to gray scale, I mean. And then what you can do is you can plug in an actual input for your gray scale. And the input works the same as a mask. So if I would go in and plug in this one over here, you can see that now it masks out everything that is black in our mask, which means that we only leave like a few butthols like this. And this is completely procedural, which means that if we change our seat over here, it will just randomly generate different potholes. So that's why this is so powerful. And it does mean that we don't need this stuff anymore. We just need this one. Do we need to blur it? I don't, yes, maybe. Let's let's plug it in like this. So we might need to blur it just to give, like, a slightly softer edge over here. So let's see, so we are blurring this out. A little bit more and then use the histogram scan to grow it. Yeah, okay, that makes sense. Okay, so we got that stuff also done. So that is it for our potholes over here, you can see. You can turn on this view over here to see only the potholes and you can see that they nicely blend together, and hopefully they will blend perfectly just like last time with our quacks and everything. We have our roughness over here. Now, for our roughness, we need to do the same thing where we have our actually, our roughness is going to be a little bit different. So we are this time just blending these two roughness together using a mask. Yes. Okay. So that's it for our gravel, and then our norm map can just be plugged in here, and then we don't need our small stones. And there we go. So we have now transformed t frame this one, and let you see what this looks like. So we got this stuff over here. We can go ahead and we can write actually save a scene first. Right click Export outputs as bitmap, textis pothole, export, turn on automatic exports, and there we go. Okay, and that should now work exactly the same as with the cracks. So if we just go in here, we can import these 1 second. There we go. Oh, I need to quickly go into my norm map, and I What happens? There we go. It's really small. Let's flip the green channel around. And then if we go into my materials, we have cracks here one, duplicate. Potholes on Sco 01. And yeah, I hope that you can see the power of the procedurality in this that we can just very quickly later on, add more or less potholes, if you want. And in our presentation scene, I will just see if that is needed or not. So I can save those things. I can duplicate. Over here. And I'm quite nervous, so let's hope that it works. Yeah, that's not too bad. Not too bad. So now you can see that we now have a potholes. Maybe this one, we want to only set our strength to minus one, and maybe make it a little bit darker. Let's go in here, let's make our center. Like a little bit darker. Maybe that will look nice. I don't know. I feel like the color is too much similar. So maybe make it like more like a grayish color, like a whitish color. Yeah, close. I just want to get some difference because else it because these are both stones, then else it will just seem like it is like the same thing, and that's not something I'm trying to achieve here. I'm trying to show like the difference. There we go. See? So that now looks like a nice difference. And especially from a distance, you can see that we now have a potholes, and just for the sake of trying out, if I go ahead and, for example, look at my mask over here, if I would go in my clouds and simply change my seat, it looks like that I am able to very quickly generate Yeah. Nice, very different potholes. And now with everything being updated, I can go in here and I can literally just reimport these three. And there you go. Now we already have a different one. So that's looking really good. I like it. And that is how we create potholes for video games. So in the next chapter, what we will be working in on is we will be working on probably some Atlas creation and some performance things. So let's go ahead and continue with this in our next chapter. 8. 07 Using Atlases With Decals: Hey, so what we're going to do in this chapter is just a quick optimization technique, and that is on how to use atlas textures as decals, because this is something that with the current system inside of Unreal engine, whenever you have a decal, it has to be a square and you just have to have it in the center and it will just drop it down here. But there is actually a technique that you can place decals into, like, atlas. They still have to be squared, so it's not as flexible as unity because unity has systems where you can turn them into sprites, and then you can select them. But it's still quite useful. So let's say that we have well, actually, we have four decals here, so we can actually use that so let's go ahead and for this, I'm going to use Photoshop to show you how to do it. So here we have a Photoshop document that is just four K, 40 96 by 40 96. Now, what you want to do is you basically want to split this up into even sections. We have four decals, so we are just going to split this up into the middle. If you have eight decals, you can just go ahead and split this up also. But it needs to be even sections because else, it will be really annoying to do the calculations inside of unreal. So what I can do is I have over here my rulers, which if you don't have them, you can go to, like, few and rulers over here. And I'm just going to click and drag I'm going to set one at 20:48, and you can see that it will snap and another one at 20:48. So here we have our four Digals. Now we know that they need to fit into this area. Now, at this point, what we can do is, first of all, I can create the system just to test out, and then we can take it from there. Let's go ahead and use our selection mode to select this cube, and the solid color, let's make this white. Select this one. A the solid color down here. Let's make this blue, select this one. Again, solid color. Let's make this green and finally select this one over here. And again, solid colors make this pink or something like that. Okay, perfect. So now what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go ahead and textius atlas. Let's go ahead and save it in here. So file, save us. And she called this like Atlas nscore template, for example, something like that. And then I'm also going to, of course, save it as a very quick TJ, but I'm just going to call this one already Atlas nscoePascl because I know that I will be converting this later on. So we got that done, and now all we need to do is if we go into real decals, textures. Oh, yeah, I already addit it in here because I didn't expect to add it. But yeah, basically, so you can go ahead and let's create a new folder called Atlas over here. Atlas over here, and let's just drag it in here. Because at the beginning, I did not think I was going to show you how to actually make this. But since we are going to use our origon decals, it's easier if I show you. So if we go into our materials, we can go ahead and we can use our decal master over here. And yeah, we can pretty much just use this one. So these are UVs so we can just add it to this backside over here. So how does this work? First of all, what we're going to do is we are going to have a static switch parameter. Like this. And I'm going to go ahead and call this one Atlas underscore UVs. I'm really picky with how I type stuff. So Atlas UVs. And then if it is false, I want to add a simple texture note. So I'm just right clicking Texture Cornet that has nothing in it, and that's going to be in the false and over here that whenever it is false, it will just normally use the default UVs that we already used before. Now, what we're going to do is basically we are going to create a system where we can switch between our four positions that we have created. To do this, what we want to do is, let's go into my decal, and I'm just going to replace it with my Atlas base color over here. And the reason I want to do that is because Asa cannot preview it. So we have this Atlas base color, and if you just go ahead and set this to be a cube over here, we can start previewing this note. Now, nothing will show up. It's because of the Atlas UVs. It's a bit annoying. But basically, what we want to do is we want to create a texture coordinate and then what we want to do is we want to divide this by the amount of shapes that we have on, for example, horizontal and vertical. So we have two. If you had four, you would basically for us, we are going to add a constant, or you can do a scale parameter, but it depends on if you want to swap in more textures. So because we know that we are having one, two, we just said it's to two. So utt easy. Let's go ahead and go back in here. Now what we want to do is we want to then add this, and what we can do is with the art. Basically, we are now dividing it into different pieces, and then when we add a value to those pieces, and this value is going to be our U and V location, we can basically swap the locations. So right now you can see that you have your U and your V, vertical and horizontal, basically. If you add a scalar premter, Atlas underscore and then duplicate this again and call this Atlas underscore V. Now these are two parameters. However, the texture coordinate, the way that the parameters work, is that it needs a one node that has two values in it. Right now we have two nodes that both have one value. So all we need to do is add them. We just create an art node, plug these in here, and add these to whatever we have over here. So it will add our coordinates on top of our already existing split up textures, and then we throw this into our UV map. Now, what you will see is over here, we now have this box down here. And what I want to do is I want to go ahead and I believe that I do I need to set it lower? Let's have look. If I go here and set this, for example, 0.5, oh, yeah, yeah, see, so I do need to set this to be lower. I'm going to set my art. Oh, that's why. Not art, sorry, append. We need to append vector. That's why it wasn't working. I thought maybe I had like a value one, but if we do something like this, and then it would be handy if I actually set my switch to three. There we go. Okay. So if I set my switch to three, now what you can see is we have our atlas. If I would change this value, for example, to one, you can see that it's switched back to one. If I would set it to three, it would probably, yeah, it would just nullify because there isn't a three. So with this, with these values, what you can do is if I set this, for example, to 0.5, you can see that it switched. This is because it moved the U axis by 0.5. Now, why do I do 0.5? Very easy. If this is 0-1, 0.5 is in the center. That's a nice thing with four. If we would split this up again, you would go 0.25, for example. If you would split it up again, you would be 0.128 or something. I don't know. But yeah, basically, so you would just keep switching it up. So you can see that now we have blue, and just like that, we can basically keep switching. So if I go at V to 0.5, you can see that now it becomes yellow, and you can guess where this is going. Now that we know how to do this, all we need to do is we need to go ahead and if we go into our textures, I'm going to grab Legs one, and I'm just going to drag this into our base over here, and then to set my height and my width over here to 50%. I then move it up here and done. This one, because the leaks when you drag in your leaks, it doesn't actually show you the Alpha. We do need to also quickly just open up our base. Go to the Alpha, press Contra A, contro C to copy the Alpha, then go in here and just do a new layer and press Contra V. Right click free transform, and again, sets to 50%. So this is just mapping. We are now just mapping this one in here. And then what we can do is we can just go ahead and we can do the same where we just map this one on the other one. And then for the other pieces, we do need, of course, a norm map. But because these pieces don't have a norm map, we just want to give it like a plain color, basically. So we have this one, and yeah, that's a bit the annoying thing. Normally, I would recommend combining decas that have the same maps, exactly the same maps and stuff like that, because now we need to fake all of our norm map values and stuff. So we have this one in here. Now the other one should be a little bit easier. If we go for our cracks, we can crack space color normal roughness 50 50, 50. There we go. You can just go ahead and select all of them, free transform, throw them in here. Then finally, we have our potholes also oh, yeah, I forgot about the base color, but that's something I'll fix like it a bit. Yeah, you can just skip through this if you want. I'm just doing this in case I have something to say. That's why I'm doing it in real time. So we got these ones, and, let's not forget the pothole Alphas. And then what we're going to do is we're going to merge these together. So for our potholes Alphas, we just need to open out the base color, copy the Alpha again. We can close these leaks, and then we can just go ahead and go in here, paste it again, free transform. 50 throwed in here. And finally, we have our quack space collar. Free Transform, 50. And there we go. Awesome. Okay. So we got all of that stuff done. So creating the Alpha is quite easy. You just want to basically select all of your mask layers, right click and just merge them together. So that's number one. So that's going to be mask. Next, what I'm going to do is I'm going to have all my normals over here, merge those together. Here we go. And those are the normal. Then we have our base colors over here. Merge those together. Base color, and finally, we have our roughness. Now, of course, balancing out the roughness and everything, you can still do that inside of the shader with our system. So all we really need to do now is with this stuff selected. Let's select our mask. Then go into channels and press a little plus sign and just paste it in here. So Contra C Contra V. And once that is done, we pretty much can grab a base color. See, mask is now working. And then it is literally just a matter of pressing save as copy, go to TGA, paste the base color. Next, we have our roughness and roughness. For the top bits, I'm just going to make this, let's say, just like a white color, fairly white. So I'm just grabbing a brush, and I'm just holding alt and, like, grab a color from the original roughness so that it is filled up. And then we can do another save At let's underscore roughness. And then you can see everything in action in just a bit. If you just give me 1 second. We have this one. Once again, we can just do this. And for your normal color, make sure that your RGB is one to eight, one to eight by 255. That is the official norm map color. But we can now also do a save a copy. And call this Atlas underscore normal. Okay. Perfect. So you probably guessed it at this point, some of you might not even be watching this anymore. But, yeah, you probably guess it now all we need to do is just import our roughness and our norm map for our Atlas, and then just right click and press reimport on our base color. Don't forget that you still need to flip around your green channel or your norm map. And at this point, we have our DCA master. I'm going to set the default off right now. I'm also going to stop reviewing this note. So this one is working, so we can save this. And yeah, I know. So maybe it is easier if you actually grab Leaks one and swap this back because else it might get a little bit confused. There we go. So let's duplicate this one, for example. And all we need to do now is have our materials. We can go ahead and we can have Leaks one, for example, duplicate Atlas underscore 01, and then we can just open this up, turn on all of these values over here. Grab our atlas and drag it in our textures, and let's try this out. So we have our atlas over here. We can go ahead and go into our materials Atlas 01, drag it in here, and let's give this a go. Why is my mask not working? Is my base color. So it looks like it has not actually imported the Alpha map over here. If we just have a look in Photoshop, so yeah, it definitely has an Alpha. So what I tend to do is I tend to literally drag in our TGA file and just drag it in here. Okay, see, so then we can see that it is a Photoshop problem. So for some reason, Photoshop is not I don't know. It's probably not the name. We have a Alpha map in here. It's totally fine. So that is interesting why it is not working. That's maybe after I've saved the name, let's do a Save A copy. TGA. Yeah, Alpha channels is turned on. It should just save it. But I feeling this is still not going to work, but we can never look. So right click, reimport. Never look. So right click reimport. Yeah, so it's still not importing my Alpha. So this is a bug that does sometimes happen, although it's been a long time. Import, as I said before, import your TGA over here. And as you can see, it does not have any Alphas, but what you can do, she can go to your original Contra A and Control C, your mask. And then in this TGA file, I don't know why it does this, but then create a new Alpha and then just press Control S to save it. So yeah, as I said, I don't know why it does this, but this should work fine. So if I now right click and reimport, here you see? So now it reads the Alphas. Awesome. So at this point, you can see that if I just press zero, I have eig 01 or here. So ik one, 0.5, ig two. 0.5 by 0.5. We have this one, and if I do this one. And just like that, you can have your values. If you want in your deca master, you can also have Boolean switches or static switches where you can basically turn on and off whichever decal you want to use. Unfortunately, I'm not aware of any array rules where you can literally just have a slider or anything to do this. But basically, now we have optimized it because instead of us having four separate textures, we can all do it into this one texture, and all we need to do is just create four instances that have the different switches. So that's pretty much it for our Atlas chapter. I hope that it was not too long for you, so still took a little bit longer than expected. What we're going to do in the next chapter is we are going to go over pom decals and also train decals, because they go hand in hand. Soy, it's mostly going to be train decals. I will just show you how to do some tire tracks, footsteps and stuff like that, which we will most likely not be creating ourselves, but using mega, actually, because same basic concept. But yeah, so let's go ahead and go over this in our next chapter. 9. 08 Creating Pom Decals Part1: Okay, so in this chapter, what I want to do is I want to show you how to create Pom decals, which stands for Parallax occlusion mapping decals inside of UnwelEngine. Now, Pom decals inside of unwel engine can be a little bit buggy. So I found a good way. At least I think pretty much like the best way that you can do it. Unfortunately, one thing that I also wanted to show you is how to do actual geometry displacement decals on trains inside Un wheel engine five. But this seems to be a functionality that is just unless you create your entire custom systems, it's not really something that I personally can get working, and it's very technical and very difficult to do. So instead, we are going to use the pump technique. Now, you can use the pump technique for various things. So I'm going to show you a quick example on how to use it, for example, on twains. But then or just the ground or something, but you can also use it to actually have, for example, in Star Citizen, for example, they use pump decals for a lot of different details, small details on meshes and everything. So I'm going to show you those two techniques. One on how to basically have a mesh, and the other one is on how to do it with the twain. Now, for our twain version, what I'm going to do because creating those actual decals, for example, I had in mind, like tire tracks. We can go to mega scans, because if I need to create actual tire track material, this will be super time consuming, and it will also be a little bit too advanced, so that's something that's more like for a material to toil, because you would create these tire track decals exactly the same as that you would create a material with tire tracks. So instead, what I will be doing is I will be using mega scans, and I will take it from here. Uh, I will be showing how to just create some basic details which just like some basic modeling on how to do pum for the baking and everything. And then you should have a very solid foundation. So here we have let's see. I just want something that has some tire track or here, like this one. This one looks quite nice. So let's say that we have some tire track texture and we want to convert this into a decal. Now, for the deco because this is going to be on train, we don't really need a base color in this. We mostly just need a normal and we need to pump for it. Yeah, that's pretty much it. B for the rest, it can be imprinted on top of a train. So I can go ahead and download this. Now, the actual example on how to use it on already textured train, we will do, like in a little bit. That's something that we will do at near the end of this tutorial course, where we will be putting all the stuff that we learned into practice into an actual environment. So that's something that will come later. And I think you will like that. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and I have downloaded the Tire Track server, and now go ahead and go in here and go tire tracks. Now, for this one, I'm just going to drag in my tire track texts. And this time, I also want to just drag in the actual displacement over here. So, as you know, what do we need for a deco? In this case, we need a displacement. We need a non map, but we also need an Alpha map. So for this to generate Alpha map, we can pretty much go in here and you can pretty much steal this one. Let's just do that. Let's actually just literally steal this Alpha map which for tire tracks might be quite easy. So I'm just going to duplicate this over here because I want this alpha map for tire tracks to be a little bit less round. So I'm going to let's see. Let's set my brush pattern a little bit bigger. There we go, because I do want the tie tracks to be able to almost tile, so to speak. So a little bit less round so that it is more square and then add a output to this over here and call this one generic mask underscore 01, for example. Now, what will happen is that it because we have it in our potholes file, it will actually export it along with the potholes, and it will have the naming. But honestly, what we can do is we can just press Export. Go in here and then we have a pothose and then you will have your mask here and just remove the potholes underscore. Does mean that we cannot change it anymore because it will not overwrite anymore. But if we just do this, right click and maybe, like, cut it, and let's just place it here on the base. There we go. That's like enough for an Alpha. I'm going to show you some very quick techniques on how to do this kind of stuff, because it's very handy to know how to do, these things in a very quick way over here. Actually, I'm also going to a little bit nicer organization, so we can go ahead and just drag these into Edge damages, move here. And then it will update all of our materials also. And it's another one called leaks because that was a mistake of me to just drag them into the core like this. I didn't realize how many files I would end up having. So okay, so we have our generic mask. Now, for this deco, we are going to probably, I think that we can just go ahead and we can reuse leaks or our deca master, but we do need to duplicate it at this point. So I'm going to duplicate this and call this Pom underscore decals. And here we go. Okay, so now bomb decals, because they are decals, they work a little bit different. They are actually a pain to get working if you want to do it completely manually. So that's why we are actually not going to do that. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to delete this stuff. I know that my bomb decals, so it shows here as like a base color, but for now, I don't need a base color. I think what I will do is I will just delete it because, oh, no, wait, I do need a base color later on. So I'm going to use switches. Static switch parameter. Oh, that's a little bit annoying because, of course, if we drag this into base color, it will probably, you know, if I call this has base color. The thing with a base color is that it will always need something as soon as we throw it into a switch, most likely. But I can have a look. Like, I'm not completely sure. So if I said this has base color is eagle to not completely sure. So if I said this has base color is eagle to true, it turns on, as soon as I drag it in there, it will give me an arrow, yes, that is true. Um, now, because as far as I can see, we cannot really get around this, what I'm going through instead is I'm going to create two different materials because I do not want all of this stuff. I want to completely change this. I don't need a roughness map, so it would just be overkill for me to do all of that stuff here. So we are going to create one very simple material. Um Wow, at this point, I can pretty much almost delete everything except for nor map. So yeah, we are going to create one very simple material, and then what we will do is we will also later on create a more complex material. So let's start with this. We have a norm map, and we have a flat and normal. I know, I removed pretty much everything. Then what I'm going to do is I'm going to go into my textures and also drag in already my generic mask in here, and we can just throw this into our opacity. So that's also fine. Now, if we go and in our textures, I'm going to create a new folder that I'll call tire tracks. And for this one, what I need to do is we have right now a displacement that is a JPEG displacement. However, we need to have our displacement inside of our Alpha map for this. So I guess for the norm map, it is fine. It is kind of ironic that Unreal engine marketplace does not allow JPEG format, but MgScNs just JPAC even though it's owned by Unreal. But again, just figured I should say that little bit of information. Let's flip the green channel on this. That's totally fine. We have our Alpha, so all we need to do now is we need to go into Photoshop. We have our displacement over here, and I'm just going to press A, Contra C, create a new Alpha Contrave and then file and do a save a copy Trove. And then file and do a save a copy, and this time, save it as like a tagaFle and just call this tire tracks underscore. I like to call it height, underscore height. And then if we go into unreal, hopefully this time it did include again, it did not include the Alpha. That's really strange. Because it should include contorCG here. Safe. And now it does include the Alpha. Okay. Honestly, I don't know why, but that's strange. Okay. So we now got a height map and we got a norm map. Okay, at this point, now you might be guessing that you are familiar with just doing general Pomo normal materials, which means that you would like a parallax Occlusion mapping note. This is this very large note over here. However, note does not work most of the time. It will give you some very bad results. Now, I could go ahead and, like, act as if that I have, this note that I created that's so amazing and everything. But that's not how it works. It's just a note that I have. I have included it into my materials over here. It is a material function note. I call it decal Pom function, and I found it on like a forum a long time ago. I try to look up the form again for credit, but I cannot find it. So I do apologize. But this note is specifically it's very similar to our parallax clusion mapping note, but it's specifically for Digals. Now, why am I not showing you how to make this into Attil easily? If I open it up, this is why. I am simply not good enough to understand exactly how this is working. I would not be able to teach you. I know the general concept behind it, but that's pretty much about it. So I'm not going to pretend as if though, I'm not going to pretend as if that I know exactly how to do this. This is really technical work. But we can use this note. That's a nice thing. So this note is in the project. You can just go ahead and you can simply drag it into your Pom decals note over here, and then you can see that it looks very similar to what we've had before. So yeah, it is pretty much see? It's almost the exact same note. At least it looks almost exactly the same. And this note will be able to make our pom work fairly decently. So what do we need for this? Most of the inputs are pretty much the same as when you create a Pom material. You need a height map da. So let's go ahead and just dd that one. Now, a height map that you have over here, you need a texture object height map in order to art this. So the only thing you need to do is right click, convert the texture object. And then if you want, you can also write click and convert this to perimeter, show which is the amount. So let's press ASClick and call this height amount, and I tend to set the starting point at 0.05 often. And then we can take it from there. The minimum steps and the maximum steps. Basically, what these will do is pump decals. You can see it as many different many little planes, very closely stacked on top of each other. The minimum and the maximum steps basically dictates how many planes are stacked on top of each other. Because if you are stacking planes very closely on top of each other, it will look like as if there is actual height, even though there is none. But of course, without geometry. So we need a scalar parameter that we'll call min and we need to scale prometer to what all max. I always like to set my min to 232 and my MX 264. Next, it will ask us for our UV maps. Sometimes it can be nice to control the tiling. So let's do a texture coordinate and this to control the tiling. So let's do a texture coordinate. At this point, if you want, you can also use an atlas, although I tend to not do that with these type of details, just preference wise. Then we can add a multiply, and we are going to multi, sorry, we are going to multiply our texture coordinate with a scalar peremter which we'll call tiling and a default value of one. We basically plug this in here and throw this into UVs. Your temp channel you can leave empty, your reference plane can be another scale pemter that'll raw Rf plane, and we can keep it at zero for now. Okay, that's it. That's all the inputs that we need, as far as I can remember. I'm simply going to plug in my parallax into my norm map and into my generic mask over here. And for now, let's leave it at this and see if it actually works. You can see already over here that it does have an effect. So let's go ahead and save this, and then I can show you how it works. So if we go now to our materials, we have our Pom decals and going to right click and create material instance. And call this Tire tx underscore Pom. We can open this up over here, and all we need to do is we need to plug in the correct no map like that. Here we go. And now that we've done that, I will move this over to my screen temporarily, and I'm going to drag in my material. So tire tracks Pum, and now what you can see is this is happening. Now, you can see that there is a Pom effect going on right now. It might be a little bit tricky to see, but it is there. This works better on actual terrain. But I will show you this later on. If you now go ahead and, for example, play around with your height maps, what I often notice I often notice is that the height amount is actually nicer sometimes if we go into the -0.4, for example. Oh, that's way too strong. -0.04 because it pushes it down a little bit. I kind depends on your what your height map looks like. So if I do 0.04, for example, like this, Okay, so 0.04, in this case, looks quite decent. Now there's a few more things that I'm going to do. I want to show you how to do it on here because it is easier to see. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and also add an extra mask to this. These two things are very quick to show. So first of all, we are going to just grab my crunch map and I'm going to set my brush pattern a lot stronger like this. And then it should or re export a new mask for me, which I can once again call generic pot mask and this generic mask underscore 02 this time. I can cut it again, and there we go. Now, we have another one. Which could be nice, for example, in this case, if I go to my textures and just input this, I feel like for this one, it is fitting to take a round one. I highly recommend that you watch until the end of this course, or at least watch the final chapter to see how I'm actually using these decals and see them in context. So now you can see that over here, that is working quite well. So we now have this decal that we can just always place, and we can just duplicate it. And if you want, you can even go ahead and carefully overlap it and rotate it to give you the effect as if you have tire tracks that are going around the corner. She can see over here. So just like that, we can very easily create these kind of effects. Now, for this one, all you will need to do, and I'm going to show you that technique because remember, I told you about the minus. If you grab this height over here, we can do an output. We can plug this in here and just call this one height, label material. There we go, and then we can just do a quick export. So this one, because it is basically in height map, whatever you turn into a norm map can also be a height Map. That's basically it. So we got this one, and I might need to invert it, but we'll see soon enough. I can go to my pothole over here. I can import, Oh, one sec, almost forgot. We need to add an Alpha. So add an Alpha merge node plug it in here. At the gray map in between. There you go. That's it. That's what I wanted. And now I can just drag in my height map. There we go. So now if I would go to my materials, and, for example, and, for example, boom decals. So here we have our tire tracks. I can A, for this one, we need the more complicated version. Actually, now I think of it. So we got the easy version. Let's now just already make the complicated version. It doesn't really matter in what order that we do this. So if I go ahead and grab my decal master, yes. Let's duplicate this again. Pum underscore decals underscore Complex. Open it up, and all you need to do is delete this stuff. Go to your pom. Oh, not the function. Go to your Pom decals. Copy this stuff, paste it in here. That's literally it. That's all you need to do. Plug it in here like this. And having that done, it's pretty much fine. You can go at, and you can just save this again. And now that's it. So now it will have all of these pieces already in here. I'll create a material instance for my Pom decals complex. Let's call this pot holes underscore. Pom and let's just assign our correct textures. So I want to do a normal, has roughness, height, digal normal roughness, all of that stuff. Let's work on, let's just turn everything on for now. So what I can do is I can go down here. Base color, height, normal roughness. And then it's just a matter, let's say that I replace this one over here, I can replace it with potholes pum. Give the second to update the shader. Okay, so this one looks like right now. And this is what I mean we like the minus. So it doesn't look very nice. Now, first of all, it looks like that First of all, it looks like that I need to actually grab my invert grayscale over here because it looks like that's the one that we need. We need to invert our height map. That's something I sometimes get confused about, so let's remput. There we go, see. And then what you want to do is, let's say that we set this to -0.02. And often or 0.01, 'Cause often it's, like, a little bit floaty if we do sir Pizira wine. S, sir pitcher one. So it is okay, but it still feels a bit floaty, and the trick that I did is if I said a minus before it, and then I guess I will after I need to not invert this. Sorry, I do apologize. I think if I now re input it. There we go. So we have done because we are doing the minus, it still looks like boom. Yeah, so you can see it. But it is so close to the edge that you can see that it is a decal, and it just feels like geometry. And now you can see the difference. So for example, I can go ahead and I can No, you see here, you can see how this works a little better. 1 second. If I just because I like to keep the scene quite clean, let's move this over here. What we can do is we can just go ahead and duplicate this version, and then for the old version over here, if I just close this, we can do pothole e one. And here you can see the difference. So you can see that this one it's really like normal map, and this one, you can see that it has more depth to it, especially like up close, it just feels like it has a lot more depth compared to this one which feels like a little bit flatter. And that's basically the general idea for Palm. Now, what we're going to do in next chapter, it's almost like a bonus chapter. I'm going to just do some super quick models. Here, by the way, the pom also works with shadows and everything. She can see over here. She can see over here. So that's really nice. I'm going to create some super quick models that, for example, we can just use on the wall or whatever. And these models, we can use those also as like pum. So it's more like a bonus example, but it will not really cover anything new, so to speak. 10. 09 Creating Unique Pom Details Part1: Hey, so this chapter, you can see a little bit is like a bonus chapter because what we will be going over is just on how to have your modeled assets turned into boom decals. So it is going to be quite basic. Of course, because it's not tutorial about, moding or anything, not about decals. I'm not going to go over, like, how to actually make them. But let's just say that you just want to get started with, like, a plane. Let's make it like 50 by 50 or something like that, and set in the center and say that this is your low pool. Now, whatever you throw on top for your high ply, that's what you can use. I will do this in two parts. I will do one thing that's just like a little bit of mulling, just something I don't know, something nice and basic. And then what we will be doing is baking it down, going into substance painter, and I will be using some alphas that I got to just, like, populate the rest of the area just to show you how you can also do different techniques within this technique. So for this part, what I'm going to do is I'm going to let's do I was going to plan, like a classic floor panel. Which for this, we can do, let's set the segments down here. Let's just set this entire half for the floor panel. Why not? Does it really matter. And then what I want to do is I want to go in here and let's create another, let's like another plane. So this is going to be a floor panel. So let's place a plane like this roughly. I'm not too picky with this stuff, of course. Then what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go ahead and convert this to an added poly over here. And then if I go into my verticies and turn on edge faces, I can select the vertices, and I can chan for those. To give them like a slight corner. So this is going to be the end of the panel. So yeah, just give it a little corner. Then what we can do is we can select the inside and we can do a nice inset. And the reason I want to do an inset is because I'm going to use the floating jomtre technique for this. And for that technique, you want to end up with like a flat plane so that there is no transition in your height map between the low poly and the flat plane over here. Now, once we've done that, what we can do is you can let's go ahead and do let's do like a bevel. Make the bevel go downwards. And it's not to get to make it, go inwards a little bit. And the reason I want to have it going in is because I will be looking at it from the top, and if it is perfectly straight down, you will not get that nice fall off that you have over here, and it will look a little bit ugly. So next what I'm going to do is I'm going to give this, like, a little center bit. And then I will do another bevel, but this time, I'm just going to remove the minuses over here so that oh, sorry, this one needs to be in the minus after all. So this one needs to be -0.18 to make it nice and consistent. There we go. Now that we have this panel over here, all that we need to do is we just need to create a pattern inside of this panel. Now, for this pattern, or use Booleans, or what you can do is you can use floating geometry. Normally, I like to use actual geometry like pushing it in with booleans. However, in this case, that might be a little bit time consuming. So I hope that this will be fine for the Hedman, but I am going to use actually just floating geometry on top of this, and I'll show you what I mean with this. So let's grab a sphere. And we're going to use the sphere for, like, the panels over here. What you want to do with this sphere is you want to go ahead and probably rotate this like 90 degrees. Yeah. And then I'm going to convert to an dipole. Going to go to my left view. Yeah, left view over here. Oh, sorry, front view. To my front view, select one quarter, plus contra I to select the rest and just delete the rest. Is that all that we have left is this. Then we have this panel over here. What I can do is I can simply extrude this out at this point. And I can also select this over here. And for this one, I'm going to do a extrude. But it's going to be extrude setting so that I can carefully move this out over here so that we have a flat area because once again, we need this flat area in order to get this working. At this point, what you can do is you can go and add a normal modifier or in any case, just flip your normals. I'm going to then a symmetry, press flip. I'm going to give it something like this. Now it's just mostly a matter of centering my pivot and placing it, let's say, over here or something, going into add a poly and you just want to place it. Also, one thing that can be useful is to simply select these edges and a single connect here. This way, I know where the center is. I know that over here, I can push this a bit further. Let's leave this one in the center like this. Now with this one, you basically want to place as close as possible to the base. Now we do need to turn this into a high poly that might be a little bit annoying because of these edges over here. But what we can do in the latest versions of TSMx in this case, or most other programs also have this is we can be sneaky and we can add a retpology modifier to this over here, and we can just press compute. And then as you can see, it will just quickly, do a retopo at which point, if we add in a turbo smooth, which is our version of subdividing, then you can see that over here, if I turn off my edges and faces, that's looking fine and from the top, it will look a little bit like it is sitting in here. The only thing that I want to quickly make sure if I go to my added poly Yes, so add a pool. I'm going to select click the loop select this one, and I'm going to grow it twice, and I just want to flatten this to make absolutely sure that it is exactly flat. Once that's done, we can just add like a turbomooth. That's fine. Although I will probably add that after I've done all my duplications. So we got this one. I can just go ahead and I can duplicate it roughly over here and get it to be roughly in the center. And then just a matter of duplicating it over here and setting my number of copies, quite a bit higher. So I don't know, I'm going to go for, like, 25 or something until it hits, 24, that was the case. There we go. And if you feel like it's not even, which I do, then you can always select all of them, move them a bit up. And there we go. So for these ones, I'm going to isolate and I'm going to merge them together. The reason I want to do that is because TS Max doesn't like throwing turbo smooths on so many models at the same time. So merging it together means that I just have more control, even though it means I lose my red topology, but doesn't matter. And then I can start like a single turbo smooth over here. Now, for this version over here, all we need to do is turn this into like a hypole for which I'm just going to add some supporting loops here we go and some more classic supporting loops. I like these areas. And then for this one, I'm just going to insert it to add my supoklo move back a little bit. And I need to, of course, place a few at the corners. So, this is just like, as I said before, basic modeling. It's not what this tutorial is about, but I will leave it in because I know that there are some people who even though this tutorial says that it is an intermediate tutorial, they will be here and have the absolute basic knowledge of some specific topics that you will need to know, and that's where this comes in. Sometimes it's nice to just place an extra card here to make sure that the loops do not go in like strange directions. But that should do the trick. Okay, P ptmizerOPptmiser, turbo smooth. Here we go. And now, if I turn off isolation mode and go, for example, well, if you look at it from the top, this is what you get. See, so it's just completely fake, but it is working, but it feels like it is just one mesh, and hopefully our mamasetTolbik will also see that. So we got our plane, and then this one I will populate with like a bunch of other stuff. But in any case, we got our plane. I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to export that one and oh let's make a new folder that I'll call, I don't know, Palm details or something like that. And let's just do low poly. Okay. And now for my hipoly make sure that you don't turn on isolate display whenever you export your hypoly because else it will mess up the geometry. And then I can just go ahead and call this HP. Here we go. Okay, so baking, we already went over inside of marmoset. So I'm not going to go ahead and explain that again. I'm just going to import it. So we have our low and hypole only thing is that you might want to bake a few more maps in this case, because we are also going to create some unique textures inside of painter for it. So none. Make sure that it is mapping over the top. Give it a textiusPum details, bakes. And bomb details. My microphone is in the way, so I can't exactly see all my settings over here. Four k. Let's do a normal object space curvature, height, of course, the height sexy, important, and ambient occlusion. That's all I need for now. And I'm going to get started. We're doing a quick test bake using my norm map and just press bake up here. And then if we go, for example, to Photoshop, we can just quickly Come on. There we go. We can just quickly make sure that it is all looking correct. So I'm just opening this one. Yeah, there you go. See? So that is how the norm map looks because it always projects exactly from the top. So that's exactly what I wanted. Now for my height map, it's always a little bit of playing around with the setting. So let's first of all, just bake the rest for now and then we can focus fullly on the height. Okay, so Moms had actually crashed for the first time in ages, so I'm back where I was left off. That's no problem. So we are going to bake our height. Now, I did already play around with the settings. So when you have your height, you will always have a setting like this, 0.50 -0.5 by 0.5. However, personally, these settings never seem to work for me. So I like to always start at zero, and then I like to start at like one, something like that. And then when you press bake, what you can do is open it up inside of Photoshop again. Here you are. So here you can see that what it looks like right now. So it's not perfect yet. Now, there are two things that we need to fix. First of all, I want to focus my height just on the back side. The reason that these do not work is because the height does not look the same as like a norm map where it just imprints it on top of it. Instead, it will actually read the height of these things, and that's not very handy. But for now, what we're going to do is, first of all, you basically want to go into your height, and I'm going to set my inner distance down a little bit. And then what you can do is you can press bake and then just look at your thumb nail. So over here you can see that I'm looking at my thumbnail, and let's see. Do I need this at my outer distance? No, sorry, my out distance needs to go lower, actually. Think maybe I want excets at zero for now. And once you've done that, let's have another look. I can just update this. Oh, not zero, not zero. 0.1. Don't ever go zero because then it just becomes instantly white. Too much? A little bit more. So it's just a bit of playing around with. Let's actually try 0.5, I guess. And let's do this one that's -0.2. I guess we were quite. This is always different depending on the model. So you often just need to play around with it. Or at least that's what I find. I find often having differences. So yeah, okay, for now, this is fine because we will have a mask that will mask this out. So let's say that we have this, which is looking pretty decent. And then when something is white, it will stand out. When something is dark, it will go inwards. So now you might guess, Okay, but what are we going to do about these pieces? It's a bit annoying but not too difficult. Basically, what you want to do is in your height, you have your spheres over here, and you just want to temporarily throw those into your scene and then bake again. The reason for this is because the height will always read even if we turn it off whatever we bake in here. So now what you will notice is if I update this, we only have our back panel. And having that now if I go back, I can drink in my sphere again. This is why I always like to literally model the jom tree inwards because then I don't have to do this kind of stuff. But technically, this would probably be still, like, a bigger time save than doing all of the jom tree like that. And it would be way more complex for me to show you how to do all of the jom tree. So now what I can do I can add this. Oh, I forgot to Sorry, let's delete this. Make sure that for the other detail, you go over here and you set the padding to none because you don't actually want to have padding on this specific one. There we go. And then what we can do is we can go in here and we can import this Import this. There we go. Okay, so we got these pieces over here, and now what we can do is we can probably just play around with an overlay mode. Soft like no. And what kind of pushes into, like, the same values as before. Let's go ahead, and I'm just going to use my magic One tool, and I'm just going to delete. Right click Rest RIs. There we go. Just delete the background. And now what I want to do is I just want to go ahead and it's actually fetter this. Let's go. It's a little bit annoying, but for now, I'm just kind of messing around with things. Modify, fetter with like I know, three pixels, control shift I, and then delete it again. And this way, it becomes a little bit softer. And then if I go image adjustments, brightness and contrast. Hm. That's interesting. Let's try levels because it's levels are, like, really clamped down, as you can see over here. That's interesting. But this is more what I was looking for to get this effect. Now, these pictures actually need to be exactly the same. Over here as they are over here. So that's a little bit sometimes annoying to get those exactly the same. And what I'm going to do is I'm also going to tone this one down a little bit. So I'm hesitant to press okay. What you can do is you can try to, like, hold Alt and click. And then you can read off C five, C five, C five. And if you hold Alt and click over here, it is c66 c66c6. Wow, I can't pronounce it. So then I need to kind of go in here and I need to just go one down. And then again, click c5c5, C five. Okay. I know it's a hacky way of doing things. It's not how I would normally do things. It's just because it's speed. And right now, I don't want to waste too much time on this specific part of the util. So anyway, we have the stuff done. We can then go ahead and we can press Save and press okay. And now it will have our final details in our hype map, and all of our maps are now baked down. Now with that done, you can actually test out. So here we have our low poly mesh. We just track it back in here. So, here we have a low poly mesh. If we just throw on a new material, you can actually go to your displacement. Sorry over here to parallax, I mean, so you can go over here to normal and then to parallax, and you can drag in your nom map, and you can drag in your height map. And then you can already see how it will behave roughly the same inside of Unreal Engine. See? So here you can see inside of Unreal engine, it would roughly do the same where it will basically show as if there is a height going on. And then on the outsides there's just nothingness. So now it feels really like there is actual height. Even if you go like, super up close, it really feels like there's height, even though there is not. So that's how you can kind of test this out. I will just leave it like this for you guys to see so we can save this. And now the next step is to go inside of substance painter. 11. 10 Creating Unique Pom Details Part2: Okay, so here we are in substance painter. So what we can do is create a brand new file and just PBR metallic roughness. For our file, what we're going to do is we are going to use our low pol over here or you can just use that plane that we actually created. That might actually be nicer because that plane is horizontal and the low poly is vertical, and just to like nice four k, open GL. And then what you can do is import your baked maps. You can press T and you can go ahead and you can go to textisPum details, bags, and just already art all of your maps in here, and it's press Okay. And give that a second to load in. Okay, cool. So all we need to do is go into our text chat list and call this Pom details so that we can use it later on. And I'm going to show you some very, very basic stuff over here, and then we'll take it from there. So you have inputed your bake maps, which means that if you click on here, you get your non map object space. Your ambient occlusion, your curvature. You don't have a position in thickness map. If you want those, you can always press used Bake maps. Well, actually, it's a plane, so it doesn't really matter. Four k, used low pool is hi ply, and then only set these two. But as I said before, it's a plane. Lily it won't really do much in this case, because it will just be white. But as you can see, we now have all of our details in here, and that is looking pretty good. Okay. So what do we need? Emit clusion, height, dah dah dah. That's fine. We do want to get also like unsupported channels by Shader Opacity channel in here. Oh, I miss click. There we go. A best channel. And now what you can do is you can, for example, do your normal texturing. I'm just going to drag on like a smart material, drag on like a smart material because I don't need to really do any texturing on this because this is all throwaway work. Since I'm not going to be able to use this for, like, my presentation scene, I don't know, steel Go away. Okay, so here we have some steel. Now, you can see that there are some direction stuff going on that is most likely that there is I know it is brush steel, like somewhere along here. It is probably you can just turn it on and off here, the roughness details because of the triplane let's set this to UV projection. Still, you know, at that point, I'm just going to delete it. I'm not going to bother with that kind of stuff. You do want to kind of make a mask over here. In this case, I like to just go ahead and paint the mask in myself. And the reason I want to do that is we can bake it inside of Mom set, but we are going to add some extra details in here. So we got our steel over here. Now, what I can do is for now I can turn it off, and let's say that I want to add a few extra details in these areas over here. Now, for these details, I'm not going to make them, but I am going to use the hard surface collection from JROTols which you can find over here, and I will also post a link into, like, the tutorial description to this. So this is quite nice. W your hard surface collection over here, it's like, a lot of different kind of hard surface tools. And JO tools is quite known for this kind of stuff. If I just quickly showcase it here, you get, like, Well, he also does tutorials, but there's, like, a lot of hard surface pas and everything that you can get here, and it is all quite nice. So I'm just going to temporarily use these because it is a little bit easier for me. Here we go, because dieting is that the sier for me. Here we go, because dieting is that these come in actual height maps, the same height maps that we have been creating. So what I can do in here is I can, for example, select the ones I want. Now, I'm just going to do this, like super quick. So I don't know. Let's select this one. I do want to get something that I know will work or will look nicely with like Pom. And let's just s this one, for example, and maybe also select like this one over here, which like a uh, N, let's do this one over here. So it's just like different panels. And all you need to do is go file Import resources, and then drag in your selection in here. You can just click and drag to select all of them, and we are going to set these as a texture into our project. And at this point, it would probably be good if we save our project also. So I'm just going to call this pom pom underscore details. Here we go. And next, if you just create a fill layer and I'm going to have this at the bottom, height, underscore details like this, what you can do is you can add a let's only turn on height like this. We can add a black mask to this, and then we can paint in these height details. And you can do this in multiple ways. Or you can literally double click on it, and then it should Oh, no, wait, that's when it is an Alpha, sorry, because I'm not using it as an Alpha. In that case, just go to projection. Dragging your shape into your grey scale at the bottom. And let's say I use this one over here, going set my Alpha hardness all the way up, and I need to probably set my height down because else it will not show. But now what you can see is that I can Lizzy just paint this in over here. Then I can, for example, grab the next one, which is this one, and we just like paint it in over here. So it's like a panel. And then we have the last one for which I can just go in here. And if you holds, you can see, watch all of the menus for this specific version. So we can go up here. So I'm doing this quickly. It's just to showcase. So now what I can do is I can, like, set the norm map strength down over here. Oh, that's annoying. I've got to 1 second. I've got to paint So stuff. Sometimes if you forget to paint something and it needs to be black, it needs to be white. You know what? Let's redo that one. Shall we? Because this is not going the way that I wanted to. And because I click them away, it's a little bit awkward because now I'm not able to find them anymore as easily. There we go. There they are. Okay, let's try this again. So we can go in here. And you can ignore, all of those type details and everything. If they become a problem, I can easily fix those. There we go. It's not exactly straight. I do want to try and make this at least a little bit straight. Okay. And let's not forget the last one. Just go to have that one over here. There we go. Okay. Sorry about that. So we can push down the heights for these. If you want, you can give a little bit of blurring. You can go up here, add a filter with like a blur. Give it a little bit of a blur, maybe to make it a bit stronger or something like that, and I'm just going to set my height all the way down. So we now have these pieces. If we want, we can throw on the steel, throw our height details at the top. And you can just do whatever texturing you want. So I got this. Now at this point, what we will be doing is we will be painting in the mask and I will be doing, like a little bit of texturing. I'm going to Trap set because I feel like I'm spending way too much time on, like, silly stuff that has nothing to do with details right now. So let me just quickly go ahead and Tipset and get it all ready to go. Okay, so as I said, I kept it super basic over here. And what we have now is, as you can see, we just have, like, a very basic texture. This one has, like, a little bit of paint on it. This one has, like, some paint and some metal, and this one is just like a metal panel. But the important thing is that we also have our mask over here, and our mask is the one that will, Wi showcase. If I go like this. There we go. So our mask is the one that will be really important for these decails. But anyway, so we now got this stuff done. I can turn off the color in my mask. That is quite important because set will show up in our base color. And now let's say that we are ready to export this, for example. Of course, if you're making decals, I expect you to make them look like amazing and stuff like that. So I can go in here and I can export it. I will need a custom preserve our no weights, preserve On weights. We probably don't. Here, you see, because it is using obeste into the Alpha with our default preset. So that should be fine. I'm going to navigate to my folder, and then I will just double check. So PBR metallic roughness should be the correct one in this case. Target file and let you set this as four K and export this. Just want to quickly check in my base color. Cool. It has my Alpha in here also. Oh, I can see that there I missed like a few spots in my Alpha. No problem. I can just quickly, you probably won't even notice like small spots like this, but let me just quickly fix it. For you. There we go. So let's just do an answer. And also, what you can see is that I gave like a little bit of, like, a softness to it. This will give us, like, a nice far off. So we have this stuff done. I think that we are ready. You would, of course, map them onto a plane the same as you do your quarter dens and then you would go ahead and you would, like, place them on here. However, because this is just like a tutil, I'm just going to, like, project them on here using a basic deco because it's the exact same concept. Oh, one thing I find important is that I need to look in my Alpha that does that jo and I'm going to very quickly because this one does not seem to it sometimes happens. Like the height that you import does not always actually show up as the height. Oh, 1 second. Let me just quickly go to RGB color over here. There we go. Now I'm able to import it. So yeah, the height that you import is not always the same as the height that you import from painter. And the reason for that is because it does in painter, it does not read like that, like that. But this should be fine. We probably might need to do, like, a little bit of balancing. Now, we can do that over here by trying to, like, match the color a little bit. But remember that we have a mask. So for now, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to save this. It's annoying that they changed at the Photoshop that you always need to do a saves copy. So over here. Oh, and let's not forget, select everything, throw it into your Alpha channel. And let's see if we still have that bug again, so we will see. So if I save this again, and I like close it. Is it in the Alpha channel? No, it's not. Let's try again, safe, Alpha, paste. Close it. And now it is. Honestly, I don't know why it is doing that. Honestly, I don't know why it is doing that. I wish I could tell you. It's quite new to me, so I do not know. But anyway, so we have our base color, height, metallic, normal, and roughness. The metallic one is actually also a new one. So what we can do is import all of this stuff. Go in here and it has already because we are exporting from substance painter, substance painter exports in direct X unless we say it otherwise. So the texture is already in the correct location. You can see that because it is standing outwards instead of inwards. Now what I can do is I can pump decals complex. With that one, I can just art the metallic over here, convert the parameter. Metallic with a static switch parameter has metallic map. And if it is false, it will just for now become a constant. You can also have it as I'm a constant. You can also have it as a scale premter if you always want to have it metallic. But if it is true, it will do this and just throw this into our metallic and don't forget to throw in our Parallax UV. There we go. So I'm doing this quite quickly because it's technically not showcasing you anything new or at least whatever I'm showcasing, it's super, super basic, even though it is new. So potholes pom, we can duplicate and call this one Pom details, for example. Open it up. Over here. And then what we can do is we have our Pom details, so we have our base color turn on the hesmtallic base color, height, metallic. And I wonder how the height map is going to react, react. We might need to play around with the settings a little bit. So those are now all done. Okay. I'm a little bit nervous for this one, because the height maps for these ones are always they often need some tweaking. I just hope they don't need a lot of tweaking. So let's just set this to 90 and again to 90 over here. Scale this one down. Scale is down a little bit more, and I accidentally inverted, so you need to make sure that you do not actually go into the obstra. So the masks are working fine, so we have these details. The palm is I don't know. Is the boom good or bad or let's try 0.05 is like a base. Okay. So, now you can see that the pom is actually, the poem is working quite well. These are sometimes limitations that you get over here. Those limitations you can play around with, I believe, your reference plane to try and minimize them. But for the rest, that is looking actually pretty decent. Okay, so yeah, over here, my reference plane 0.1 the reference plane basically sets like the distance, so you can choose how much you want to get rid of it. Yeah, I think something like this. These pump details, yeah, see? So that's looking fine. And then, of course, with your intensity, if you minimize the intensity a little bit, then it will not be as extreme. But as you can see, the general takeaway, even though the artwork might not be as nice right now, but the general takeaway is there, that this one, it makes it really feel like this is standing out and that it is geometry. And you can see that we can just give multiple different textures. And this is roughly the same techniques that I also use, for example, on star Citizen or Citizen or I think also on alien isolation, they probably also used it. Yeah, just these kind of techniques, of course, they might have a more advanced shader and that kind of stuff. But I do hope that you enjoyed this little extra bonus chapter where we just go on how to do this. You can see it as like a nice fading, but you can also give like a strong fading if you want. And from a distance, it doesn't even feel like decals. It just feels really like it is actual geometry. Awesome. Okay, the next chapter will be the last chapter where we will show a brand new technique, although it is a classic technique, and that says how to generate decals from images that you have taken yourself outdoor. And once we've done that, we are going to put everything we learned together into a quick environment, or at least just like the stuff that we made. We are going to throw it, like in a quick environment. And yeah, it's going to be fun. So I hope that you enjoy this 12. 11 Image Based Decals: Okay, so welcome to the last chapter in which we will discuss a unique deco creation. And in this chapter, what we're going to do is the classic. So we are going to go over on how to actually create a decal based on an image, which is pretty much what you see over here inside of for example text.com. So they took, for example, an image of some leaks, as you can see over here. And then they extracted that image to only have the decal and nothing behind it. And that's also what we will be doing for this chapter. So for this, what I recommend is you can pretty much do this with anything. So you can do this with even your phone camera or with, like, a DSLR. I did it using a Nikon D 500 DSLR camera. And basically, I was like, on holiday in Vienna, and I just took some pictures of, like, some surfaces that had, like, some really nice grunge and everything on it. So that is basically what you want to do. Just go outside if you want. You can, of course, also download these from the Internet, but I would say go outside, capture some images, and I have a few over here. If I go large icons, I got, like, a few of them. Now, on purpose, I did not actually try to convert these to digas yet because I wanted to show you the organic look of how we are going to achieve this effect. So first of all, what you want to do is, let's say that we go, for example, let's do like, let's do this one over here. So what you can do is these are still in a format, so I can go into Photoshop and it will show up my Raf filter. I'm just going to go, for example, to geometry, and then I like to set scale rotation because I want to make this a little bit nicer looking over here. Detail, maybe, give it a little bit of sharpening. Oh, this is not the most sharp image. So that's my fault that I probably had my dea Pragma, sorry, for you guys, it is called your shutter or release or I don't know. Probably a Fstop. I probably had my Fstop at a very low value, which means that on the outer side, it's not giving me a very sharp image. But, okay, so once you are happy, you can, for example, press Open. And now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to click and drag and just roughly state where I want my degl to be. And I hold shift while dragging to give me like a square. And in this case, I'm just going to image it. I'm going to crop it, and then I go to image and image size. And you can see that over here, my image is a little bit too small to be like a four ke image. So I'm going to go 2048 by 2048. That will give me often a better result. I have some images here where the outsides are hopefully not so blurry, over here you can see, it's still like a little bit. But this is just about the concept. It's not so much about creating the most amazing decails because I did not take these images with decals in mind. I just took them because of reference, pretty much. So a few ways that you can go ahead and basically all you need to do is generate a mask from this. So most of the time, the easiest ways to go to select and then go to Color Range. And then what you can do is you can click on specific colors. If you want you can set your selection preview to none, and then you can really see it. So yeah, you can click on, like, specific colors over here, and then I like to go to Grayscal and then you can play around with your fuzziness. Over here to decide how much of the color you want to have included. So if I, for example, do something like this, now, at this point, it will be quite sharp. So I can show you. So we can do a solid color and make it black. And if, for example, or make it like white for now, if we then also add a solid color behind it, can see that it is quite sharp. So it will work as decal, but it is quite sharp. I will work as decal, but it is quite sharp. At this point, you can always hold Control and click on your mask, and let's say that we feather it a little bit. So select, modify, and fetter, and I think we only like maybe like one pixel. It doesn't always work, but we can try. And now we have this one. So, okay, so actually one pixel. But yeah, we cannot go lower than one pixel. That's too bad. So in this case, the fettering does not work exactly the way I want to. However, what I can also do is I can always just go in here and go into your mask and then go filter, blur and give it like the tiniest gasienburTing, like Here, even less. 0.1. Oh, it's really sensitive. It's 20.2. Yeah, there we go. 0.2 blur. Okay. Awesome. So we now have our basic mask and turn off the black color, and then you can kind of see how it works. Now, at this point, what I tend to do is I tend to go ahead and right click and merge the black background with the top because again, it's a mask. And then I press A, Control C, go to my channels and paste it into the Alpha. Now, if you click back on your RGB and then turn on your Alpha again, you can kind of see where your decal is. And as you might have guessed, we want to kind of, like, fade out the ends. For this, I recommend getting a simple brush over here. And I have, like, a lot of brushes that I created myself. You can actually get them on my store. That's like a shameless plug if you want to get them. But yeah, so just get an interesting looking brush, basically, for example, this one, maybe, and make sure that your color is set to black. And then what you can do is you can kind of just like start fading out your decal and try to make it feel like a little bit more organic. So you can see that over here. I'm not just painting in like a round bit. I'm trying to get entire details over here. And this can be, for example, just like a smudge grunge or something like that. And it works the same with shader wise as our leaks decal. So we can go in here and if you want, you can also get rid of, of course, more pieces. So let's say that we now have this. Now, at this point, inside of, for example, over here, what they always do is they always just mask this out. I think in our case, that's also good because if we do not mask this out, what will happen is we will be able to see the white outline, and the white outline basically comes from, of course, the background, but we cannot always guarantee that this decal will be on a white background. Sometimes it will be, for example, on a red background, and then you will be able to see that white outline. So basically what you want to do at that point is you can go in here and let's click on a background, a layer from background. And then if we just go ahead and like a mask, and I'm basically going to select Contra C, sorry, Contra A and Control C, my mask. Then I click on the fill layer, and then in here, I'm going to paste it in our channels into this fill layer so that now this mask is in here. And at that point, all we need to do is do a solid color. Below it and make this solid color, the same color as your deg. So now what you can see is that it has a lot less of that white outline. It still has a little bit, but that's fine because it's just a trademark of this decal. If you want to have it less, you can always go in and literally, use your levels to push back the details. But now you can see the difference, see the difference. This is basically how it would look like when it goes to, for example, text do C. So we now got this mask. Now what we can do is we can do a file and save a copy and we can folks simply call this one decal underscore zero, one, and I will Let's first of all, make a save as decals so that we can do multiple and then save a copy and then do it as like a TGA and call it whoops in here, decal underscore 01. And then we can just go at the save. And now I have a feeling we will once again get that Alpha map problem, but we will see. So if I do DC 01, TGA, Yeah, see. Oh, that's so annoying. I don't understand why it does that. I need to Contrave this one, Contrave in one, contravet in here and save it. I honestly I have no idea why it's doing this, but now it is working. Now we have a decal with an Alpha. At this point, you might have guessed. So I will first show you because some people might not be interested in me doing the other textures. But let's go in here, and let's just do image based and just drag in our decal 01 over here. And now all we need to do is in our materials, let's grab Leig one, for example, duplicate and call this image based underscore 01 to make it a bit easier for you guys to understand. Normally, I would just call it like grunge 01 or something like that. And then in our deca, all we have to do is drag in texture, and that's about it for now. Let's go to materials. And I don't know how it will look. So sometimes it looks bad. It all kind of just depends. So 90 degrees? Yeah, it looks pretty good. So you can imagine just having this as like an extra grunge decal here and there. And that's a general concept for this. This is probably the easiest method, although you do need to go outside to find the decals. But yeah, it's also the least flexible. So we got something like this. Now I will show you how to, for example, do something a little bit more dramatic. So these are pretty much the same. I won't go overdose, but I will leave them in here. Although this is a lot of data, it's 25 MBs per map. I'm going to delete that one just because it's not really adding any value. Let's say we have this one over here, which is like a much stronger paint effect Digal. We can open it up yeah, the sharpness is decent for it. So maybe set the sharpening a little bit stronger. And then let's go to geometry. And then I like to go ahead and just, like, scale this in, maybe rotate it a bit, make it flat. There we go. Let's open this up. Okay. Awesome. So we now got this one. We can once again, we can just go in here and hold Shift. And I can see that on the outer end. Oh, no, wait. This time, it does have a pretty decent stuff. But let's say that this is going to become decal over here. So I can just kind of like place this roughly in the center. That's quite nice, actually, because we can just do, like, a cut off. And what we can do is we can go image and crop. And at this point, you just want to go image, image size, 3,000. I think we can get to 40 96 without too much blurring. Yeah, here, that's fine. Okay. So we now have a 496 by 496. We got this one. Now, at this point, there is another way that you can often generate a mask, but it's not the best way. I will show you. It's by duplicating your layer, going to image adjustments, and then you and saturation and saturate it down. And this only works when you have a lot of contrast and that it is pretty much using your levels. And then what you can do is you can try and use your levels to kind of map out the exact shapes. But as you can see, it is not a good way. So here you can see it just keeps up all of those dark areas, and that's why I rarely use this technique only if it is a very basic version. But I think for this one, we can just use our color range again, go in here. Oh, that's interesting. So why is it giving me? Because these are very different colors. These are very different colors. So select color range. Localized color clusters. No, let's turn that one. Yeah, let's turn that one off. So you can, if you want, try and get this into substance Zina and there's a node, and that node is called color equalizer that will basically just flatten things out a little bit. For now, I'm just trying to see if I can maybe get like a decent look. So I'm just clicking basically on my Yeah, I feel like this is like the best one. I'm going to probably get rid of this one and this one over here because I don't really like the look right now. So I can do a solid color, make it. So I'm going to make it white to black. And this one is a little bit tricky. So I can see that yeah, it doesn't look great. It's probably because of the background, but I can go into my mask and I can go ahead and sm I call black and like Twine kind like paints out some of these details that I do not want. So I'm mostly just painting around over here. Yeah, let's get rid of that. Let's keep this one, quite small because just an example, normally I would have if I really am looking for details when out and about, I would probably try to focus on a surface that is, like, flat in the background and that has, like, a strong detail on the foreground, like dirt and everything like that. And that often works the best, if you do stuff works best if you do stuff like that. So for now, I can just go ahead and I don't know why I'm using that brush I can just use this one to get rid of all of these extra details over here. You get the point. So it all kind just depends. You need to find something that has a nice color contrast so that you can actually properly select everything. And that's the general goal for this. So we now got this one. At this point. Yeah, you can, if you want, use your levels also to play around with it, but we can also do that in just a sac. So if we have this, we can merge layers, Contra A, contra C, and Contrave and then have a look. Yeah, see here. So there is quite a bit of fading, but that fading might look nice. So first of all, just kind of want to give this a ty and then we can kind of see what we're doing. So I'm going to add a I should still have it copied so I can just press Contrave in here. So there we go. Now we can see like this is really the grunge and then I can go ahead and add a solid color behind it and just do like a color picker note. Let's go for something like this. Just like a bluish color. There we go. Okay, so we have this one. I wonder what it will look like. It's not coming out exactly how I expect it, but you never know. So let's do save a copy. It's like a Targa file, decal zero, two, and save. Now, my guess is that, again, it did not do anything with the Alpha, and I was white. So I'm just going to save this, paste alpha in here. That's aquari I just don't know why it's doing that. But again, so that one is now working. So if we go into our Oh, not our pump details, into our image base, we can import degl 02 in here. And then if we go into our materials, we can go ahead and we can grab the image base 01, duplicated, Image base 02. Of course, if you want, you can also generate using subset zone or norm maps from this. You can even use photogrammetry. But if you start generating norm maps and base color maps and everything, then you basically just end up with, again, this stuff. So it's all linked together. But anyway, so we got this one. We can go ahead and duplicate it. And if we go to image based DCL 02, I am curious what this will look like. That's always the fun thing about it. It's like, you never know, but sometimes it's nice, sometimes it's not. So, there we go. Uh, yeah, it's okay. I would probably set my opacity like 0.9 or something. Or 0.8 something or 0.8 like this, maybe I would go into my color overlay and make it a little bit more of like a brownish color over here. And just like that with a few adjustments, we got, again, a nice looking decal that we can use. And that's the general concept about it. Okay, and we are under 20 minutes, which is nice for just a quick explanation. Awesome. Well, look at that. We went over a bunch of different decals. I do also hope that you like this tutorial format. What I twed with this format is I try to really, like, first of all, focus only on all of the techniques. And also, in this case, when I say intermediate, I really just try to, like, make it for intermediate artists because decals is such a specific topic. I do not expect 100% beginners to even preview this tutorial. So, but yeah, now you know how to create various types of decaals like over here, procedon painted, procedural cracks with norm maps or norm maps only with actual base colors, another gun with norm maps pom based. So you got image based, edge based. We got a lot of stuff in here. So I think this is looking quite solid. Now in the next chapter, what I will do is I will have a nice little scene for us and we are going to use the decaals that we placed and maybe a few others, I'm just going to show you how I'm populating a scene. Maybe if I feel like I need more decails, I will do a quick timep of just some extra decails or decal creation. So that's going to be it for next scene, but the actual teaching moments on how to create the actual decals, at this point is over. So if you are sick of hearing my voice, then at this point, you can click away and else I will see you in the 13. 12 Creating Our Decal Showcase: Okay, so welcome to this final chapter where we are going to go on how to just play some decals in the scene just to show you how it all works together and how it just kind of blends together. So I got this really nice scene over here. It will not be included in the tutorial because I just downloaded it from the Unreal marketplace. But yeah, it's really nice and high quality. I quite like it. So what we can do is I have also imported my decals, for example, and we can just for example, have a look. Here we have, for example, like a Road. Now, if I press G, you can see that they actually also use a lot of decals on this road, and it just shows you again, like how the decals and everything are used. Uh, the road itself is a little bit cracked, which means that our crack decals might not be as good, but as you can see, you would be able to, for example, just art like some of these crack decals. And even though it is not exactly the same in terms of the texture, it still works pretty well. So what I can do is I can, for example, go ahead and duplicate this and place these cracks over here like this. And then if I would open it up, I can always try and give me a second over here. Yeah, I can always try and balance it out. So for these ones, I would say that maybe I want to go into my crack texture and set the brightness to, like, 1.5 so that it is, like, a little bit brighter. And then maybe I can go in here. And I can give this a little bit more of like a bluish tone. And that way I can kind of, like, balance things out. Now, you can see that the cracks, they work pretty decently. And that's pretty much how we would just go on with this. So we can, for example, have like, Oh, here, let's do our potholes with, like, pump details on top of it. Let's load it in. Takes second because this is, of course, a new project. But here you can see that now I have these pump details also in here, and you can see that this works really nicely. So it fits together really nice. I can go ahead and I can open it up and maybe again, just make this like a little bit more bluish to fit with this specific environment over here. And just like that, we have these really strong pump details. And if I just go ahead and, like, delete these ones because I don't know, it feels a bit unfair if I also use his decals on top of it. Although I can do a few of them, but, like, the main shapes would be like, for example, over here, let's say I like, like, one over here and then maybe I grab, for example, here, this one from the person who created this environment. I can move this one, like a little bit in the back. And just like that, I don't know if we have any cameras. We do not. I can, for example, go in here and make a nice view like this. And just like that, I can go and just create a very quick. Where am I create camera. There we go. And the reason I'm creating these cameras is because I want to just create a nice presentation scene. So I can go down here in 1920 by 1080. And then I can just kind of like nicely fit this together. And of course, I will make this look extra good later on for my presentation, but I still want to show you that you can get some really nice presentation. For example, I have, one of the parallax ones here, like in the forgot and everything. For example, for me, the lighting is a little bit strong, but that's all looking quite nice. And then you can also, if you want here, that's actually a little bit too much quacks. You can also go in the back and maybe have a few more quacks also over here, those areas. Like that. And there you go. So that's the first one. We got a nice looking little showcase for something like that. Now, let's say that you have a bunch of leaks and everything and you want to use them in these areas. You can just go ahead and you can use your leaks and you can rotate them. And what I recommend is when you have these leaks, of course, you can scale them down, but also make sure that you just scale them flat like this so that they do not extend the extend over in areas you do not want them to extend over. Um, for example, over here, I'm not sure. Yeah, you can, if you want to do that. And by the way, you can see that the corn dens, this artist already used corn dens themselves. So here you can see, like, the power of corn dens. So you can see that it's being used in the industry. But what I can do is I can turn off snapping set this over here, and I can have these nice leaks sitting over here. And then if, for example, duplicate this, I can now grab my second leaks, for example, and they will blend in quite nicely, and then I can duplicate this once more and maybe use my first leaks again. And doing that, it will give you this nice difference between them. I can then duplicate this again, rotate it 90 degrees and just get these nicely lined up in here. And then let's duplicate it again and this time, use leaks two again, just like that. Okay, so that's pretty cool. If you ever have models, for example, these models that you do not want to have the leaks included, what you can do, also, for example, this one is you can select the model. And then if you go down to render rendering over here and then advanced, you can turn off received decals, and then it will simply not receive any decals, including the decals that we created. So I can go in here and same over here, I can, for example, just like turn off received decals and that makes it all feel a little bit more grounded again because the decals are sitting behind it. Now, you might have guessed that if I look at this, I might want to tone down my intensities a bit more. So I can go here in a paste and set this to, for example, 0.8. This one also to like 0.7 even. There we go. And just like that, we now have these really strong leaks. Awesome. Now let's say that we want to have a little bit extra here. You guessed that we can use, for example, our image based decals. You can see everything just nicely comes together, and that's nice. So you can go in here. When you scale the decal, it's always a bit buggy, as you can see over here, it goes into the minus. So then you just need to push this back into the plus because else it will not give you correct lighting. Here we go. And now you can see that if I just use this one and maybe I open it up and set my opacity to 0.9 like this, I can have a few of these decals in here, which are also looking quite nice and I can duplicate this. I can rotate this around a little bit over here. Maybe at this point, I can not that one. That's annoying. It does not allow me to select my decal. Come on, just let me. Just want to select my there we go. We have this decal over here. What I can do with this is I can go ahead and rotate it 90 degrees and maybe use my image based number two in here and use it maybe somewhere along the bottom over here. For these ones, what you get off course, also do is you can also just move these out to control the intensity. Just like that, I have now another decal sitting nicely there. We got our leaks done, edge damage we don't really have to do. We got some potholes over here. Maybe the potholes also work Sorry, this one? No, it does not really work in this area. As you can see, it's way too dark, but it works better on, like, a darker surface. But yeah, just like that, we have a bunch of different stuff that we can use, and we can now go ahead and I do wish that they cleaned up the scene a little bit more. Typing camera. Okay, I'm just going to write clay or Contras contra vid my camera. So we have camera number 01. And then I can, for example, go to camera 02, and I can make, like, a nice render like this where you can see our decals in action with various different decals just like that. So that's pretty much it. You can see Camera one and Camera two. And that is basically how you would go ahead and start using these decals in your actual scene. And of course, as you can see, like all of these edge damages over here, you would, for example, if you create a model, you would place those edge damages just like I showed you. So that was it for the sutoyal course. Short but powerful, I like to think, and I really hope that you enjoyed the sutoial course and that you learned a lot from it. So yeah, we went over a bunch of different techniques to create decals. And now that you know the workflows of these techniques, it is just a matter of applying them to different types of decals. So now you have leaks. You can do rust leaks. You can do all kinds of different stuff. You can also use these techniques in your normal models and texturing workflows. Same with the image based decals. You can have various different image based decals. Maybe you want to, for example, generate some norm maps for it or some unique roughnesses for it. You can do all of this in designer with your cracks and all of that stuff. You can also, once again, just nicely go in and create different variations. Maybe instead of cracks, you want to have tiles that are like broken up and all of that stuff. And thanks to the Pom, which is working really nicely here, you can see that all of that will work great. So I really hope that you enjoy this tutorial course, and I hope to see you in my next one. Once again, thanks for watching Fast Racals, and I will see you guys later.