3D Art: Nanite

 Unreal Engine 5 Nanite Virtualized Geometry

Nanite lets you use much higher-polycount assets than what was previously possible with real-time art. It does this by rendering pixel-scale detail -- only detail that can be perceived -- and culling the rest of the geometry. 

Using Nanite

Any static mesh can be converted to nanite by just checking a box on import: the "Build Nanite" option under the Mesh panel.

Depending on the size of the mesh, it'll probably take a minute to import. During import, UE5 is sorting the triangles into clusters, and these clusters, depending on where they are in relation to the camera, will have their level of detail changed on the fly, essentially automating LODs.

UE5 has a Nanite Visualization mode that lets you see both the triangles and clusters of your model.

Just about any mesh is a good candidate for Nanite. If it's a high-poly model, if it's going to be occluding a lot of other Nanite, or if there are going to be a larger number of instances of that model, using Nanite will streamline things.

UVs and Texturing

Nanite meshes can be textured, but they use a slightly different workflow than typical game-res meshes. Both Quixel Mixer and Substance Painter can handle the high-poly meshes that you'd be using, the limit is based on your GPU and what your computer can deal with.

If you don't use zRemesher, you'll have to be proactive about your UVs and plan them ahead, UVing your base mesh in Maya before converting the Smooth Mesh Preview to Polygons and bringing it into Zbrush. Once it's brought into Zbrush, you won't be able to decimate or dynamesh, or you'll lose your UVs.

Overall, Nanite opens a lot of doors for real-time art, and has just a slightly different workflow for most game art.

Resources:

Nanite Texturing Workflow by Gabo Vallaro

Nanite | Inside Unreal video demo by Epic Games

Creating Nanite Meshes by Ryan Laley

Nanite Documentation

3D Art II: Module Four Week Fourteen

 Part II: Adding Stuff Underwater

For this part of the module, I took some ideas from Ghislain Girardot's video that Nick showed us, and tried to add some underwater elements and give them a little life. 

Fish

For the fish, I found a really helpful tutorial on Youtube about how to get a static mesh to follow along a spline. It uses a Timeline to make a float track, and uses that to map the length of the spline from 0 to 1, and update the location and rotation of the fish along the spline.

I also wanted the fish to move up/down/side to side, but I wasn't sure how to get that to happen while still having the fish follow the spline, since their location is updated every tick to be on the spline. Instead, I used the World Position offset channel in the fish material to give the appearance of movement. It uses Time, a Sine node, and a vector parameter, which is then multiplied by either red, green, or blue to assign it to the x, y, or z axis respectively.

RotateAboutWorldAxis_cheap node to make the fins flap a little, masking the front of the fish's body and leaving the back half to be rotated along the z-axis.

Seaweed

The seaweed also uses its material to simulate movement. It uses two nodes, a RadialGradientExponential node and a SimpleGrassWind node. The RadialGradientExponential node is used to mask the very bottom of the blades of seaweed so that it's not moving at its root. The SimpleGrassWind node actually moves the seaweed.

The meshes for the fish and the seaweed aren't mine, and came from Sketchfab.

Edge Foam

I updated the edge foam to also try to mimic what Ghislain did, but I'm not sure I like it better than the old edge foam.

Instead of using a Noise node, it uses a tileable texture map, and uses the DistanceFieldGradient node and the DistanceToNearestSurface node like the old set-up did, but in this case it uses it to pan the texture.

I think I might revert it to the old edge foam set-up, but I'm not sure.

3D Art II: Module Four Week Twelve

 Part I: Water Shader Set-Up

There ended up being tons of really helpful resources for making stylized or simple water shaders. I did bring Adam Homoki's really complicated cartoon shader into the project and took some elements from his set-up, including his math for the Gerstner waves/world displacement, plus a few texture maps and material functions.

World Displacement

This uses the Cartoon water shader's Gerstner waves to calculate world displacement. It's a lot of math and cosine stuff that I don't fully understand, but I think it adds a lot of dynamism to the shore since it creates a more radically different surface than just a sine function.

Base Color with Depth Fade

I watched a YouTube video that used depth fade, and thought it would be useful in transitioning the ocean and the shore. It uses a blend overlay node and lerps using a depth fade node as a mask.

Fresnel Color Transition

This creates a change in color for distant water based on the viewing angle and makes the water a little less flat-looking.

Normals

Something else I took from Adam Homoki's shader: his normal blend material functions and normal maps. I could probably honestly do without them and use a simpler normal set-up if I needed to.

Edge Foam

This I got from a nice and simple YouTube video Nick shared. It needs Distance Fields turned on in the Project settings, since it uses those to judge where to generate noise.

Roughness

Played around with this quality, just trying to make the sun shining on the water surface a little less weird-looking. It uses a fresnel, and I'd like to work on the transition a little, although the hard edges might contribute to the stylized look since it makes it look a little cel-shaded.

Edge Fade

Uses the same node as the edge foam to soften the transition between the island and water. The issue is that it also does it for any objects that may be floating in the water, and you can see down below the water plane.

Sea Foam

These maps were taken from Adam Homoki's shader. It looks at the world position to tell the height of a wave, and if the wave is high enough, it applies the sea foam mask.

Foam Sparklies

This is an emissive quality that uses the same mask the sea foam uses to limit the location of the shiny bits. The two maps pan, and whenever their pure-white spots overlap, the If node lets it through and it comes out as an emissive spot.

One-on-One: Part One

 Anatomy + Top Ten Artists

I looked into Scott Eaton's stuff and found a .pdf of his Artistic Anatomy for Digital Artists. It broke everything up into seven lectures that I've been working through: Proportion, Torso, Arms, Legs, Hands and Feet; Head and Neck; and Gender, Age, and Body Composition. It also had a lot of useful reference images, like these proportion canons:

I wanted to focus on proportion, since that was one thing that was mentioned during last industry review. I also tried practicing the musculature of each body part. The arm, especially the forearm, is an area that I really struggle with.

Top Ten Artists

1. Taissia Abdoullina

2. Baolong Zhang

3. Ben Erdt

4. Kris Costa

5. Gabriel Casamasso

6. Ian Spriggs

7. Robin Benes

8. Heber Alvarado

9. Sefki Ibrahim

10. Jonjo Hemmens

Goals

 charcter/creature art

Not sure if that's a viable entry-level position

Develop more prop-centric portfolio

I'd like to be able to work long-term for one studio, whether that's a bigger studio or indie

Ben Erdt

Ian Spriggs

-commit to character artist

-show diversity on portfolio

 - good character artist can do props anyway

-would like to work in the games industries but also open to other industries as well

-film and television

-character artist, emphasis on props

-leaning towards realistic style

-third semester, personal projects

-extra studies

 - 10 artists that I admire, high caliber

 - Try to reach out to these artists

 - What was their career path/do they have suggestions

 - Extra research for master's program

 - One out of ten responses would be a win

 - anatomy studies

 - hands

 - build base mesh

 - Poor foundation affects everything else

 - cloth/clothing

 - jc leyendecker, shapes/cloth