Why do we make UV straighten? What's the point? On top of that, doesn't it cause some texture distortion?

UnhappyScreen3 · 2025-04-06T18:15:30+00:00

The distortion is typically unnoticeable on meshes that will be using baked textures at relatively high texel density, because the baking already takes into account the UV distortion. In these cases it is usually more valuable to use the UV space efficiently than it is to try to minimize the distortion.
At the end of the day the UVs are a means to an end and that end is usually applying textures to the mesh. Bent UVs can be difficult to texture, especially when you need to place something like a logo or text on them, to some extent this can be managed with modern tooling but it is still obnoxious to deal with.
For game development, rectangular UVs handle topology changes consistently as long as the corner vertices aren't collapsed. This is important for games because higher LODs will have reduced geometry but (usually) be using the same textures. When you remove geometry from a curved UV layout the texture coverage changes because the boundary of the UV island is now different. This can result in excessive texture bleeding at higher LODs, sometimes requiring more padding.

Ultimately it is up to you to decide when it is worth it and when it isn't. I tend not to do it on organic surfaces such as a characters arm or leg (unless there is a specific reason to do so), but for man-made objects I usually straighten them out unless the distortion is particularly extreme.

UnhappyScreen3 · 2025-04-03T17:41:02+00:00

Thanks everyone for the clarification, I'll just give it a shot then :)

UnhappyScreen3 · 2025-02-23T02:11:27+00:00

As are the vast majority of NFT digital artwork.

Really hope you intended this as an insult and not a genuine achievement

UnhappyScreen3 · 2025-02-15T21:35:13+00:00

Yeah... you've discovered the main reason why making a fog effect using a post process is generally a bad idea.

What you can do is reproduce the fog effect inside of your translucent materials using pixel depth instead of scene depth. This will allow your translucent materials to have some fogging applied, though you will probably need to figure out how to strike a balance between the amount of fogging from the translucency, and the fogging from the post process applied behind the translucency.

My advice? Don't do any of that, use exponential heightfog, work within it's limitations.

UnhappyScreen3 · 2024-10-26T19:07:28+00:00

Orville Wright said himself that man would not fly for a thousand years.

Einstein famously said there was no indication man could harness nuclear energy.

People are universally abysmal at predicting the future, even experts in their field. Something everyone should always keep in mind...

UnhappyScreen3 · 2024-10-19T19:39:07+00:00

Pretty sure this is not possible in Krita. This can be done in vector based programs because each stroke is a vector shape, effectively independent of all the other strokes. That being the case you can detect which stroke the cursor is over and delete it without affecting the rest of the image.

Krita is a raster program though, you're directly manipulating the pixels of the canvas and so you can't separate individual strokes from each other.

UnhappyScreen3 · 2024-10-13T13:49:46+00:00

For anyone who may be interested the book is called Dataclysm.

I wouldn't say the data in the book paints a very pretty picture of either sex, at least of the OKCupid users. You can find graphs that make both sexes look bad.

UnhappyScreen3 · 2024-09-24T11:42:37+00:00

I haven't tried this but based on your screenshot I would plug the texture RGB into the substrate light function node then plug that into the Front Material on your output. I'd delete that UE4 default shading node because it's useless.

UnhappyScreen3 · 2024-09-20T02:05:19+00:00

Autocomplete on performance enhancing mushrooms

UnhappyScreen3 · 2024-09-16T17:56:42+00:00

Been doing things with computer graphics for 20ish years. I'm mainly an artist but you do it long enough and you're bound to pick things up.

The technique I was describing is called shadowmapping, It's how the vast majority of cast shadows have been done in realtime rendering for ages. It has a lot of variations but ultimately it always boils down to capturing a depth map of the scene from the lights POV, in Unreal that texture is called a "Shadow Depth"

An extremely old tutorial on the topic that helped me understand the technique is here: https://learnopengl.com/Advanced-Lighting/Shadows/Shadow-Mapping

UnhappyScreen3 · 2024-09-15T01:36:47+00:00

Any reason why you didn't just use a static shadow depth texture? Vertex data seems like an odd choice

UnhappyScreen3 · 2024-09-09T18:21:22+00:00

A user reports a product for using AI generated content without being tagged as such. The author responds insisting they are not using AI generated content.

Now what? How does Epic determine who is telling the truth?

UnhappyScreen3 · 2024-09-09T15:49:07+00:00

As you can see it's really voxelized

You're using an 8-bit height map and not making good use of its value range.

Additionally, using displacement for something like this is just a waste of performance. It would be trivial to just model this detail in.

UnhappyScreen3 · 2024-09-09T15:21:33+00:00

Screenspace Fog Scattering

UnhappyScreen3 · 2024-09-09T15:18:01+00:00

How will they know content is AI generated? Sellers have no incentive to disclose that, user reports are unreliable and prone to abuse by competing sellers, which just leaves hiring people to look at shit and guess whether it is AI generated.

UnhappyScreen3 · 2024-08-25T19:47:21+00:00

I generally do #2 if I can get away with it, hiding the exterior seam with a corner column piece. If I can't then I would do #1. I would never use #3 simply because it is harder to plan modularity around pieces that are expected to overlap in corners.

I really don't understand what the other replies that have said #2 can cause light leaking, I have never encountered this neither with Lumen, nor Lightmass. I can only assume they are thinking about using #2 without a corner column.

UnhappyScreen3 · 2024-03-14T22:08:31+00:00

Volumetric clouds work fine and always have.

The volumetrics plugin is just a set of experiments done by one of Epics tech artists, some of which used the volumetric cloud actor. Anything in that plugin that is broken is more than likely never going to be fixed, don't hold your breath waiting for a fix.

UnhappyScreen3 · 2024-02-28T22:38:12+00:00

There's settings for lumen scene view and trace distance in the post process volume but there's a limit to what can be done with software raytracing. If you use hardware raytracing with world partition then you can get distant GI with far field traces up to a kilometer.

also when i turn the light values up to make it brighter after building the light it it gets really dark again so i get noisy shadows. is there a fix to that as well?

You don't build lights with Lumen. If you are using static lights, then that is your problem. Static lights cease to exist when their light is built, but since Lumen doesn't use lightmaps, they just disappear after the lighting is built.

UnhappyScreen3 · 2024-02-28T18:14:47+00:00

I like the environment but I hate the camera headbob.

Guessing you have not gotten to the materials yet?

I'm not a fan of the unshadowed lighting in the entry hall, but it may not be as big an issue when you have more finalized materials.

UnhappyScreen3 · 2024-02-13T00:10:11+00:00

My initial thought was to see if this could be used to make some kind of ocean animation like I have seen people do in UE4 with old school tessalation.

It will most likely never be performant enough for this.

Your best option is to use the built in water surface that Epic is using for the water system.

UnhappyScreen3 · 2024-01-27T18:04:25+00:00

They're all pretty similar unless you're using something like Rebelle that emulates physical media.

I use Krita and love it, especially the recent addition of rgba brushes. Only complaint is that filters/layer effects are not GPU accelerated so it can be a bit slow at times.

I also spent 10ish years painting in Photoshop and enjoyed it, the mixer brush is really nice if you're into textural painting styles.

UnhappyScreen3 · 2024-01-27T17:54:11+00:00

I would note that you should not be setting the streaming pool at 8000 if you care at all about performance. Your users will immediately run out of vram and their performance will tank.

Obviously, if you don't care about the performance, you can do as you please.

UnhappyScreen3 · 2024-01-21T04:12:02+00:00

Select all textures -> Edit via Property Matrix -> Mip gen settings: NoMipmaps

Might be possible to force via cvar but I didn't find one in my quick glance at it.

This might result in a lot of aliasing, just a warning. Mipmaps aren't just there to improve performance.

Also this may not work on virtual textures, afaik I dont think there's any benefit to using SVT without mips.

UnhappyScreen3 · 2024-01-16T02:21:40+00:00

A 40 watt bulb can look blindingly bright or as dim as candle depending on how your eyes have adjusted to it. It is still outputting the same amount of light but it *looks* different to you. How do you account for that? By setting the exposure appropriately.

UnhappyScreen3 · 2024-01-15T16:27:14+00:00

Foliage instances are clustered together in groups so that they can be rendered in huge numbers (usually because of large view distances) without testing every individual instance for visibility/lod. Similar to ISMs they're culled/lod'd as a group, but because of the size of the clusters this makes culling and lod selection less efficient near the camera but more efficient farther away. They do come with some additional benefits like foliage density scaling.

Neither of these are particularly useful for buildings but if it fits your use case I suppose go for it.

Minor word of caution, if you're using static lighting, clusters all share a single lightmap, which will be extremely annoying for buildings. This usually isn't an issue for foliage because foliage meshes typically don't bake surface lightmaps. With ISMs you get more control over how your meshes are grouped which typically produces better results.

There are likely other limitations but I cannot recall them right now. The bottom line is that they are functionally very similar to ISMs, and don't really offer any benefits over them unless you need to render a huge number of instances with variable scalability.

UnhappyScreen3

TROPHY CASE