[UDK] Studies Room / Library Environment

- all modeling done in Blender
- furniture models have their normal maps baked from high poly geometry using a cage mesh and xNormal
- 2 scene capture actors (512x512px @ 60FPS)
Triangle Count: ~61,000
Texture Memory: 30MB + 28MB lightmaps



Lighting Setup #1

Lighting Setup #2

 

  

[UDK/UE3] Distort/Animate UV Texture Coordinates

Using shader math to modify/distort texture coordinates can make for some nice and simple (or even advanced) effects. The main advantage of this method is its high quality (no texture compression, color banding) without the need to create external texture maps (e.g. flow maps) or to use other methods to alter UVs (e.g. vertex colors).


Base Texture

Wavy Effect

Twirl Effect

Once you got the math done it'll be pretty easy to implement some texture movement/animation.

You can find 2 GIF examples below:
http://www.abload.de/img/distortuvs01mlp1p.gif
http://www.abload.de/img/distortuvs02rvou4.gif

[Recources] Anisotropic Maps

4 anisotropic direction maps, 512x512px .png, use for whatever you want. Depending on your target application you might want to swap color channels or fill the empty channel with a different base color.

http://www.abload.de/img/anisodir01kmozm.png
http://www.abload.de/img/anisodir02zar4k.png
http://www.abload.de/img/anisodir03mfr63.png
http://www.abload.de/img/anisodir04p2r4z.png

[Blender/UDK] Low Poly Rock Formations

Highpoly sculpted in Blender
Lowpoly manually retopologized
Normal + AO map baked in xNormal using a Cage
Triangle count: ~800-900


Blender

UDK

[UE3/UDK] Equirectangular Environment Mapping

Equirectangular Environment Maps can be a nice alternative to cubemaps as they are pretty easy to handle (1 texture vs. 6 cube faces). Another advantage of these maps is that you don't need DX11 for proper MipMaps, so you can easily walk down the MIP chain for some simple IBL setups.
Unfortunately the material requires some trigonometric functions which will add a bunch of instructions.


Material Setup

Using this setup you can easily multiply a specular/roughness map by the MIPLevel to control the reflection blurriness by surface roughness.





IBL Example GIF (800KB)

http://www.abload.de/img/latlong01bofgl.gif

[UE3/UDK] Mixing Normal Maps

Approaches on mixing/blending normal maps using UE3' material editor.


Base Normal Map

Detail Normal Map

#1 UDN / 52 instructions (47+5)

#2 Whiteout / 53 instructions (47+6)

#3 Unity / 55 instructions (47+8)

#4 RNM / 55 instructions (47+8)