With the editor upcoming, I have been polishing the thick layer of rust off my Blender skills and have a question or three.... Materials are put onto a model in Blender and exported or done in Unreal Engine? What is a good poly/tri count to aim for, for a wagon/coach/loco etc? And a mix of q1 and 2, are decals able to be imported with a model from Blender? Will there be a repository of assets somewhere? I think making items like buffer stocks, pantographs etc would be a good time saver for modelers, just a thought. If anyone is getting back into Blender, the doughnut tutorial isn't the best for hard surface modeling tbh (although it is a good series). I have been watching Josh Gambrell, very good, and straight to the point. Any other good tutorials to watch, suggestions are welcome!
idk how all off that works but you could (if that works) take a few models and read the poly count to get an idea of how much to aim for. it also depends on the size/length of the car you want to model and how many flat and how many detailed areas it has etc...
Hi 10A _Driver, You'll be able to find out much more information about the Editor on our preview stream tomorrow night at 18:00 UTC. As a rough answer for now: Good poly/tri count to aim for - you should be able to inspect other locos using the Editor to get a grasp, as this will vary quite a lot depending on the loco. That being said, polycount you can be more generous with, compared to textures (Ideally keep these lower resolution, 1k/2k resolution maps are ideal, 4k is too much / too expensive) Materials and Decals can just be imported as texture files Will there be a repository of assets somewhere? This isn't something we're setting up from our own end, however, we will do our best to support community run websites or repositories for asset sharing. We will also be creating more areas to our forum structure to accommodate from Editor specific conversation and assets You'll be able to learn more about it tomorrow night, and then the stream will be saved on our YouTube channel
Blender materials won't work in UE4 so you want to go with full PBR texture sets. Assign one material to each part where you want to use a separate texture and make a dense UV layout for each of them. Then proceed with the texturing process. My personal workflow would be Lowpoly > Highpoly > Lowpoly UVs > Baking Normal, AO and ID maps > Export > Texturing. Here's a good tutorial for making game assets. https://www.artstation.com/learning/courses/NV2/high-poly/chapters/9g7/introduction As for polycount, I don't think there should be a hard limit to follow but remember that lowpoly model needs to have a good silhouette while surface smoothness can be baked down from the highpoly. Reminds me that various DCS planes have over a milion vertices and the game still renders them just fine.
