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UE5 Corridor - No lowpoly, No UVs

This scifi corridor was created as a workflow experiment with nanite and lumen in UE5. I was attempting to test how well an environment could be created with no uvs and no low poly. I used only a few materials and material functions to optimise the scene. I used world aligned texturing to get around having uvs. I think it would be a pain to uv a model with over a million triangles, so to really get the most out of nanite ,we as artists ,should probably explore ways to get texture detail into the new engine without having to spend tons of time with bad uvs. This isn't a perfect workflow as you are limited by what materials and functions you have available and how you've split the polygroups in Zbrush. It still seems pretty good for quickly bashing out ideas and could be a great way of doing concept art. I used quixel textures and some unreal engine standard scene assets and rendered the master sequence with movie render queue.

In order for this to work in ue5 you have to do a quick bake in zbrush of an inverted cavity map and then do an AO bake over that. The polgroups on the right hand image define the materials that UE5 will assign to the mesh.

In order for this to work in ue5 you have to do a quick bake in zbrush of an inverted cavity map and then do an AO bake over that. The polgroups on the right hand image define the materials that UE5 will assign to the mesh.

the material parameters in action on the metal material

the material parameters in action on the green painted metal

The dust / rust effect that shows in crevices is powered by the vertex baked ao in this material function.

The dust / rust effect that shows in crevices is powered by the vertex baked ao in this material function.

the metal edge wear on surfaces is powered by the  vertex baked inverted cavity in this material function.

the metal edge wear on surfaces is powered by the vertex baked inverted cavity in this material function.

This is the material for the old concrete wall.

This is the material for the old concrete wall.