Ultraengine feature recommendations

[Vida Marcell]

Hi everyone, so couple people here might know that i'm a beginner c++ programmer, and before coding i was working with advanced 3d graphics, mainly enviroment desing. And i tested many andvanced game engines like Unigine, Flax, and i see some footage of Frostbite. Now not a single of those engines could offer more than diffuse, normal, tesselation/displacement, roughness or  texture maps. And as im baking textures with marmoset or xnormal i see many baking options that i can never use, because no software supports it, for example: cavity, curvature and detail maps, these are only for making the render faster so there is no vidual difference without them, but it wuld be cool if the new engine would support a wide variety of texture maps. So here is a couple of these not commonly used texture maps:

• convexity map
• smoothness map
• curvature map
• cavity map
• detail map
• bent normal map
• thickness map
• trans-maps

Here is an example for with/without bent normal.

 http://i.imgur.com/ix9vf.gif

[klepto2]

The reason why most if not all 3d game engines do only support the basic texture maps is that the use of more texture maps indeed has a high impact on the overall performance, all the textures have to be sent to the GPU and depending on the GPU (which has a limited VRAM) it might need to do a lot of swapping between VRAM and ram. Also combing these textures and calculate the result on the fly needs a lot of GPU shader instructions which may lead into GPU bottlenecks as well. Why this might no issue for 'design' engines because you can use all the power to render the scene it is an issue for game engines as most users would expect a minimum of 30 if not 60 fps while running the game including GFX, AI and other stuff. 

Normally the texture maps you mentioned are baked into the diffuse, normal, roughness etc. maps before using them in the engine to lower the bandwidth cost for the GPU. 

but i agree, that from a design point of view these maps could be very handy.

Maybe it would be a better idea, to add a workflow to the materials where you can add all of the desired maps slot, and the engine can bake the resulting textures itself in a preprocessing step. this way you could keep the 'low' cost renderpipeline but also get the flexibility of the different slots. This would come handy with some procedural texture generators. 

[Vida Marcell]

5 hours ago, klepto2 said:

The reason why most if not all 3d game engines do only support the basic texture maps is that the use of more texture maps indeed has a high impact on the overall performance, all the textures have to be sent to the GPU and depending on the GPU (which has a limited VRAM) it might need to do a lot of swapping between VRAM and ram. Also combing these textures and calculate the result on the fly needs a lot of GPU shader instructions which may lead into GPU bottlenecks as well. Why this might no issue for 'design' engines because you can use all the power to render the scene it is an issue for game engines as most users would expect a minimum of 30 if not 60 fps while running the game including GFX, AI and other stuff. 

Normally the texture maps you mentioned are baked into the diffuse, normal, roughness etc. maps before using them in the engine to lower the bandwidth cost for the GPU. 

but i agree, that from a design point of view these maps could be very handy.

Maybe it would be a better idea, to add a workflow to the materials where you can add all of the desired maps slot, and the engine can bake the resulting textures itself in a preprocessing step. this way you could keep the 'low' cost renderpipeline but also get the flexibility of the different slots. This would come handy with some procedural texture generators. 

This is the most perfect response i have ever got. 

[Josh]

I looked into cavity maps, and they appear to just be a static non-interactive image that can be baked into the diffuse texture. I can't find any information on them that says they should be rendered in any special way, unlike ambient occlusion, which is supposed to darken everything except direct lighting.

[IceBurger]

5 minutes ago, Josh said:

I looked into cavity maps, and they appear to just be a static non-interactive image that can be baked into the diffuse texture. I can't find any information on them that says they should be rendered in any special way, unlike ambient occlusion, which is supposed to darken everything except direct lighting.

I have also been under the impression that they are pretty much a waste of space.

 

[Josh]

I'm actually going through and implementing as many glTF extensions as I can, because those are the features that have widespread support and an established art pipeline. "Transmission maps" are in the glTF transmission extension for advanced transparency:

https://github.com/KhronosGroup/glTF/blob/main/extensions/2.0/Khronos/KHR_materials_transmission/README.md

[Josh]

Here is some info on the supported extensions:

https://www.ultraengine.com/learn/gltf