Alternative to Vertex Painting

[DennisGlowacki]

I'm a huge fan of vertex painting but sometimes I wish I had more verts and adding them sometimes seems like a waste especially on larger surfaces.
So I thought about using mesh paint instead and wanted to share this in case it might help someone.

http://content.screencast.com/users/cubedude89/folders/Jing/media/ad07ee51-7e05-4a08-b847-e589d4347bdd/2012-04-02_1722.png

Here is my test, I ended up using the same setup as a typical 'advance vertex paint' material except changed out the vertex color node with a 32x32 black texture. I tried 128x128 but it seemed too high res and ended up looking to much like a standard brush stroke.
In this test I have red driving the blend between the two textures and green drives the power node that makes it sharp or fuzzy.

(I picked 2 random textures I'm sure it could look a lot better haha)

[passerby]

though the question is what is cheaper, needed a extra small texture per paintable asset, or just adding more vertices, to store the vertex colour.

[DennisGlowacki]

In terms of memory it seems pretty cheap at 1.37kb for that 32x32 texture.

Anyone have ideas on performance impact?

[aivanov]

Thankfully 'cheaper' matters little for portfolio artwork. If the effect is the same, but achieved with less stress, why not?

[Chase]

Can you post a screen shot of the material setup you have? Just curious. Thanks!

[AlexLeighton]

Might not be a bad thing to look into if you only have a handful of meshes in a scene you want to paint, or as you said, you have meshes existing that aren't suitable for vertex painting but you want to add a bit of variation.

I think this method would get very expensive very quickly if you're doing it for a whole scene though.

[passerby]

i could see it as beneficial over vertex colour for maybe very large meshes, like the floor or water plane, or for the odd thing you want to paint in engine but didnt prepare the mesh for that use with enouth verts.

though a while scene full means a lot of extra textures.


though got a question, can you pack these into existing textures, like maybe using a colour channel of a existing texture on a prop, that wasnt used yet.

[WarrenM]

Yeah, it's a toss up at times. Extra verts or an extra 32x32 texture for each instance you need painted. Ultimately, I guess it's another case of "test, test, and measure".

[Ace-Angel]

Polygons/Vertices > New Texture...

[teaandcigarettes]

I think it would be a really great tool if UDK allowed for combining the UV's of all assets in the scene into a single texture atlas. Kind of like what it does with the lightmap UV's.

[WarrenM]

Polygons/Vertices > New Texture...
I'm unsure what the ">" means there. Polys/verts are always better? Always take more memory? Something else?

[Harbinger]

In terms of memory expense both options are so cheap it probably doesn't matter much. I'd be curious about render cost though, is it cheaper to do another texture read or to lookup the vertex colors?

That's an interesting use of the tool!