since i got accepted into expotees, i was looking at the past brochures from previous years to get a feel for the paragraph of text about my project i needed to write. instead of paying much attention to that, though, i noticed a couple of people had mentioned that they had used a program called 'knald' in their projects, so i thought i would check it out.
oh man, it's pretty amazing it has to be said. i found this (relatively low resolution) texture on CGTextures just to try it out, and the result ended up being so impressive I decided to use it in my level.
so on importing the texture into knald, you're given a bunch of options which let you adjust the amount of detail in the normal map, which it is generating on the fly. this thing is basically crazybump on steroids. it then generates the other maps i need, such as height/displacement and ambient occlusion. all while giving me a handy real time DX11 view of a 3D object with the texture applied where i can see things like displacement.
so then since my original texture was quite low resolution, i can take this newly generated normal map into Quixel suite with all the other maps it generated too in order to rebuild the albedo from scratch based on the topography
and this is the finished texture, from original source material to multi layered, multi mapped, tileable texture in literally about 5 minutes.
and after setting up a material to use displacement in my scene, i can plug in all the exported maps from quixel and it runs in engine. i actually found out that i can plug in the sonar opacity to the tesselation multiplier, which means it only generates extra polygons for the pieces of the model which are in sight, which is pretty handy in terms of saving performance.
