Decalery (aka Bakery Decals)

FedeStefan · October 1, 2024, 7:36pm

guycalledfrank:

FedeStefan:

Hi, I recently picked up Decalery as it seems promising, I replied to this post because I’m wondering how you got this scratch system with what seems a mesh deformation system too.

My questions are:

do you first deform the mesh then apply the decal? or is it the other way around?

how did you get a good scratch texture? I’ve been trying to find one or attempt to make one but it hasn’t worked unfortunately.

Cheers!

Deformation logic is completely separate It’s done by modifying a displacement texture and using it in a vertex shader.
Decal is just a simple mesh, but it uses a similar shader that samples the same displacement texture.
Displacement textures are all stored inside a single global Texture2DArray, and I use a wild workaround to pass array slice value via renderer.realtimeLightmapScaleOffset because it doesn’t ruin SRP batching Decals inherit all lightmapScaleOffsets from the receiver and get the same array slice!

As for the scratch texture itself, I just downloaded it from textures.com and modified a bit

Thank you for answering! Do you think you could ever include this as a demo in the future or is it a private project? I’m not really good with shaders however your support has helped me with an idea already

guycalledfrank · October 2, 2024, 9:12am

The deformation system is rather complex and it’s kinda out of scope of the decal system. Maybe I can release it separately. But it’s also fairly limited, as I’m using hemispherical displacement projection for cars, and it’s not enough for anything that’s not mostly convex and mostly glued to ground.

FedeStefan · October 2, 2024, 1:05pm

Thank you for the support, I have a car deformation system (which just creates a runtime mesh then deforms it) and yet have to implement the decal systems into it which is why I was asking how you did it as it looks very good

Also, Is there anyway to use LODs with Decalery or is it optimized enough? Because I’m going to use it for a few models (LOD 0 is 35k triangles) and wondering if I’ll run into any troubles

guycalledfrank · October 2, 2024, 2:36pm

Ah, then you should be able to just use Decalery the same way as with any other mesh
If you want to know the logic I use to decide if a decal should be applied, then it’s just OnCollisionEnter() and using some average hit point/direction:

		int numContacts = collision.GetContacts(contacts);
		Vector3 contactPosSum = Vector3.zero;
		Vector3 contactNrmSum = Vector3.zero;
		for(int i=0; i<numContacts; i++)
		{
			var wpos = contacts[i].point;
			var wnormal = contacts[i].normal;
			wpos += wnormal * contacts[i].separation;
			contactPosSum += wpos;
			contactNrmSum += wnormal;
		}

		var contactNrmSumNormalized = contactNrmSum.normalized;
		var contactTestPoint = contactPosSum / numContacts;

Currently you need to apply a separate decal to every LOD mesh. Perhaps it should be automatic

FedeStefan · October 3, 2024, 10:13pm

guycalledfrank:

FedeStefan:

and yet have to implement the decal systems into it which is why I was asking how you did it as it looks very good

Ah, then you should be able to just use Decalery the same way as with any other mesh
If you want to know the logic I use to decide if a decal should be applied, then it’s just OnCollisionEnter() and using some average hit point/direction:
		int numContacts = collision.GetContacts(contacts);
		Vector3 contactPosSum = Vector3.zero;
		Vector3 contactNrmSum = Vector3.zero;
		for(int i=0; i<numContacts; i++)
		{
			var wpos = contacts[i].point;
			var wnormal = contacts[i].normal;
			wpos += wnormal * contacts[i].separation;
			contactPosSum += wpos;
			contactNrmSum += wnormal;
		}

		var contactNrmSumNormalized = contactNrmSum.normalized;
		var contactTestPoint = contactPosSum / numContacts;
FedeStefan:

Also, Is there anyway to use LODs with Decalery or is it optimized enough? Because I’m going to use it for a few models (LOD 0 is 35k triangles) and wondering if I’ll run into any troubles

Currently you need to apply a separate decal to every LOD mesh. Perhaps it should be automatic

Thank you (and I apologize for the delays in me contacting back), I’m also wondering how much cost applying the decals to 3 models (being LODs) would be on peformance, would it cause a lag spike or not? I still have not tried it due to me being busy with work and did not have enough free time to experiment

guycalledfrank · October 3, 2024, 10:49pm

In GPU runtime mode I don’t think it’ll be noticeable at all. In CPU mode it highly depends on your mesh detail. If it’s not really high-poly, it should be fine.

I also have built-in methods for stretching decal spawning over multiple frames (see AddDecalToQueue/UpdateQueue: Decalery manual - Bakery GPU Lightmapper: Wiki), they’re used in the example scene. I.e. you can add 100 decals to the queue but only spawn 10 each frame. Seen a similar optimization in HL1

stephenhuang1 · October 7, 2024, 9:16pm

Hi @guycalledfrank
I upgraded my unity version to 2022.3.45f1 (URP) and it seems that decalry is broken

Opening up the shader shows this error

And it seems that the issue is coming from here:

Any suggestions on how to get this working??

Some extra details:
I have bakery installed and working and I am working with URP.

guycalledfrank · October 7, 2024, 11:41pm

Hmm are you on URP 14? Seems to work for me. Make sure that you’ve imported BOTH DecaleryURP and Bakery_ShaderGraphURP packages (the only difference between ExtendedPBR and BasicPBR is Bakery feature support). If that doesn’t work, please try my latest github patch.

BTW, I’m going to release a new store version probably… tomorrow!

stephenhuang1 · October 8, 2024, 2:07am

Thats correct.

But that sounds good. I’ll grab the changes from the new store version tomorrow and report back if i have issues. Thanks!

guycalledfrank · October 8, 2024, 2:55pm

Decalery was updated to v1.1!

Changelog:

Terrains are now supported and can be used as receivers in all CPU/GPU modes:

See more details about terrain usage: Decalery manual - Bakery GPU Lightmapper: Wiki

Shaders now have better UI:

“Create mesh asset” option which I previously mentioned here, that serializes decal meshes, so they’re usable across scenes/from prefabs.
Bakery Lightmapped Prefab support. When applying decal to an object inside such prefab, Decalery will ask if you want the resulting decal mesh to be a part of the prefab. It will link decal lightmap references to the prefab storage, not scene storage.
Instead of “Link to parent” there are now 3 different options:

Shaders: fixed stereo rendering.
Shaders: fixed some deferred blending issues (previously discussed in this thread).
Shaders: fixed build error on Switch where it tried to compile the shader it wasn’t supposed to compile.

PrimeDerektive · October 9, 2024, 1:45pm

Re: lightmapped prefabs, I’m trying right now, but BakeryLightmappedPrefab is always detecting a change and won’t let me save the bake, because the mesh for the generated decals does not exist as an asset. What is the proper workflow here?

EDIT: nevermind! I see the generate mesh asset thing, I’m a dummy

PrimeDerektive · October 9, 2024, 5:10pm

@guycalledfrank so when using generate mesh asset and applying the decal across multiple receivers, generate mesh asset only generates one of them, so it breaks

EDIT: i figured this out. its because the two receivers had the exact same name. This is probably going to happen when using modular prefabs across multiple scenes. Can you append a random hash or something to the mesh names?

One more question, this is purely selfish. I think Faded might be one of the best looking games I’ve ever seen. Can we get some insight into how you used decals in a scene like this?

Is that breakup all decals and tiling textures? Or is it a combination of photo sourced facades and decals? Where do you get your decals? It looks absolutely stunning, btw.

guycalledfrank · October 14, 2024, 7:55pm

Ahhh, bummer. Made it a bit better now:

It will append prefab name if the decal is inside a Lightmapped Prefab.
It will append additional characters if there are identically named receivers for the same decal.

Can you check it with the latest github patch?

Also, a bonus:

I’ve added some normal modification options:

“Vertex welding” used to be “Optimize”.

“Off” and “Weld and keep normals” is what you previously got by checking “Optimize”.
“Weld and smooth normals inside receivers” basically smoothens all hard edges on the decal. But it won’t smooth disconnected edges, such as between different objects intersecting each other.
“Weld and average normals” averages all decal normals. Can be useful if you’re using small decals to hide seams between intersecting objects.

Thanks!

Here are the decals I used here:

There are some cracks, muddy puddles and manhole covers on the floor; plus a bunch of decals on the buildings which just hide seams between different textures. A door on one building is also a decal (the handle on top of it is 3D though). Some dirty leaks under windows also.

Here is a funny one, because window shape was different on the photo-based texture: