How to get hi-res alphas?

[Kevinheimer]

Hey,

I'm really new to Substance and texture creation in general so please excuse me, if this is an obvious question. I exported a building that is about 12 meters x 10 meters and 4 meters high from Blender and tried texturing it in Substance Painter, but when I add alphas they appear really blurry, even when I use the 4k view. It's the same with Edge Wear generators and others. I really don't know what do. Is this a problem with my UVs?

Thanks for any help, because I'm really lost here

Here's an image:
https://imgur.com/a/G750T7y

[volker]

It essentially boils down to a good UV layout that optimally utilizes the available UV space. If you don't get enough resolution,  split the UVs into multiple UDIMs.

Upload the object somewhere if you want us to take a look at it and point out any issues.

[Kevinheimer]

After posting the question I tried using UDIMs, but I'm still trying to understand them. I split my UVs onto three different UDIM tiles, two 4k tiles and one 1k (and one face is somewhere on a tile far off, that one was a mistake), but in order for things to not be mushy I still have to use the 4k setting, somehow resulting in a texture that is 4k by 8k. When I try using that in Unreal it won't even load up.

Here's a link to the project:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MNUK1c3beTYavTYjyQ5YxtqFHldG1fSB/view?usp=sharing

Thanks again for any help that might come my way

[volker]

I do not work with real time engines often, I don't have a lot of experience in that area. In general, if you want to use the asset in Unreal Engine ect, the UV layout definitely needs to be optimized far better.

About 50% of the available UV space is wasted in your layout. You want as little empty space as possible. You need a good UV unwrapper/packer like RizomUV to do this efficiently. Moving the UV islands around manually will not give you the best possible layout.

Also, you have a lot of elements/plates in your model that look similar. You do not need to texture each one of those separately. Instead, texture one single plate (or one version of each fundamentally different plate), then use small mapped planes (single polygons with separate UV layout, mapped with your alphas) to position the stamps on the plates you have duplicated in Unreal.

It does not make sense to put extremely high resolution textures on a large wall with barely any detail, just to have enough resolution for some small stamp you want to put into a corner. Use separate geometry for the stamps.

[Kevinheimer]

Thanks a lot for taking the time to look at my project!

I'm going to look into some UVunwrappers and do exactly what you said about using different planes. That's kind of what I was thinking about, but I didn't really know if that was a viable option.

Anyway, thanks again!