Big #1. Take advantage of the Unity HDRP shader PBR support. Us BB's Materialize --
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-- and understand the basics of Lambertian Coefficients --
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Here is a screenie of a Materialize shader I just threw together in 5 minutes while typing this:
View attachment 504000
Once you've taken a photo of rope, then set that as your Diffuse layer, you can use the photo to create all other channels in Materialize. Onceyou've applied the Lambertian Coefficients and adjusted everything as you like it (remember, this is very up close, the rope in the game will be zoomed back quite a bit), then save your project create new folder, then chose select. You will end up with something like this:
View attachment 504002
2. This will show you how to create your mask map for the mask channel:
You can use Photoshop, Illustrator, GIMP, Corel Draw, whatever you prefer.
Open a new 2024x2024 project @ 300dpi
Set your smoothness channel from Materialize as the base photo layer
Open a new file 2024x2024 @ 300dpi
Open the color channel editor, for each you will port in other layers of the Materialize Texture
Red = Metallic (add nothing for non-metallic shaders)
Green = Ambient Occlusion map
Blue = Edge map (aka Detail map)
Once that is done you will have this green version of the others combined, select all the copy
Go back to your smoothness map and paste, you now have a PBR mask map for your HDRP texture
(basic but unrelated tutorial here, for combing RGB channels:
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)
Personally, I just import my base layer and name it Smoothness. Then make a new project, name it Red and in this case make that a transparent layer no background, then new project, name it green drag in the AO map, new project name it blue drag in the edge map. Go back to smoothness, open the channel pane (bottom right) delete the RGB channels. Next to paths, see the 3 little lines and the down arrow, click that and choose New Channel, in the pop-out name it Red_Alpha and set the color to r-255, G-0, B-0 opacity 50%. Now open the Red tab project, select all and copy, go back to your Smoothness tab and in the Red_Alpha channel paste the transparent Red layer. Make another New Channel, Green_Alpha, R-0, G-255, B-0, Opacity 50%, and then paste in the AO map from the Green project. New Channel, Blue_Alpha, R-0, G-0, B-255, Opacity 50% then copy/paste Edge Map from the Blue project tab.
Now click all of them as visible, go back to the Layers tab and it should be a blue-green image of the rope.
Should look something like this:
View attachment 504010
File>Save for Web>PNG24 and name it Mask_Map save it to your Materialize Project folder.
3. Make a subfolder and copy your Diffuse (aka Albedo in some tutorials), Normal, Height, and Mask Map for your shader texture.
(explanation here:
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4. Make your rope model... Here is a Blender tutorial:
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5. Apply the shader texture to your 3D model in Blender or whatever you use. I suggest using the PBR shader node logic, this is an example for Blender 2.79 (
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) and will work in any Blender (pre-2.8+ which sucks terrible balls, do not use 2.8+ or no non-2.8+ tutorial will work for anything as they went further away from industry standard and more proprietary in terms and methodology), then save it all as FBX for your zipmod.
View attachment 504044
Hope that helps...