3D Texturing Technology & Digital Applications 5

Question 1

What does 'ambient occlusion' simulate in a texture bake?

Accepted Answer

Soft shadows in crevices where light is blocked by surrounding geometry

Answer

Ambient occlusion (AO) bakes approximate how much ambient light reaches each point on a surface, darkening areas where geometry is close together.

Question 2

In a Substance Painter export preset for Unreal Engine 4, the metallic, roughness, and AO maps are typically packed into which channels of a single texture?

Accepted Answer

R (metallic), G (roughness), B (AO) of a combined ORM or RMA map

Answer

Unreal Engine 4 uses a packed ORM texture (Occlusion/Roughness/Metallic) to reduce texture memory usage by storing three grayscale maps in one RGB file.

Question 3

What is 'tiling' in the context of a procedural texture, and why can it be a problem?

Accepted Answer

Tiling repeats a texture across a surface; it becomes a problem when the repeat pattern is visually obvious

Answer

Tiling repeats a texture seamlessly, but when used at a large scale the repeating pattern becomes noticeable, breaking the illusion of a unique surface.

Question 4

What is the role of the 'thickness map' in subsurface scattering (SSS) materials for skin or wax?

Accepted Answer

It defines how much light passes through the material at different areas

Answer

A thickness map tells the SSS shader how much geometry depth exists at each point, controlling how much light transmits through thin areas like ears or fingertips.

Question 5

Which rendering feature in modern engines uses ray tracing to compute more accurate ambient occlusion than traditional screen-space techniques?

Accepted Answer

RTAO (Ray-Traced Ambient Occlusion)

Answer

RTAO uses real ray-tracing hardware to calculate ambient occlusion by casting actual rays into the scene, producing accurate shadows in areas SSAO misses.

3D Texturing Practice Test

3D Texturing Practice Test

3D Texturing Technology & Digital Applications 5