Substance Hotspot Texture Experiments

After playing HL Alyx I messed with its map making tools some and really liked the hotspot texturing it has! There is some good info on how it works here: https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Half-Life:_Alyx_Workshop_Tools/Level_Design/Hotspot_Texturing

I remember seeing a blender addon about a year ago that could do this too called DreamUV (It's free!) : https://github.com/leukbaars/DreamUV

Overall I really like this workflow, even without having it in engine it is very nice to map assets then export to engine.

I could also make a hotspot mask texture instead and put that in UV channels 2 that way any regular tiling texture in UV1 could use the grunge while keeping better texel density.

So far it seems to work best with more uniform "smart material" like layouts. Grungey materials like concrete or dirty metal are not noticeable when stretched some, but if you put more exact details like bolts they can get stretched easily unless your geo matches the HS texture perfectly.

Will for sure try making some more complex hs textures in the future to see what else can be done.

If you want to see more things that were used in HL Alyx SDK check out Joe Wintergreen's thread here!: https://twitter.com/joewintergreen/status/1262662025903128576