Torquinox posted at 11:31PM Thu, 07 January 2021 - #4409687

Looks great! Obviously, the decals aren't doing displacement, and the parallax effect fails from some viewing angles. Decals look to me like a variation on normal mapping, but I could be wrong.

You're correct. What the addon does is simply projecting a conforming plane geometry to an existing model. The plane will contain textures with alpha information or, in the case of 3d mesh decals, a combination of normal maps and parallax mapping to fake the appearance of depth. It's also using modifiers to perform the decal projection onto the faces of your objects. So, if you wanted to actually export that object along with the Decal Machine details, you would need to bake the decals to their parent objects as normal or displacement maps, as a means of export. This is a feature built into Decal Machine, but it's not the greatest process. You need to do your bake at relatively high resolutions, even for simple objects, which is the only way to reproduce the detail of most mesh decals. Blender's support for antialiasing baked details isn't the best. Decal Machine uses supersampling to overcome Blender's antialiasing and ray distance shortcomings while baking, so the process can become very time consuming and resource-intensive.

Personally, I would much rather use Substance Painter for this type of detailing, if the models are going to be sold or potentially used in other software. Decal Machine is great as long as the objects are staying within the Blender ecosystem.

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