Final Major Project - Beauty Shots

 Final Major Project 

Beauty Shots

    In a way, it's so very strange to me that this is going to be my final hand in. I have spent so much time in these labs at university that it's going to take me a moment to realise that my final project was.. well, my final. The sheer amount of things that I've managed to learn this year is something that I'm so very happy about because I think that I've managed to improve my work a lot, and also gain a lot more confidence in myself when working with 3D because I now know what I'm doing and if I don't - I know where and how to research things in case I get stuck, how to troubleshoot.. I also feel a lot more confident to start applying for jobs. 

    Overall, Game Art has been such a learning experience for me and the skills that I've managed to attain will stay with me. There are a lot more projects that I have in mind that I'll be able to work on in the future.

Final Major Project - Ritual Room

 Grand Finale!

    The end! I feel like my entire final year at university passed so quickly.. and although I got to learn so, so much more, so much more than any previous year, it's still strange to me that today's technically my last working day in labs. Tomorrow I'm only panning to submit my work and figure out how I'm going to take a video of my level in Unreal Engine in order to showcase my Final Major Project.

    One of the two very last things that I had to do in regards to my scene was texture the last mod kit consisting of the posters which have been scattered predominantly across the second floor, although can also be found laying across the entire level and the rope which is in the smallest, furthest room - the Ritual Room. The other was the pentagram.

Posters..

    I didn't intend the posters in my scene to have any complicated textures on them. I wanted to give the player the impression that most of them are, for example, just pages that have been torn out of a newspaper and painted with some symbols used in rituals.. or perhaps just ramblings that would be difficult to decipher in the long run. They aren't neatly spread across the wall, nor looking very flattering with the blood spilled across some of them - but once again, that too was very intentional because I wanted to build somewhat of a creepy atmosphere. Especially in that room.

    Result..

    How I textured the posters was simple - I went on the internet and found a bunch of royalty free images that fit the image that I had in my head..

    Then, I downloaded a couple of images that I was that I could use and edited them in Photoshop. I removed the unnecessary detail and stamped a couple of images one on top of another in order to create that overlapping effect - as if the remnants of the newspaper were underneath, and an illegible handwriting was on top. Then, what I did was invert the black and white images and export them from Photoshop as alphas and then import then import them as alpha maps in Substance Painter. I found this method works because Photoshop is very easy to use when it comes to editing images and combining things, using texture maps edited in Photoshop as alphas to stamp onto planes is a fast and efficient way to make posters in Substance Designer. If there was colour, it would've been a little bit more difficult.. but because of the nature of my scene and the time period in which my environment is set in, that wasn't the case - I intended them to be black and white.  

Pentagram..

Pentagram Images, Stock Photos & Vectors | Shutterstock

    Once again, in order to texture the pentagram, I went on Shutterstock and searched for some royalty free images that I knew I would be able to use. I wanted a pentagram that didn't look too perfect but rather had some spills - I thought that would indicate to the player that perhaps it had been painted messily and most likely in a hurry. 

    This was the original photo.

Once again.. Pentagram Images, Stock Photos & Vectors | Shutterstock

    

    I still wanted to add a little bit to it though and make it more unique, so I once again imported this image in photoshop, turned it black and white and exported it as an alpha, then went onto Substance Painter and turned on the alpha blending mode, and then I added the opacity channel.. after that I just painted over the image. I added my own little text saying ''help me help me help me'' in the middle because I wanted to suggest that perhaps somebody had been trapped inside of that circle, as well as a blooded handprint, suggesting that they might've been hurt.

    In addition to all of that.. before I was ready for submission, I wanted to give myself a little bit one working day in order to sort out my naming conventions, to organise everything in folders and make it a lot easier for the examiners to know what is what and what is where. Also, I wanted to just make sure that everything in my scene was in place and that no assets nor texture maps were missing.. not this time.

Final Major Project - Staircase

Substance Designer

    The most prominent materials that I've been using in my scene have been different types of wood - softwood, dark wood, walnut, etc. Towards the end of my project, I decided to make a slightly different type of wood, one that's evidently been used quite a bit. So what I did was search for a tutorial that would explain to me how to make the fibers of the wood look that way, for example. I ended up stumbling across this one - Substance Designer: Simple- Fast- Great Wood Material - YouTube. Although it wasn't exactly what I was going for, I knew that I could tweak quite a lot of things when it came to the fibers and the overall colour of the texture just so that I could create something that resembled more closely the type of material that I wanted to use for the staircase in my scene.

    On one hand, when creating just about any type of wooden material, I like to warp different combinations of noises in order to get the pattern that I want. On the other hand, I like to add the gradient colour by choosing an image on the internet that I really like and hovering over it with the colour picker. 

Substance Painter

    Once I was done with Substance Designer, I exported the material and imported it in Substance Painter in order to continue working on the overall detail - the reason I prefer doing that in Substance Painter as opposed to Designer most of the time is because I find it a lot easier to work with things like dust, dirt, grunge maps, curvature, etc. Also, being able to select only a specific area onto which you would like to work on is comes very much in handy a lot of the time. 

PS: So.. in this case, at first I did accidentally made the staircase look a little bit too old. However, that was fixed soon after.

Result..

Final Major Project - Adding Final Textures (Part Two)

Final Touches (Part Two)

    In one of my previous projects, I modelled a projector. However, although I quite liked the simple design of the projector, the technical qualities of it were quite bad because at the time, I still wasn't very used to using both using topology in an efficient way and unwrapping in an efficient way. Once again, I remember one thing in particular that I used to do in pretty much all of my previous projects was unwrap assets separately, in separate 3Ds Max files and on separate unwrap sheets. So this time, I made sure that the asset had no unnecessary geometry and was unwrapped with the rest of the models in my scene that were similar to it so that I could texture them altogether. 

Example..

..the rest of the assets have been unwrapped around it. When unwrapping, I try to put each peace of each asset close to one another and in the same space or corner so that texturing would be easier and the parts wont spread across the entire UV. 

Texturing in Substance Painter

    When it comes to assets that have been used and therefore worn out or damaged, I like to once again use Curvature in order to add detail to the edges because usually, that's where things like dust and dirt collects and is the hardest to get rid of. In this case, because there's quite a lot of metal on that asset, I added a slightly red/ orange nuance to the Curvature in order to suggest that there's rust. 

Result

Grunge Maps 

Unreal Engine

aaand.. in addition to all of that, here's another asset that had to be revamped because the topology and the unwrapping of it were quite bad.

Final Major Project - Adding Final Textures (Part One)

 Final Touches (Part One)

    Towards the end of my Final Major Project, pretty much most of the things that I had left to do were just texturing whatever assets I hadn't textured already. The windows in my scene were one of those assets. 

    A lot of times, in order to see how the contrast and the combination of values and colours in my level is, I like to view my scene in ''Unlit'' mode - in the past, I've found that that helps me out quite a lot when it comes to seeing how the colours interact with one another. Also, in this particular case, my scene in Unreal Engine is quite dark, therefore there are some bits and pieces that one can hardy see unless they switch to that mode. 

    I try to have a good balance between light and dark, even though that is mostly up to the lighting. 

Examples

    To certain assets, I like to give a little bit more detail - for example, in this case, I wanted all of the book stands in my scene to have a unique pattern to them. The way I did that was by creating a new fill layer on top of everything and disabling everything except for the height map. That way, the pattern that I wanted to stamp onto the wood was not going to be coloured (because of the base colour map), nor was it going to look metallic (because of the roughness map). 

    When exporting packed map channels from Substance Painter in order to import into Unreal Engine, the channel packs usually automatically assign the height map to the normal map, therefore I always try to make sure that the nodes are connected to both.

    In addition to all of that, I would like to add that one of the very few issues that I've been encountering with my project recently was.. collisions. The simple collision tends to work most of the time, but because they tend to be a box, if objects are overlapping with other objects for example, that could create an issue. Or in this case, if an object has been animated to move a certain way and the player has to go through it.

    The way I solved this issue was by changing the Collision Presets to BlockAll and the Collision Complexity to ''Use Complex Collision As Simple.'' That way, Unreal Engine assigns a collision to your asset that encircles it as best as it can and it's usually much better than the simple box.

    Next week is my final week before hand in and I'm planning to deal with the rest of the texturing for the remaining assets, as well as take a video of my scene in Unreal Engine and make sure to submit everything on time.

Final Major Project - Getting There

 Almost Done!

Here are some quick screencaps to show you how my project has progressing so far.

    There's a couple of things that I would like to do next - first of all, I would like to finish texturing, then I would like to add some more details to my scene such as the blood symbol in the furthest, smallest room, as well as make sure that everything that needs to be merged has been merged and my naming conventions are correct. So I don't really have too much left.. also, if I do end up managing to finish early, I'm planning on doing some of my stretch goals too.