Haunting House Project - Formative Feedback Submission

   Before Hand-In

    The very last thing that I did before handing in for my formative assessment was build the lighting in my 3D environment. The way I did that was in Unreal Engine, I went to ''Build'' and then ''Build Lighting Only.'' I always tend to do that after I've made sure that I've placed and set up all stationary and movable lights correctly in my room.

Beauty Shots

    There are still quite a bit of things that I'm going to continue working on even after I hand in. For instance, I've modeled and unwrapped all of my assets, however I still haven't textured all of them. So that's something that I still need to do, along with fixing anything in my scene that I'll know it might need some adjustments after I receive my feedback.

Haunted House Project - Opacity

       Opacity Maps

    In order to create the dripping blood texture for my scene, I had to create an opacity map. The way I did that was go on Substance Painter, open a new project and set the Shader Settings to PBR metal-rough with alpha blending. What that does is it basically creates a separate opacity map for you that you can manually export from Painter and connect to the Opacity Mask node in your material in Unreal Engine. 

    This year, I learned how to channel pack properly which is something that I didn't do last year. When it comes to Substance Designer, I tend to do it manually, but when it comes to Substance Painter, I tend to just export my textures once they're ready by using the Unreal Engine 4 (Packed) option. What that does is it automatically exports my Ambient Occlusion, Roughness and Metal map all together on the same texture sheet. After that, the only thing that I manually have to fix is find my roughness map in Unreal and make sure that the sRGB has been turned off and it's set to Linear Colour - that gets rid of the issue where a lot of times, the textures appear extremely shiny in Engine. 

    Here is an example of the final outcome in Unreal.

Haunted House Project - Further Development

     Next, I moved to Substance Painter in order to continue texturing. What I did first were the tiling textures - I did one for the floor and I also did one for the ceiling. The way I do tiling textures is basically, I tend to export just one unwrapped tile from 3Ds Max and texture it. Then, after I finish texturing, I make sure to set the projection in my properties in Substance Painter to UV Projection so that once I export the textures, they would tile perfectly across the UV map, which I also make sure that has a good texel density prior to that.

    Below, I'm going to insert some screenshots in order to show you a quick look of my workflow.

Floor

Ceiling

    In addition to that, I also did the textures for my piano in Substance Painter. The piano is one of the hero assets in my environment, and I wanted to make it a little more impressive, in a way in which it would contribute more to the whole Haunting aspect of my scene. So what I did was add the bloody hand and the dripping blood to it, to suggest that even though it's a cozy environment that's being used on daily basics, there's still something that's not quite natural about it. Here's a snapshot of my asset after I textured it.

   

Piano

    Also, a little detail that I wanted to add to my piano were actual piano sheets - in my opinion, that's something that added to it. 

    Here, I would like to address that I DID NOT create the textures for my piano sheets myself. The piano piece is Ludwig van Beethoven - Sonata No. 14, ''Moonlight''. It's a small Easter egg that I wanted to have in my scene, because Beethoven is one of my most favourite composers of all time. This is the image that I've neem using, I downloaded it from Google Search and applied it to my unwrapped plane.

This is the piano sheet that I've been using in my scene. 

Final Result

Haunted House Project - Particles

 Particles

    In terms of particles - I wanted to have two types of particle systems in my 3D Haunted House environment scene. So once I was done making some of the materials and applying some of the textures, I decided to focus on making those particle systems in order to start building up the atmosphere further. 

    The very first particle system that I created was dust. In order to create it, I used Niagara which was something that I had never used before. However, I wanted to familiarise myself with it because I had seen other people in tutorials use it and it seemed quite useful to me. Dev Enabled is a channel on YouTube that I really like and I tend to watch it quite a lot for tutorials and things like that - Dev Enabled - YouTube. His videos has helped me out a great deal.

    In order to make my dust particle system, I started out by initialising the lifetime and the spawn rate.

    I do that first and before anything else because I think it's important for me to get the rate in which the dust will spawn and scatter across the environment I place it in first, then test it out in order to see how much space it's going to fill up - and then move onto setting up things such as the scale and the exact colour. 

    What I did next was go to box location and change all three box sizes slots in order to set up the correct scale that I wanted, of how far I want my dust particles to go. And velocity in order to align the direction in which my particles were moving, which is something that I had to look up because I wasn't sure about.

    

Result

    Once I was done making the dust particles, I made fire using a normal particle system. That one was a lot easier to make because I was already familiar with the normal particle system from last year.

    Similarly to the dust particles, I started out by initialising the spawn and the lifetime. When it comes to the lifetime, I tend to use Distribution Float Uniform for distribution. The reason for that, I've learned, is because float distributions are the ones usually used when there's a lifetime of a particle, or spawn rate of emitter.

       

    In addition to that, I set the SubUV and the colour over life. The latter is what determines the colour of the fire, and for that I looked at some reference images on the internet – I made the fire redder at the bottom, where it's rising from and yellow towards the edge of the flames where they're almost evaporating.

    Here are some of the screenshots that I took of the end result.

Haunted House Project - Substance Designer

    Substance Designer - Wood

    I started texturing my 3D Haunted House environment by making a scratched wood material in Substance Designer first. The reason for that is because I was already quite familiar with making wood in Designer, it's something that I had done last year – however, the reason I decided to start from scratch is because now that I know how to make my base, I wanted to spend some time making it a little bit more detailed. Attention to detail is something that I think I lacked in my previous project. 

    In order to make my scratched wood material, I followed this tutorial on YouTube – Making a worn glazed wood PBR Material in Substance Designer - Tutorial - Full-process series part 7 - YouTube.

    Making the base was quite easy. However, adding the details later on was a little bit more challenging. The YouTube tutorial that I inserted above helped me a great deal, because it broke down every single step and explained everything very clearly to me – for example how to make the knots and the scratches separately and then blend them together in order to create the details. 

    I found this approach a lot more efficient rather than making the base of the wood in Substance Designer and then transferring it to Substance Painter in order to add the details there. This is something that I had done before, only to realise that it doesn't really work very effectively.

    In addition to that, in the end, I pulled out a couple of images from the internet in order to use colour pick (in the Gradient Map) recreate a similar realistic colour, rather than setting up a flat one. 

Channel Packing in Substance Designer

    Once the material was finished, I made sure to channel pack my maps before exporting the outputs as bitmaps and moving onto Unreal Engine in order to make the material ball and connect them. I exported the base colour map, the normal map and the roughness (R), the ambient occlusion (G) and the height (B) maps I channel packed together. 

    

    I had an issue with my roughness map. Basically, after I connected and applied my material to the asset in my scene, I realised that it looks extremely shiny. And how I attempted to fix that was by adding a constant, although this didn't fix my issue. This is a problem that I also had with another one of my textures.. so I ended up asking one of my tutors for help and they helped me resolve this – basically, I ticked sRGB off and changed the sampler to linear colour. 

    The last node, the height, I connected to World Position Offset in Engine. 

Unreal Engine

    Once that was done, I simply dragged and dropped my scratched wood material onto my unwrapped assets. (PS: I tried to make sure as much as I can this time to make my texel density look good so that there wouldn't be any strange stretching or blurred edges.)

 

Result

Haunted House Project - Unwrapping

     Once I was done modelling, I started unwrapping my assets. When I'm unwrapping, I like to take a little bit more time arranging my unwrap sheets because it makes things a lot easier for me later on when I start texturing in Substance Painter. With materials that I've made in Substance Designer, it's easy to apply them to the unwrapped asset in my scene, however when it comes to Substance Painter, I tend to paint using polygons sometimes, for example – that's something that clean unwrap sheets also makes a lot easier to do. 

Unwraps

    I unwrapped (and exported my unwrap sheets from 3Ds Max) using x1024 texture sheets for my larger assets such as the furniture, and x512 sheets for my smaller assets such as the props – books, bottles, candles, etc. 

    However, after I finished unwrapping and went back to my scene in Unreal Engine in order to reimport my assets, only now fully unwrapped – I realised that I've built the lighting in my scene, however I've not actually built the light sources in my scene (the lamps). So what I did was go back in 3Ds Max. 

Part I

Part II

Part III

    In addition to that, in my next blog post I would like to talk to you about how I followed a tutorial in order to make my scratched wood material in Substance Designer, which is a material that I'm going to be using a lot in my scene because the interior is predominantly populated with furniture that's been made out of wood and is quite old. 

Haunted House Project - Unreal Engine Part 2

 Unreal Engine Part 2

    What I primarily focused on these past few days was finishing my couch asset in 3Ds Max and modelling the sofa for my scene, also in 3Ds Max. On the other hand, I tried to model the rest of my smaller props too such as the lamp and the shelves and basically finish modeling so that I could move onto unwrapping. 

Couch

Sofa

    Modelling in Max is not something that I find challenging, so although it took me sometime to model my assets, I didn't really encounter any issues. Here are some quick snapshots of what my scene looked like after I had finally finished modelling.

   

Haunted House Project - Unreal Engine

 Unreal Engine
Early Development

    In my previous blog post, I uploaded a screenshot of my scene so far in Unreal Engine – at the time, I was planning to have my lighting primarily in blue and in yellow because I quite liked the contract because the coldness of the blue and the warmth of the yellow created. However, when I asked one of my tutors for feedback, he suggested me to have a look at this artist called John Atkinson Grimshaw. He has a very interesting way of incorporating lighting in his dark, nightly paintings. I had never actually heard of the artist before, so I was so surprised when I looked him up and saw his work, I found it absolutely beautiful. His landscapes had such an eerie, ghostly vibe to them, which is something that I absolutely love. He had managed to create that mood without even adding a single ghost into any of his paintings. 

    What made the biggest impression on me in regards to his work was indeed his approach to lighting. Instead of using blues to paint the night, he seems to be using a lot of greens which I think is what contributes a lot to the eeriness of his landscapes – it's quite unconventional. It reminds me a lot of author H. P. Lovecraft, who tends to use words to describe similar landscapes in his stories – a lot of greens in nightly settings.

    Below, I'm going to insert some of my most favourite paintings that I recently discovered by artist John Atkinson Grimshaw. 

John Atkinson Grimshaw

    After discovering Grimshaw, I decided to take a completely different approach to the lighting in my own environment in Unreal Engine. What I did was basically turn the blues that I had into greens instead, in a way in which it would suggest that the night outside is cold and green, and quite eerie compared to the atmosphere inside which is warmer, more inhabitable by things that the player may not necessarily be able to see, but would be able to sense – which is where I would like the haunting element in my scene to be coming from.

    How I did that was adding green emissives to my windows to give the impression that the night outside is eerie and it's lighting up my scene in faint green. The other emmisives I added on my candles to suggest more warmth that comes with places that are more inhabitable, like I mentioned above. Here's a very quick breakdown of how I did that.

Emmisives

    Basically, I made my emissives by adding a separate material ball in Unreal Engine. To it, I added a constant and a multiply that I connected to my emissive node. I find this way of making emissives very easy to navigate around because I can increase and decrease the brightness anytime I want by just going back to my material. It's a very non destructive type of workflow, I think.

    On the other hand, I took some time after that to arrange my scene in Unreal Engine because initially, I thought that it looked a little bit too empty. I'm going to insert some screenshots from my Unreal Engine environment progress here.

    What I'm planning to do next is focus on modelling the sofa, which is going to be one of my hero assets – because technically, my environment is inhabited (haunted) by this gigantic creature that I mentioned in my previous blog post, which was very inspired by Lady Dimitrescu from Resident Evil Village. So whilst there is one normal sized couch for the human sized creature, there is also going to be one bigger sized sofa for the non human sized creature too. This was also something suggested to me by one of my tutors in order to give the viewer a better understanding that this environment is indeed inhabited by something that is not entirely human. I really liked that idea and I thought that it has much better visual communication.