Haunted House Project - Update Shots

Update Shots

Haunted House Project - Update

 Texturing

    Texturing.. the eyes of little children inside jars. Hue hue. On the serious note though, what I focused on next was texturing the rest of my assets. First, I textured this jar that I have scattered around in my scene. I used a wooden material for the lid, however for the bottom part I turned the alpha blending on in order to add an opacity channel. On the other hand, later on in Unreal Engine, I created an instance for it because this allows me to manually modify the glass however I want. 

    Then, once I was done texturing the lid, I had to make the eyeballs using the high poly/ low poly workflow because spheres are far too expensive in terms of topology to use in Unreal Engine and I was going to need to use a lot of them in my scene. So the way I did the eyeballs blob (I'm not entirely sure how else to call it) was basically, I made a square and used a modifier in 3Ds Max in order to make it more round, and then I placed a sphere on top of it that aligned perfectly. Then, I exported both and went onto Substance Painter in order to texture and bake the high poly onto the low poly. 

    Once I had one eye, I made an entire stack and merged them all together in order to make it easier for me to move them around the jars but also to optimize it better. 

    

    After that, I also textured some of my smaller assets such as the wine bottles. For the wine bottle specifically, I ended up using photoshop in order to create the base material for it because I found it a lot faster and easier, since the texture map was a little bit more tricky than just a material. 

PS: The waves might be a little reference to a band that I really like and was listening to whilst texturing..

        Also, fabric.. that's another thing I've been working on when it comes to texturing, because I left some of the main assets such as the sofa and the couch for last. And after the fabric, I textured books (for which I ended up making a lot of variations just because there are so many of them and I wanted them to be more diverse rather than too similar, I think it adds).

    In addition to all of that.. I would like to credit this symbol that I have been using in my scene. It's not a symbol that I have come up with myself, it's actually a really ancient symbol that symbolises the Goddess Hecate (Hekate). She's the Goddess of Witchcraft, and she's also the crone mother of the Triple Moon Deity (which stands for the waxing, the waning and the full moon, a5b2d9b786faeb2144bf41953d67a99b.png (562×579) (pinimg.com). I thought that it really fits the aesthetic of my scene because of the theme.

Haunted House Project - Candle Flames

    Candle Flames

    After I somewhat finished working on my 3D Captain's Table project in order to be able to submit it for formative assessment, I went back to work on my Haunted House project because the texturing bit was quite unfinished. One of the very first things that I wanted to add to my scene was tiny flames to the candles because without them, they just looked like glowing sticks. I would like to credit this tutorial on YouTube that I had watched a long time ago, it's basically how I learned to make those flames - Candle Project | 04 | How to create a candle flame in Unreal Engine and Substance Designer - YouTube. 

    First and foremost, I started out by creating the fire material in Substance Designer. I used a couple of Shapes in order to recreate the actual shape of the flame, then blended them together. Towards the top, I wanted the flame to be slightly lighter but towards the bottom, I wanted the shape to fade.

    Once I was done in Substance Designer, I created an output so that I could export the map with opacity. (PS: Before exporting the output, make sure that your exported colour space is set to Raw.) Then, I imported the flame map in Unreal Engine, opened it and unticked the sRGB box. The reason we do that is because the sRBG tends to mess around with the roughness (or the shininess) of the maps sometimes.

    

    The last thing that I did was set up the actual material ball in Unreal Engine. First, I changed the material to translucent so that I would be able to use opacity. Then, I created a SmoothStep for the Mask and I used a random map of waves that I found so that I could create the moving effect of the flame, otherwise it would've stayed static. Also, I tend to use a lot of Texture Coordinators when making fires and flames. What TextCoord does is it basically enables you to alter the coordinates of your texture. In addition to that, TextCoord allows you to multiply by a scalar parameter so that you can change the amount of times it tiles.

Final Result

    

    Basically, the reason I like using an emissive colour for things such as fire is because that makes the flame glow, which is how it would normally be in real life. It just makes them look a lot more believable, despite the stylisation. What I would like to do next is start texturing the rest of the assets that still need to be either textured or fixed (because I had some issues with the texel density).

Captain's Table Project - Wrapping Up

     The textures in my scene are the very last additions that I'm making before this formative hand in. There were a couple that I was missing, although there were also a couple that I actually needed to fix because when I imported them in Unreal Engine for the first time, they skewed. I wasn't sure what's causing this at first, although later on I ended up going back to Substance and realised it's actually the size of the map that was too small for an object that was too big.. so that was an easy fix. 

    

    In addition to that.. I have a map in my scene. For that map, I actually went on the internet in order to research some free maps because making a material for it was going to be quite challenging for the time being. So I ended up choosing a free map texture that I found on Freepik and quite liked - Pirate Map Images | Free Vectors, Stock Photos & PSD (freepik.com).

 Map texture taken from Pirate Map Images | Free Vectors, Stock Photos & PSD (freepik.com)

    When it comes to flat textures like this one, I tend to only use them as base material. Because with the map for example, you don't really need to make a roughness or a metallic map for it - what I do is just make a material and connect the map to the base colour node. What I need to do next is finish the textures for the hanging signs in my scene because although I already have them, I haven't really written anything on them.