Final Major Project - Lab Equipment and Spilled Liquids

Lab Equipment 

 

    I spend a little bit more time modelling a detailed mod kit. The reason for that is because the environment design in Bloodborne and Dark Souls 3 is one of my biggest inspirations for this project, and the sheer amount of details in them is something that I've always loved exploring. I love to just walk around, spending ages on just looking at the assets and the textures.

    But back to the point - I spent a little bit more time modelling a detailed mod kit and then having the Cainhurst Castle from Bloodborne in my mind as an inspiration, I scattered them around in order to bring more live to the room and make it apparent that it's being used by someone or something on daily basics. 

Spilled Liquid

    

    Once the lab equipment was done, I used some of the knowledge about making decals that I had acquired during the development of my previous project, the Captain's Table, in order to make spills. I thought that would be a nice little addition on to my scene. 

    How I made the spills was by using Substance Designer first. I made a very basic graph using a lot of Grunge maps and Histogram Scans, then Transformation 2D in order to change the placement of the stains. In the end, I just blended all the nodes together and then exported the normal map, the roughness map and the opacity map. 

    It didn't quite go as planned though. The decal looked very rough as soon as I put it in my scene, and looked more like an opaque roughness map rather than a spill. So what I ended up doing was asking my tutor for help and he suggested I export the opacity map, import it in Photoshop, turn it to black and white in order to get rid of the grey areas, export it back again and put it in Unreal. So I did just that.. 

..and it worked.

    Here's an example of how I connected the exported maps in the material properties..

    After I made the spills decals, I knew that I'm most likely going to have to make some blood decals too because of the nature of my scene. In the past, I used to make blood by exporting a plane from 3Ds Max, texturing the blood manually onto it in Substance Painted, exporting the textures from there using the alpha blending with opacity option and putting them together onto the plane. I've learned now though that making decals is a much more efficient and correct way of doing things like that.

    So to save time, I made blood spills from the liquid spills and how I did that was simply copy and paste the material that I made for the decals, go into the material properties and add red colour to the spill.

BLOOOD

Result

    The blood in my scene is primarily in the small ritual room, because that's usually where grim stuff happens. It's also the room that's furthest away from where the player enters, therefore they will have quite a bit of exploring to do before they find it. 

Final Major Project - Collisions

Collisions

       Collision is something that I often tend to have issues with when it comes to building just about any environment in 3D. The reason for that is because the type of environments that I like to build are often very cluttered interiors in which there's too many overlapping objects. So because of that, I usually have to make collisions manually. 

    I make the collisions in 3Ds Max. How I do that is - I usually finish a model and then create boxes or just about any geometric shape that would go well with the overall shape, then I make sure that they cover the model nicely. Here's an example.. 

    Once that's done, what I do is rename every box or every geometric shape like this.. UCX_TheNameOfTheAsset_01_00. UCX is what makes Unreal Engine recognise the boxes or the geometric shapes as collisions once we export them from 3Ds Max and import them in Unreal. The reason we need to add the name of the asset that the collision is for after the underscore is because that's how Unreal Engine recognises what object it's for. Then because we usually build a collision by using multiple objects, in the end we usually have to add the numbers. Here's an example of that too..

    Setting collisions up in Unreal Engine once they're done is easy. All I tend to do is go to the asset properties, go to Collision Presents and change it to BlockAll using the arrow. Then, I just tick Customized Collision. What that does is make sure that Unreal Engine is using the collision that I've made, not the default simple collision that the Engine automatically creates for every asset.

Result 

Collision

 Scene

    Building collisions is usually pretty straight forward.. but there are small things that can create problems when making them. For example, sometimes if you decide to attach the collision boxes together in 3Ds Max, Unreal Engine reads them as one large object. Which turns the collision into one mesh that the character would not be able to go through, if the asset is big. I learned that the hard way..

    But for the most part, collisions are no trouble..

..for the MOST part.

Final Major Project - Progress So Far

 Beauty Shots

Final Major Project - 3D Modelling (Part Two)

 3Ds Max and Unreal Engine

    During these past few days, I've mostly been focusing on both modelling and populating my scene in order to start establishing the mood that I have in my mind - a fairly cold, gloomy exterior and a fairly warm, very dimly lit interior. Getting the aesthetics right is very important to me, because over the years I've learnt that lighting plays perhaps the biggest role when it comes to building a certain atmosphere.

    Here are some quick screenshots of the models that I have been making in 3Ds Max..

    In my previous project, something that I really didn't like how I did was the overall arrangement to things. In my opinion, everything looked too similar and the reason for that was because I didn't really make more than one or two modular pieces, and then merged them and copy pasted them around. So the result of that was areas that are way too similar to one another, so much so that even to the player, they would've looked the same.

    In order to avoid that, I modelled a better variety of assets to populate my scene with, and also I didn't make just one set of books, merge it and then paste it across every other bookshelf, but instead I spent some time arranging the books, the candles, the props in general, created a variety and then pasted them around. In my opinion, this made my level look a lot more immersive. 

    In addition to that..

Lab Equipment

 Reference - Bloodborne

Unreal Engine

    I received some very nice feedback from one of my tutors which prompted me to spend some time creating nice details - in this case, lab equipment that would actually indicate that this has been a science lab and is most likely still being used for similar purposes, just perhaps with intentions that aren't as nice as the ones of the students in the past had been. 

    Here are some of the glass materials and instances that I've made..

Glass Materials and Instances

        When making glass, I like to use this node in Unreal Engine that's called ''Fresnel_Function''. I've just learnt that it makes glass look so much better because it helps me create depth in the material, therefore when I use it on an asset, the asset wouldn't just be transparent - that's not how glass works in real life. In addition to that, using refractions also works. 

    I like to add Opacity Min and Opacity Max because it helps me manually set the numbers that I want and alter them, should I want my glass to have more opacity or less. This depends on what type of asset I'm using that material for.

Final Major Project - Windows and Beams

Windows

Reference

Result

    When I'm making windows, I usually tend to model the window frame and the glass separately because I find it a lot easier to texture and/ or apply materials to the glass later on. The way I texture glass is usually by either adding a transparent map to it manually in Substance Painter, or creating a material for it in Substance Designer - for example if I want the glass to have dust or dirt on it, or anything of the sort.

    In addition to that, I usually like to add Fresnel Function to it in Unreal Engine because it enables you to add depth to the glass, for example. In my opinion, it makes it a lot more realistic, if that's something that you're going for. Also..

Easter Egg..

I messed up.

    When it comes to my Final Major Project in particular, the idea that I've had for my scene from the get go was that the main source of light is going to be the moonlight, (as it is a night scene). But also, the exterior is going to be very dimly lit because although the place has long been abandoned and is not being used as school anymore, it is still inhabited, just used for other purposes. Plus, I wanted to create a nice contrast between the night outside and the environment inside. 

 To create the visual of the moonlight coming in through the windows, I decided to recreate the beam in Unreal Engine. 

Beam

    I started out by making my own cone in 3Ds Max - that cone is what I'm going to apply the beam material to. Then, once I made the cone and unwrapped it, I moved to Substance Designer in order to recreate texture maps that are similar to the result of the beam that I had in mind.

Unwrap

Substance Designer and Unreal Engine

    I wanted that nice scatter effect, therefore I just used a Grunge map. 

    PS: TextCoord is what we use in order to make the texture tile without skewing. In this case, we also want to create the effect that the light is distorting the more it interferes with the exterior. I added an ExponentialHeightFog and a PostProcessVolume because both help me play around with the atmosphere and create the mood that I'm going for early on. Also, they're very useful because you can change the mood in your scene without having to add any drastic changes to things like lights and textures that would take much longer to alter.

    I wanted the lighting in my scene to be a little bit more interactive, therefore I asked my tutor to help me build it and we ended up settling on this pinkish-purplish hue that indicated there's moonlight coming from the outside, and also created a nice atmosphere by adding contrast. 

Result