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.