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