Final Major Project - Adding Final Textures (Part One)

 Final Touches (Part One)

    Towards the end of my Final Major Project, pretty much most of the things that I had left to do were just texturing whatever assets I hadn't textured already. The windows in my scene were one of those assets. 

    A lot of times, in order to see how the contrast and the combination of values and colours in my level is, I like to view my scene in ''Unlit'' mode - in the past, I've found that that helps me out quite a lot when it comes to seeing how the colours interact with one another. Also, in this particular case, my scene in Unreal Engine is quite dark, therefore there are some bits and pieces that one can hardy see unless they switch to that mode. 

    I try to have a good balance between light and dark, even though that is mostly up to the lighting. 

Examples

    To certain assets, I like to give a little bit more detail - for example, in this case, I wanted all of the book stands in my scene to have a unique pattern to them. The way I did that was by creating a new fill layer on top of everything and disabling everything except for the height map. That way, the pattern that I wanted to stamp onto the wood was not going to be coloured (because of the base colour map), nor was it going to look metallic (because of the roughness map). 

    When exporting packed map channels from Substance Painter in order to import into Unreal Engine, the channel packs usually automatically assign the height map to the normal map, therefore I always try to make sure that the nodes are connected to both.

    In addition to all of that, I would like to add that one of the very few issues that I've been encountering with my project recently was.. collisions. The simple collision tends to work most of the time, but because they tend to be a box, if objects are overlapping with other objects for example, that could create an issue. Or in this case, if an object has been animated to move a certain way and the player has to go through it.

    The way I solved this issue was by changing the Collision Presets to BlockAll and the Collision Complexity to ''Use Complex Collision As Simple.'' That way, Unreal Engine assigns a collision to your asset that encircles it as best as it can and it's usually much better than the simple box.

    Next week is my final week before hand in and I'm planning to deal with the rest of the texturing for the remaining assets, as well as take a video of my scene in Unreal Engine and make sure to submit everything on time.

Final Major Project - Getting There

 Almost Done!

Here are some quick screencaps to show you how my project has progressing so far.

    There's a couple of things that I would like to do next - first of all, I would like to finish texturing, then I would like to add some more details to my scene such as the blood symbol in the furthest, smallest room, as well as make sure that everything that needs to be merged has been merged and my naming conventions are correct. So I don't really have too much left.. also, if I do end up managing to finish early, I'm planning on doing some of my stretch goals too.

Final Major Project - Blood Signs

 Building Somewhat of an Eerie Atmosphere

    This wasn't something that I had planned initially. At first, the only creepy space in my entire scene was going to be the furthest, smallest room on the second floor. However, as time went, I decided that I wanted to add a little bit more to it. I decided that I wanted my scene to go from the colder but seemingly normal atmosphere in the library on the first floor to a progressively darker and darker, far more cluttered and uncanny type of space as the player progressed up the stairs and throughout the other two doors. So what I decided to do was add to the empty space by the stairs that at first, I had only planned to have as a slightly darker area with just a little bit of clutter on the side.

    First and foremost, I decided to create some alphas in order to put some bloodied text and handprints on the wall and on the floor in front of the locked room beside the staircase on the second floor, suggesting to the player that something had happened there - inside of this building, before they even enter the second room in order to uncover opened doors that lead towards a very messed up room with blood splattered here and there. 

3Ds Max

Substance Designer

    In order to create the alpha channel, in Substance Designer, I changed the mode to pbr-metal-rough-with-alpha-blending. This enables me to then go onto the Texture Set Settings and manually create an opacity channel which later on I can turn either into an Opacity Mark in Unreal Engine or into a Deferred Decal. 

      

       In addition to the bloodied ''Stay Away'' text, I created a small handprint onto the smaller plane in order to stamp it around my scene because I thought that it would give the player an interesting indication that perhaps somebody has been hurt in this place, or that perhaps somebody been trying to flee. Whatever the case has been, they're currently nowhere to be found though. 

    In addition to all of that, I ended up deciding to turn these into a Deferred Decals rather than Opacity Maps, the reason for that being that the colour and the splatter looked a lot better to me that way. To create a Deferred Decal, I change the material domain to a Deferred Decal, the blend mode to a Translucent and the decal blend mode into a DBuffer Translucent Colour, Normal, Roughness. Then, I connected the A channel of my Base Colour texture map into Opacity, along with the rest that I normally connect by default in every material. 

Result

Final Major Project - Dust Particles

  Dust Particle Effects

    In one of my previous projects this year, I attempted to make a dust particle system for the first time and although it ended up functioning just fine, I didn't quite like how it didn't exactly give the player the impression that there's dust, the particles looked more like glowing fireflies because they were a little too big and a little too bright. So, I decided to recreate the same particle effect system in my Final Major Project, only this time figure out how to adjust things properly. 

Part One

    I began by creating the particle - then, I adjusted the Emitter Properties in order to change the settings. For example, when it comes to making dust particles specifically, I like to tick the Interpolated Spawning which is what makes some spawn modules update in the spawn stage instead of in the actual particle update stage. In general, modules in this section are what sets up the initial values for each and every particle. 

    Then, I like to adjust the emitter state and the spawn rate in the Emitter Update. There, I set up the rate in which I want my particles to spawn inside my scene. Once I've done these, I move onto the Particle Spawn where I adjust things like the lifetime of the particle system, for example - and what I mean by that is for what specific amount of time are the dust particles going to both spawn and hover in the air before restarting. In addition to that, I also messed around a little bit with the sprite attributes because I wanted to get the right size this time around. Underneath the Initialize Particle section, there is the Box Location which is where I adjust in what space and how far are the dust particles going to spread. 

Part Two

     Once I've adjusted all of these, I like to move onto the Particle Update which is where I change the particle state, the color and the sprite scale. In this case, I set my Scale Mode to RGB and Alpha Separately and randomised the spawn rate of the particles in my scene. I also set the minimum value to 0.35 and the maximum value to 30.0 so that there would be a very visible range, making the particles look more realistic - for example, the player would be able to see them more clearly when they're hit by direct light and less clearly when they're spawning in a slightly darker corner. In addition to that, I like to set the float up so that their movement would be more random. Then, I adjusted the vector scale to a 5.0 in the Add Velocity section. 

    Finally, I played around a little bit with the Sprite Renderer at the very bottom, just in order to tweak some things. 

    

Result

    In this case, I'm much happier with the way the dust particle system turned out as opposed to the one I made in my previous project because this time. 

FMP - Another Update

Texturing the Lab Equipment 

Result

    Once I was done texturing and setting up, I created a new material and added a red gradient base colour to it and and a constant to it's roughness. Then, I applied it to the cylinder inside of the blood device in order to, well, suggest that there is blood in there. And the glass case around the blood, to it's material I had added a Fresnel node to make it more realistic, because most glass materials in real life aren't fully transparent. 

    In addition to that, I added a SimpleGrassWind. That's a node that I tend to use sometimes when I want to make certain assets move ever so slightly, like for example the cobwebs in my scene. For the SimpleGrassWind node, I created three parameters once again - one that's WindIntensity, another that's WindWeight and a AdditionalWPO. Then, I created a material instance where I adjusted these sliders so that the cylinder inside of the blood device would somewhat resemble blood. 

    What I would like to focus on next is making some dust particle effects. In my previous project, I learned how to make them, however I wasn't really satisfied with the final result because the dots looked a little too big and shined a little too much, so they ended up looking more like fireflies rather than dust, in my opinion. Therefore.. my next goal is to attempt remaking them, although remake them right this time.

Final Major Project - Texturing the Lab Equipment

Substance Designer

    Lab Equipment

    

    In the past, I used to unwrap small objects on separate UV sheets and therefore texture them separately. However, later on I found out that that's a very bad thing to do when it comes to optimisation. So.. instead of doing that, what I tend to do now when it comes to texturing a mod kit consisting of multiple similar objects is unwrapping everything on the shame UV sheet, opening the material (M) in 3Ds Max, selecting every object and applying a Standard material to the selection. Then, I export the selection from Max and import it in Substance Painter. The reason I have to do that, I've found out, is because unless I've made sure that everything has the same material on it, Substance Painter will open every UV map for every asset separately.

    Once again, I baked my Low Poly using the Low Poly mesh so that I would get all the different maps that I need and be able to edit them separately. For example, I tend to use Curvature a lot because to the edges of almost every asset I add details like dust, dirt, damage, etc. in order to suggest to the player that the environment is old and most likely hasn't been cleaned in a very long time. In addition to that, I've also learned to often edit the roughness map in Substance Painter instead of having to add constants to it in Unreal Engine to six the shininess. 

    Also, often times, I would prefer exporting the base material from Substance Designer and importing it in Substance Painter in order to continue editing and adding to it instead of applying it directly to my assets in Unreal Engine. However, when I'm exporting a material from Designer, if I'm going to take it to Unreal I always channel pack it, but if I'm going to take it to Painter, I never channel pack it because that prevents me from being able to use the texture maps separately. 

    What I'm planning on doing next is simply importing the texture maps in Unreal Engine, setting them up and applying the material to every asset. 

Final Major Project - BAKING

 Baking..

and High to Low Poly Workflow

    Because of the style that I had chosen to build my entire project around, I didn't really need to use the process of baking the information from high poly models onto low poly models much. Prior to starting to project, I spent a lot of time playing Vampyr again and I noticed that a lot of the assets in that game looked plain and it was the textures that made them stand out. It's not a realistic style, the proportions are realistic, although there's a certain stylisation to everything.. and that's something that I really liked about this game in particular, and about any game with stylisation to it really.

    In some cases though.. baking is very much required. Because for example, I couldn't make a cloth that is old and wrinkled but is still optimised in terms of topology and doesn't have a ridiculous amount of triangles. At first I attempted and decreased the amount of triangles, although that made the cloth lose it's purpose - I deliberately made it in a way in which the viewer could tell that there's a body underneath it. Getting rid of polygons made those creases disappear, and that ruined the shape that I was going for.

High Poly and Low Poly

    Usually, if I don't have a High Poly, I tend to build the Low Poly onto the Low Poly in Substance Painter and I do that for every assets because of the texture maps. However, when there's a High Poly that needs to be baked onto a Low Poly, we want to place the two one on top of another in 3Ds Max (or whatever software you're using for 3D modelling), make sure they're named the same and only have an underscore and a High Poly and a Low Poly after, export both and import the Low poly into Substance Painter, then use the Texture Set Settings to select the High Poly model from wherever you've saved it on your computer and bake it onto the Low Poly. We only need to have unwrapped the Low Poly, not the High Poly.

3Ds Max Example

Baking

    Sometimes, baking doesn't always work right away. In this case, at first it gave me strange lighting issues and how I fixed them was going back to 3Ds Max and making sure that both the High Poly asset and the Low Poly asset are put in the centre - that way, I was sure that both models are right on top of one another. Then, I reexported them again and baked them and that fixed the strange lighting issue, so I assumed that sometimes if the objects are even just slightly apart, the baking may not work properly.

Texturing

Result

    The shining isn't a roughness map or an sRGB problem.. this time. Once again, I deliberately wanted the blood in this room to look as if it's been freshly spilled because the environment in that area's being used quite often. So in a way, that's also why I wanted that bed to just be shoved in the corner with a bloodied fabric on top of it, suggesting there's a person underneath whilst the other surgical bed towards the centre of the room is clean and unoccupied, and ready to be used. Whoever's been using the previous one was in a rush didn't really bother cleaning things up.

    What I would like to focus on next is getting more texturing done, as well as adding a dust particle system in my scene.