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