Wednesday 23rd November 2022:
After talking through my plans for this trim sheet, I felt ready to begin working on the floor, another large section of my final build. I decided that creating two trim sheets would be easiest, similar to how another student seems to have approached it in their project. My plan was to create two trim sheets which would consist of a basic tiled floor, except one of the sheets would also have the large floor decal on it, in hopes of preserving the detail of the decorative section and keep the floor tiling correctly. I wasn't completely sure if it would work and line up, but thought that this method had the highest chance of working and planned to include several test bakes, just in case.
I decided to do more planning for the decal of this sheet, as I only had a few references to work from in terms of working out how exactly the pattern looks. Using the limited references I had (Movie-Screencaps.com, 2017), as well as filling in the gaps with some educated guesses, I was able to photoshop together several references into a plan of how the decal would theoretically look from a bird's eye view, a tool that would benefit me a lot later when it came to sculpting the details. In order to create the marble that would line the floors, I turned back to the marble material I had already made before and decided to tweak that material, making sure to save a dark coloured version as well as the more orange-toned version. I added these textures onto my low poly plane in Substance Painter and masked out the areas where I wanted the dark marble, saving this sheet as my first trim sheet for the floor.
I then made a copy of this Substance Painter file to use for my second trim sheet, which would be the one with the high poly details baked on. I decided to sculpt the floor details in Zbrush, which took a long time but did result in a high poly I was happy with. In hindsight, I think I could have created a stencil instead, and I think I will definitely do so for the texturing of the throne, as that will be much easier than sculpting the details in Zbrush.
Nevertheless, I persevered with the potentially more difficult method I had handed myself and baked the high poly plane onto my second trim sheet, which thankfully worked out well. I did not need to add many more details to this sheet, only making sure to highlight the decal area in a gold material which I did using the brush tools available in Painter. I exported both sheets' maps and got ready to begin the arduous task of UV unwrapping. To ensure that the sheets would line up, I decided it would be better to split my floor plane up into smaller sections before UV unwrapping it, which does technically add to my overall asset count, but I wasn't confident that everything would line up properly otherwise. Ironically the two different sheets lined up perfectly, which was the original source of my worries. My new problem, though, was that I had forgotten about the area behind the throne decal, which needs to be just a plain marble texture, meaning I was unable to scale the UVs of that area without the scaling being mismatched to the other areas or without having random bands of black marble run across the back of the plane. Thankfully, I was able to fix this fairly quickly by removing the black marble from my first trim sheet Substance file and saving the marble itself as a third tileable material. With better planning, I think I could have avoided this issue, but thankfully the fix wasn't too time or labour-intensive. Finally, I finished the UV unwrapping and was ready to begin implementing all my changes into Unreal.
I actually put off adding the materials into Unreal for as long as possible as I was fairly certain I would be dissatisfied by the result and how it would line up, which sadly I was correct about. While I was happy with the texturing itself and the design, it is definitely on my Christmas list to re-scale completely, as I couldn't get it to line up nicely to the point where it matches my references. While a bit of a sour ending to the weekly sprint, I was still happy with how the texture itself looks, and hopefully it will only need to be scaled differently in Substance Painter and the UVs corrected in Maya.
References:
MOVIE-SCREENCAPS.COM 2013. 'Thor: Ragnarok (2017) [4K]' (18.04.17) Movie-Screencaps [online]. Available at: https://movie-screencaps.com [accessed 10th August 2022]
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