Materials continued

Saturday 19th November 2022:

After focusing fully on the pillar trim sheet, I decided to take a small break from trim and work on a few of my other smaller, but equally, important jobs. I'd completely forgotten that the floor area behind my stair trim wasn't unwrapped thanks to the currently quite dim lighting of my scene, so started by doing some UVs for this and made sure that the scale of the material would match my stair pieces.

I also decided to focus a little on my torches, as they were looking quite plain, with no baked information on them and just a plain gold material. I hadn't actually finished my high poly for the torch itself, so I started off by sculpting on some of the details that I could see from my references in Zbrush, and then UV unwrapped my low poly version of the torch. Despite it having been a while since I had done 'normal' UV unwrapping and a standard high to low bake workflow, I found myself getting back into the rhythm of it again with little trouble and quite enjoyed myself!

After making sure that the high poly would definitely line up with the low poly for baking, I exported my low poly into Substance Painter to begin texturing. Getting the bake correct with the details projecting nicely was the hardest part of the texturing, as the actual texture for the torch itself is just a dirtied gold colour, which I was able to generate fairly quickly. Implementing this into Unreal also did not take long, and I am quite happy with the result.

Another quick texture that I made was my grate texture, which I just wanted to be a clean gold texture, so as not to distract the eye from the other details in the scene. Making this texture was very quick, as I was able to just tweak some of the values that I already had for my existing gold texture, which I then applied to all my grates.

The final task I wanted to tackle before braving trim sheets once again was some VFX, to add some fire over the top of each of my torches. I found a slightly outdated tutorial on YouTube (Fansi, 2021) that aimed to recreate the default fire particle effect that Unreal offers in its starter content, but from scratch (albeit still using the default material texture that is provided by Unreal). I have made smoke and small firefly particles before so this wasn't completely new to me, but I still spent a good while tweaking the settings to get the effect to a state I am happy with.

Aside from the fact that I made a lot of tweaks, I did find the tutorial hard to follow on occasion, as Unreal Engine 5 has updated quite a lot of their systems which meant a lot of the parameters I was looking had been completely renamed - ultimately, only an annoyance, but one that cost me some time. Eventually though, I had a particle effect that I was happy with, and was able to place it above the braziers around my scene.

After this, I also started planning out the trim for my floor plane, which is another big trim sheet that will require me to sculpt a fairly detailed floor decal. I initially started planning by creating a quick reference board in Photoshop, and also looked again at another student's project on Artstation to see how they had approached it (Ordanez, 2021). I planned out what I thought the trim sheet could look like (see below), but also wanted to possibly entertain the idea of doing a decal. The majority of the floor is two colours of marble, with regularly placed symbols along the length of the hallway. For this reason, I thought perhaps creating a trim sheet for the marble would be better, along with a separate decal that I could place where I needed it.

While this idea was interesting though, discussion with my tutors helped me realise that if I were to create the interlaced triquetra pattern as a decal, then it would probably have to be at a very high resolution so it wouldn't be blurry at such a large size in the final scene. I also hadn't considered how easy it would be to line up the decals with the different marbles, so decided to go back to my original intentions and soldier on with more trim.

References:

FANSI, Sir. 2021. Niagara fire tutorial in Unreal Engine 4 (UE4 Fire niagara tutorial) [youtube tutorial] Available at: https://youtu.be/rKIqa_IUkBo [accessed 22nd November 2022]

ORDANEZ, Louise. 2021. 'Thor: Ragnarok Asgard Palace Scene' [Artstation post] Available at: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/xJ9mG1 [accessed 23rd November 2022]