Wednesday 2nd November 2022:
Texturing began with the most important step, planning. Using Trello, I wrote out a list of all my final assets, categorising them based on whether I thought I would use a trim sheet for them or texture them uniquely in Substance. This is an important stage as it helps me know which assets I must UV first, and which ones can be left until their trim sheets are made, and also helped me work out how many textures I would need, as several assets would be able to share a sheet. This planning page estimated that across the 17 assets I am using, 6 unique textures and 5 trim sheets will be needed, totalling 11 textures.
I wanted to begin by creating a tiled marble texture, as I will be able to use marble for both my floor block as well adapting it for all the different stair trim sheets, allowing me to do the textures for 6 assets fairly quickly. I initially looked into creating a texture in Substance Designer, as I found some viable tutorials on Youtube that looked like they could be tweaked to make what I was picturing. However, after a lecture with Jeremy where we talked about the ease of using Substance Sampler, I decided to give that a try instead. I found Sampler to be much much faster than following a tutorial for Designer, and was able to make tweaks a lot quicker, as they were presented more visually in a way similar to Painter, instead of wasting a lot of time trying to find the node that would give me the desired effect in Designer. After making the material, I quickly imported it into Unreal to check I was happy with it, and made sure to save the Sampler file and the texture maps, so I could make them into a trim sheet later.
I then began the process of trying to make a trim sheet, using the resources available on the Learning Space, which proved to be very helpful, as the other resources I had previously seen on YouTube only really explained the purpose of trim. and not how to make it. Using a grid in Photoshop, I blocked out where the previously created marble would be, as well as the other new pieces of trim I would have to create. I applied this material from Photoshop to a 4mx4m plane in Maya and made the cuts in the plane, making sure to turn Preserve UVs on.
After making sure I had both a low poly and a high poly version of the plane saved on different layers in Maya, I was able to take the now partially extruded plane into Zbrush and sculpt in the details of the stairs edging, using the few close up reference photos I had to try and mimic the pattern of it. I then exported this high poly from Zbrush using the FbxExport plugin, in order to preserve my polygroups as different materials to make my life easier in Substance Painter. I had to change some of my settings to make the bake clean, but after a few passes at a very low resolution, I was able to get a bake I was happy with, and bake my high poly details onto the plane at a higher resolution.
For the marble, I simply brought in the material that I had already made, whereas the other two areas of trim I textured with a very basic gold material. I made sure to copy over the values for roughness and metallic, as I needed the two areas of trim to match exactly, as they were to be part of the same section of edging. After this, I was able to export all my maps and bring them into Maya to do the UV unwrapping for all my stair pieces.
I chose to make two materials for doing the process of UVs in Maya: one using my base colour albedo map, and one using the normal map. The base colour was the same for the two different gold edging pieces, so to make sure the pattern was aligned, I used the material with the normals on it but had to use the albedo material for aligning the marble pieces, as the albedo was easier to see for those cases.
I found this process to be quite slow and arduous, as it required me to do a lot of lining up between the different assets that all had the same texture applied to it. Finally though, I was able texture all 5, which finishes all my stair pieces, and also covers the majority of the floor. I brought this material into my Unreal scene, and was quite happy with the result. While in Unreal, I also brought in an incredibly basic gold material I had made on a cube in Substance Painter, almost as a placeholder texture, and applied this to a lot of elements in my scene that will be mainly gold in colour with no extra detailing.
I also started to texture some of my unique assets, starting with the chair that I had made just a few weeks prior. I found the UV unwrapping of this to be a breath of fresh air, only having to worry about having nice neat evenly sized UV shells instead of having to fit it to a texture as well! I would still like to go back and work into this particular unique material a bit more, which is why I left it in the to-do task instead of ticking it off as done. I also took this time to add more impactful lighting into the scene, including a small spotlight for the centrepiece of the scene, the throne, and some point lights for a few torches, which will of course be replaced with VFX.
The next trim I want to work on is the pillar, as it is only one trim sheet, but due to the volume of pillars I have in the scene, I want to make sure I focus some time on making it look really good, as it will make a massive difference to the vibe of the scene once the texture is finished and added in.
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