Week 5 - Painting Boats and Growing Plants!
- Morgan Jones
- Feb 18, 2018
- 4 min read
This boat turned into much more of an epic task that I had originally anticipated! The bake, mysteriously enough came out nicely with minimal errors that needed addressing, but now I realise that it did that so that I could take the extra time to texture it.
The texturing process for this boat was pretty methodical as I knew that I wanted a very specific appeal for how the boat would be applied to my scene. The main area that I was focusing on was the balancing of details in relation to how much detail would eventually be around it. This meant that it needed enough detail to show off that it was the focal point that contrasted with the environment, but not too much that it would render the area noisy later on. The most simplistic way of looking at it was that the further away the pieces of the boat got from the player, the lower resolution and level of detail they would receive.
My original bake got me the desired amount of detail that I knew worked in my scene, all I needed to do was hand paint the materials. The reason that I didn't solely rely on tiling textures was because I wanted very specific edge damage variation in the areas that had been broken off. Hand painting allowed me the freedom to really get into the details and personalise this hero asset to the level that I wanted in the ease of one program.
After painting all of the areas that I had sculpted, I decided to create a tiling texture wooden plank set up inside of Zbrush, using the same tools and techniques that I had used last week to create the High-Poly for the boat. This allowed me to make sure that the wood that I was creating remained consistent with the rest of the textures on the model. I was then able to import the textures that I baked from the High Poly into Substance painter and painted over the top of them to get some base colour and roughness variation.
After finishing the base for the boat, I wanted to take a quick break from painting wooden boards so I decided to paint some foliage alphas instead. To get inspiration of what I wanted to create, I did a bunch of research into the kinds of plants that you get on the bayou as well as tailoring there shape/colour language more to that of the animated film. I'm still going to have the balance out the base colours of these when in level because it's interesting how colours are affected by light and whether the colours will be too vibrant for the contrasting elements so well play it by eye when baking to see if the results need adjusting.
After all this was done, I needed to get everything into level and start getting the lighting near the point where all it takes from this point is tweaks to the values. This took a while to get right with post processing and bake times for the accurate shading of the scene. This being said, I'm really starting to see the lighting come together. It may still be a little strong, but its hard to tell with background being as open as it is. So next week, my primary focus is getting the background trees and backdrop in the scene to really sell the depth of the playable area.
Im liking how the foliage is now looking in the level but I am going to have to start altering the texture and lightmap resolutions to get some quicker bake times as well as for general optimisation purposes so that I can ensure that when more assets and textures are added, the frame rate is still going to hold up.
Another quirky trick I want to try is to get some colour variation within certain textures like the lilly pads. I plan on setting up a blueprint that changes the colour of an asset based on its position in the world. These sets of colours will be predetermined by me to allow the engine to randomly flick through them. I am hoping this will help add some more natural variation to the earthy colours from a lot of my models.
I am also messing around with a hand painted algae texture to use on the terrain to break up that uniform roughness from the water and to help blend the plant life better into the scene so that its not just growing clean out of the water. I intend to vertex paint this texture with a blend mask so that I am able to get interesting edge shapes where it starts to blend between areas of algae and water.
Im really happy that this scene is starting to take shape but there's still a lot of work to do so I better get back to it!
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