Week 12 - Model Fever
All I can say about this week is that I'm extremely glad I took the time to do that paint over from last weeks update. That concept gave me a bunch of ideas that I could use to upgrade what was already in the level. The first item that I addressed was the boat structural elements and beams. These were delightfully straightforward to create because the shapes are pretty basic and I created the tiling texture taking my wooden board texture and editing it so it could be used as a singular wood fibre texture that I could edit a touch more in engine to get that nice colour variation. The other area that I wanted to experiment with was the addition of a foreground in the scene because I liked the cinematic quality that it achieved in the paint-over. This was as simple as creating a plane with a painted max on 2048 X 1024 texture sheet. The part that took a little longer was later down the line when I wanted to get a focal blur effect on the texture as well as editing the placement of the silhouetted objects in an arrangement that would best suit the overall framing of the scene.
To get myself back into the swing of texturing, I started work on some smaller assets that I knew shouldn't take an enormously long time to texture building some confidence in the overall scene as I went. The technique I used to create the box was to reuse the texture that I created for the boat walls in substance and then give it and fruit some TLC with old school hand painting to get the nice contrast between highlighted wear and tear with some slight implied lighting. Something that I have started implementing in my texture workflow is the bottom to top gradient on most assets that seems to add that nice effect that is prominent in a lot of popular stylised art.
After I got back into the swing of texturing, I returned to finish off the chair asset by adding some tiling textures to the pillow features and mostly hand painting the remainder of the wicker pieces. After going through with some colour variation layer masks, I was happy to call this asset just about finished. A really small change to the assets placement was slightly rotating it instead of the asset being head on. The effect that I was getting made the asset look less 3D and chair like to more 2D and appeared to look like a digestive biscuit. The slight rotation now I feel adds way more dimension and shows off that its a chair.
This is where the fun was for me this week which involved modelling a bunch more assets and improving the assets that were already in the scene to the point where they just needed texturing. Getting in on all these little details really helped sell the greater story of the scene and gave it that extra 3 Dimensional detail that it really needed to sell the more cluttered aesthetic. Im currently much more sold now on the level of detail that the scene is getting.
This next image will likely be foreshadowing what you can expect from next weeks update because I now need to take every asset that I've added to the scene to textured completion. I've started finding cool ways of speeding up my texturing workflow by focusing only on what I get achieve with just using Tiling textures. For instance the bath tub, I created a simple old Iron-like metal in substance designer and a streaky brushed copper metal for the feet and the bath tub was more or less completed. I would then take this into substance painter for some colour correction and a little more polish to the details and gradients to tie everything together. I find getting areas like edge wear and implied AO to be much easier to achieve within substance painter rather than designer which is why I naturally gravitate towards both. The beauty of this method now however is that I have a cool metal-like texture that I can now apply to other assets speeding up the overall texturing of the scene.
The main aim for my project with regards to the time-frame that I am fighting against is to get everything into the level to a point where it just needs polishing by the end of the next couple of weeks. The reason for this is that I want to start messing around inside UE4 more with creating areas of movement in the scene to really start bringing the static environments to life. I'm not as confident in my workflow to get this done and will likely require a lot of iteration and experimentation to get pleasing results, so I would like to make sure I have as much time as I can get to do these things.
This being said, I would like break up the texturing process with some extra work in engine. For instance, this week I've been experimenting with a glass material shader that has an inside glowing property because I would like to get these hanging bottles to act as either a primary or secondary light source. This combined with an alternate firefly effect I think could achieve a more pleasing result.
Next week, alongside texturing, I'd like to look into getting at least the boat tilting to work with the inclusion of some tiling elements. However, as the scene is currently, I'd say it's time to get moving on the moving. Well see how it goes in next weeks update!