Games Production: Professional Practice (Week 4)

This week's focus was on finalising assets and the engine imports.

I have had issues with unreal 5 in the past, due to lumen not being compatible with screenspace effects by default, I felt like I lost control with some of my projects, however, I found out how you can re-enable the SSAO within the post process volume. Typing this command into the defaultengine.ini config file, I was able to regain control of the ambient occlusion.

r.Lumen.ScreenProbeGather.ShortRangeAO=0

Screenspace Ambient Occlusion now re-enabled in engine

Setting up emissive via material only on the Material IDs attached to meshes.

Rig imported into the level.

Rig animation test gif

Using the Level sequencer inside unreal, I was able to fulfil the implied functionality like in the concept that was provided in the brief.

Example of level sequencer with keyframes for animation loop

For the props, I was originally going to the crate on its own. Until a friend mentioned to me I could possibly do something on top of crates, so I opted for a bolt and spanner, which would act as narrative as if someone was helping to fix the rig with some old school equipment.
I managed to get all of these within budget of the required 2k tris for the narrative prop budget.

Prop modelling

Prop texturing

Prop UV unwrap sheet

Using the same principle as the lighting rig, I decided to bake some normals on to a plane and use this as the decal atlas for the environment.

This is how the normal map ended up coming out as when exporting from substance painter. I admit, this could have been a bit better optimised in terms of texture space. However, when I was making this atlas, I was looking at my references and there was only so much normal information I could pull out of them, which left some black spaces.

Additionally, I didn't want to fill up too much room as pulling a plane over an atlas can sometimes cause bleed because parts of the bake are too close together, resulting in unwanted overlap.

Floor texture inside Substance Designer

Going along with the consistent texel density, this floor texture I made in Designer came out as a 512.
When looking at my reference from Star Citizen, I saw a few references that had rubber style flooring.
I couldn't remember how to find/create a triangle inside of Designer, so I created a base rounded triangle inside of Photoshop, then imported it into Designer.

I plugged this into a tile sampler, which allowed me to make a pattern in the floor, I then dragged this directly in to the normals. I left the normal intensity as default, mainly because I would come back and edit the normals using the flatten normal node inside of Unreal.