Games production: Professional Practice (Week 7)

 This week I started to put my assets into Unreal engine.

Most assets remain untextured at this stage, so I was able to work on the composition of the desk and how I wanted objects to be arranged.
As mentioned in previous posts, I went with this desk as there is a lot more room to experiment with, compared to my second desk option which would have been a bit more confined.

Then referring back to my reference, I put in made a boolean mesh within 3ds max, which would act as the windows would help light come in to the room. The method of lighting I used here helps light up the assets but also gives me a lot more opportunity to experiment with other lights and lighting channels within engine so only certain objects get effected by the lights.
Furthermore, I used a mixture of Exponential Height Fog and the Directional Light to add some Lightshaft Occlusion to the scene, this made the scene look nice and gave a bit more attention to the assets and a feeling of leading lines, from the window to the desk.
Like the last brief, I went ahead and added the Screen Space ambient occlusion with the following commands.
r.Lumen.DiffuseIndirect.SSAO=1
r.Lumen.ScreenProbeGather.ShortRangeAO=0

Even though Unreal 5 has Lumen, which is really good at controlling Material AO, I wanted to find a way to add back SSAO for a bit more control, as I feel the light doesn't hit in certain places and can Lumen sometimes doesn't count AO under objects which should in theory be occluded, even slightly.

Additionally, the sun being part of central american culture is another narrative piece, especially the Inca civilisation, which I will go through in a future post.

Here are some examples of prop texturing, I grouped most assets in by relevancy, I called the texture consisting of the: Map, Telescope, metal compass and compass - 'Navigation props' to me it would make sense, I exported these assets at 2048, not only because it is a set of hero assets, but also the map is a similar size to the desk, which gave me a reason to export at a higher texture resolution.
I used a mixture of generators and hand painting to get the final outcome of these textures. For example on the machete, I used various offsets of scratch masks and to do some final enhancements, I hand painted some scratches. As for the colour, I added some fill layers and added random generators then blurred the final outcome, these colours were too harsh, but toning them down to look like it had been used, like a brushed green, as if it sliced through plants and gathered excess dirt worked well.

Annotation of my theory behind the texturing process.

Layer stack for the handle part of the machete

I also created some custom stamps/alphas for the texturing phase as it was sometimes too complex to draw the shapes or the symmetry did not faithfully stamp how I wanted it to.

Compass needle alpha

Measuring ruler for globe spine

Keyhole Alpha

I exported these directly out of Photoshop and into Substance painter and started applying these to the relevant channels like Height, AO and Base colour.

Machete and Magnifying glass unwrap

Navigation meshes unwrap

Here are some unwrap examples, like mentioned previously, due to the size of some assets, I believe it was justified to put these on a certain sized texture sheet.
To help the scene, I added a brick pillar outside, I did this to make the room seem like it was attached to a building, it worked with the wood pillar, however, just to ground it further I added the brick pillar.
Historically, I have struggled with brick texture making due to their organic nature. So I invested my time into looking up photoscanning and stumbled across Substance Sampler.
I took this picture of brick on the side of a friend's house, making it as square as possible as to make re-alignment easier.

When implementing the texture in to sampler I added a few filters, such as, 'equalize' which helped balance the tone of colours from the high, mid and low range. Furthermore, I added other tools like perspective transform and tiling to help align the texture in order to remove as much of the seam as possible. Content aware fill, just to remove some of the splotches created by the seam. Normal to Height, to change the intensity value (to control later with unreal) and Height to AO, in order to see the AO coming out of the side of the brick from the sampler tessellation.
After I finished with sampler, I took the project and put it inside Designer, this was only to add a 'make it tile' node, in order to shrink down the texture size, as it had grown during the perspective transforming process inside of sampler.