Into Unreal

Getting Things Into Unreal Engine

Now that I have 80% of my assets modelled, I should really start getting thing's set up in engine. To be completely honest, I should have done these at the very beginning. Once I had put my current assets in, I needed a couple of tiling textures to use for the large architectural pieces. I needed a sandstone wall texture, and a stone tile texture. For this, I created them in Substance Designer. I'm not going to pretend like I'm a texture artist, because I'm not. I followed two tutorials and changed some parameters around to get closer to what I needed.

For the sandstone texture, I followed 'Daniel's Game Art' - DRY CEMENT in Substance Designer tutorial', and then tweaked the gradients to get the colour I wanted. I also messed around with the other parameters for noise etc. For the floor tiles texture, I followed 'Kaiyson's Substance Designer - Tiles Floor Material', and did a similar thing.

Currently, I am happy with the sandstone texture, but the floor texture, I feel like it doesn't have enough roughness detail I want and it's a bit too stylized for my liking. I might try and modify the graph to add noise and roughness, or create a different material that better suits my environment.

Sandstone Material (Substance Designer)

Floor Tiles (Substance Designer)

For the Sandstone material, I am just tiling it using texcoord. Since I do have baked detail information from my high poly mesh, I am instancing from the master sandstone material, and blending the details together. This way, I am reusing a base colour, roughness and normals texture for multiple meshes. This means that the tiling normal is being used as a detail normal, so even when you're super close up to the mesh, you get lots of rich detail.

I am still unsure on whether the way I'm doing things are efficient or not. For the floor tiles, I currently have it set to world aligned material, so that the steps and the floor seamlessly flow. I'm not too sure how expensive that is, or if there is a better way to do it. I'm also not sure on whether I'm using tiling textures correctly or not since I have to create multiple instances of the master material, does that also increase drawcall significantly as if I was using unique textures anyways?

Detail Normal Closeup

Seamless Textures In Engine (First Pass)

For the wall, I need to create decals for the painting. As for the columns, in my reference, they also have painting going around them, but I'm pretty sure decals only work on a plane and I will have to research whether they can wrap around curved surfances or not. If decals will not work on the columns, I will have to think about creating a unique material for them, and texturing the painting in Substance Designer using textures.

What I also want to add into the environment is candles littered around that produce light. I wouldn't mind adding some particle effects too such as fog, maybe fireflies, smoke from the candles, fire effect, and god rays from the moon coming through the skylight would be a nice touch.