After texturing all the smaller buildings and assets, it was time to tackle the big assets, starting with the gate, one of the main features of my planned renders and overall environment, and I had a lot of fun texturing it, whilst it looks similar to the housing buildings due to the palette, I tried to format it like I did in the thumbnailing for it, largest parts are the brightest, smallest parts are the darkest.
Geometry wise, the Gate is split into two parts; GateFoundation, and GateOverlay, with there being side panels that are completely different geometry and a GlassLamp. Before I was actually able to texture these, I needed to re-UV unwrap it, as all the parts of the final model were different unlinked geometry, so I joined them and re-UV’ed, even if the geometry was unjoined, here is how they look!
Re-UV
When all combined, it looks like this!
Render Tests!
At this stage, I needed to start playing around with my render options so that I could get the best outcome for my immersive environment, I already had a few angles previously that I had referenced here, but considering mostly everything at this point is textured, I needed to see how everything looked.
This was the flat render I got when I rendered without any lighting, except the world light, and it looks, meh. So I experimented with a bit of lighting and created a little lamp thingy, to project my lighting better. I also decided to try and lower the strength of the world light, so that the new lights I put in place could be more apparent and even suffice as a focal point for the viewer.
I am a lot happier with this version, there still could be a few tweaks for it, and I probably will paintover with some extra effects/lighting to improve this render, I may experiment with framing in the limited time I have at the moment, shall have to see. At the same time, I don’t think im going to be able to get this into unreal engine by the time the deadline arrives. I will most likely do that after submission, just to see how it could’ve looked, but there is no way I can get it sorted by the deadline unfortunately. So I will solely have to rely on blender Cycles and post processing to get the most amount of detail possible in this piece.
As mentioned last week, I found a texture structure that I really enjoyed using for creating my buildings textures, so this week, I just followed the same process, and went full quickfire on making them, here is what I managed to do!
Glass
They all look quite similar, which I am incredibly happy about, as that is exactly what I hoped to achieve when it came to making my buildings, all of them looking similar, whilst each having unique quirks infatuated my ideas and belief in my aesthetic for this project! I think the arrows and carbon fibre look help to achieve a stylised look in my opinion.
Optimisation!
Ok so during this time, I made the mistake of exporting all my textures in 4k resolution, and whilst that ran fine on my pc at home, my laptop was struggling hard to compile all the shaders on launch, so I copied my project and made a version where all the textures are exclusively 1080p, just incase I need to made adjustments or renders on there. I also opted to making a folder of 2k textures, as there were some cases were 4k was just not needed, e.g. the tunnel, or the supports for the tunnels.
All the folders but rawspp files support this layout of management, which has helped sososos much in keeping all my texture work organised, and im really happy I layed everything out this way, as it has helped me and saved so much time in navigating through my texture application process, especially considering that all the raw texture files have the header DefaultMaterial, I managed to avoid any form of overwriting by doing this.
Whilst not as detailed as Week 12, a lot has been done this week, I’m planning on tackling the gate and the main building of the piece in the next week, as well as including some work regarding rendering. Unfortunately the deadline for this project is fast approaching (for me), so I am not entirely sure that I’ll be able to get stuff into Unreal at this stage, but I will try my hardest to get it done! If I cant, ill simply have to make sure the quality of my blender renders is impecable.
Starting off the new year, comes textures to buildings, at last! I wanted to work my way towards the harder buildings to texture, so instinctively, I started with the glass tunnel as a tunnel of glass is always a pivotal way to convince viewers that futurism is a concept in this enviroment. Luckily for me, substance painter has a glass smart material that worked wonders! I opted to using that over blenders Glass BSDF as if I wanted to add any more details to the glass, I could be able to do that without issue.
Now this glass tunnel also included the supports, as I feel going for a whole glass look to really reaaaaally push the futurism.
To get my glass to actually be seethrough or opaque, there were a few settings I had to change, mainly, changing alpha settings to allow light to passthrough the texture, both in the actual node settings itself and in additional viewport settings for the texture.
With these settings tweaked! It now means the glass is seethrough and will also display that way in the final render, including be able to see the other objects and their textures through it, wonderful! Also during this process, my lecturer gave me some criticisms about the whole tunnel and supports being made of glass. Whilst yes it was futuristic, it also seemed a bit tacky, so I decided to separate the supports from the tunnel model, and I took them all into substance painter at once to give them a really strong look. I went for a strong black as the base colour, and made use of a smart mask to add height to the object, giving it that damaged look.
I’m a massive fan of how you can disable base colour and only enable options such as height and normal, or even metallic, it really added a whole new layer of depth to my understanding of substance painter, and I really hope to make greater use of it throughout the rest of this project. I’m very optimistic about what I can do for these models.
A Flat and a Bore
Straight after I had finished texturing the tunnels, came the texturing of the big block of flats that I had created, and tried really hard to make look as futuristic as possible. For my main buildings, like the terrain, I have a specific colour palette that I am making use of, as I feel these colours do represent the futurism type, and are all sleak colours in their own way.
I also learnt that before you do anything in regards to texturing a model, you need to bake that model in substance, so it can determine the values of all the edittable functions, such as normal, world space normal, height, thickness, etc. I personally find the baking screen quite mesmerising.
Whilst texturing this building, theres one tool that completely changed everything for texturing, and that is polyfill. Polyfill made it so that I could accurately plan the shifts in colour for my building, as well as organise the shapes I wanted to create based off my UV map, it saved me so much time and grief as supposed to hand painting features, and even then it could’ve looked off.
I was incredibly happy with how effective and efficient it was at making the basecolour process feel, however I dont think I could’ve used this tool for the terrain base colour, that needed to be hand painted. As for this though, worked like a charm.
Continuing on from the basecolour, I wanted to experiment with using alphas to add more specific details and colours to my texture. However, I was unable to use it with a mask sadly, I’m not exactly sure as to why it didn’t allow me to properly use a masked alpha, so I had to resort to other methods, including a paint along path brush that drew my alpha in a straight line as I wanted it to be, and it actually turned out better than if I was doing it with masks.
Grey lines represent the paths.
Now finally, came all the normals, height, bump, materially textury look and all that to finalise the look of the fancy flats that had been ridden with decay. The plating look also comes from a smart material! Carbon fibre: I removed the base colour, normal and metallic feature of it, and made sure to assign its mask to base colour, that way the height still influences the texture, but it looks flat and more like plating as supposed to an exterior additive.
Overall, quite happy with this! and I learned an absolute ton about substance painter working on this, I am going to apply this same process to all the other buildings I am making as it was quick, efficient and honestly quite fun to work like that, so I shall apply it to all the other buildings I am going to work on, in differing styles and matters.
I also managed to texture the tunnel systems that go into the sides of the canyon terrain, I had a different approach to that, I did a more painted shtick for it of the darker colours in the palette, and I didn’t add the carbon fibre material to it, as it already looked quite metallic, sorta like camoish at the same time too, very industrialised look compared to the flats.
Quite a lot of work done for this week, and a lot of things that I have learnt from my substance painter findings! I will continue to expand on these in the coming weeks I recon, hoping to quickfire through the rest of the buildings so I can move onto rendering! See you in Week 13!
