Sci-Fi Modular Assets (Week 3) - Integrating, Lighting, Final Renders

Schedule:

Week 1 - Material 1 (Floor + Grate) & Displacement Test in Engine
Week 2 - Material 2 (Wall)
Week 3 - Integrating materials into Unreal Engine 5, Lighting, & Renders

Displacement is cool, but not that useful for a game asset pipeline. Time probably took about the same as if I were to model it, with the upside being that all of this is being driven through materials done in Substance Designer, so I can go back and iterate on it non-destructively.

Learned that nanite objects don't like masked or translucent materials, which limits the amount of optimization I can do with displacement. Which is why my wall materials are missing the glass part of the window. Also that, the gradient on the height map causes lines to render when displacing too far.

Upon review, the floor frames aren't as reflective as much as I would like them to be. Overall, I'm pretty satisfied with everything else.

Common Art III - Final Delivery

Final touches to lighting! Changed all light intensities to response to a timeline curve in each step blueprint. For Step 4, had to make the main lights flicker off and then turn back on to highlight the scan animation. Made lights along pipes to turn on according to material progression in Steps 2 and 5. Adjusted lights in the End Screen level and for new matte-paintings. And most importantly, set the record of fastest speed-run for the experience at 15 seconds.

Below are the nodes I had to set up for Step 4 lighting. Basically, I replaced all the Set Visible nodes with Set Intensity ones and controlled the target light's intensity using a timeline curve. Most of the timelines have a linear curve to ramp up each light, but I also included a flicker effect in Step 4 with an example screenshot below.

Step 4 Blueprint

Timeline for Flicker Effect

Step 5 was one of the more complex blueprints because it had more lights being animated. Again, same process: attached a Sequence > Timeline > Set Intensity. Inside the timeline, I created a float track for each light I'm targeting and animating independently from each other. Then, I hook it up all accordingly.

Step 5 Blueprint

Lights for Matte Paintings

Sci-Fi Modular Assets (Week 2) - Material 2 (Wall)

Schedule:
Week 1 - Material 1 (Floor + Grate) & Displacement Test in Engine
Week 2 - Material 2 (Wall)
Week 3 - Integrating materials into Unreal Engine 5, Lighting, & Renders

Wanted to finish the Wall Material this week, but ran out of time. Height map is mostly done then need to texture it. Tested it in UE5 just to see how it's looks. There seems to be a weird line-distortion happening and I'm not sure why. I planned for Week 3 to be a catch-up week, as well as, setting aside some time for rendering.

Common Art III - Sprint #5 Delivery

 Made adjustments to lighting based on feedback:
- Lights now properly bounce onto Player VR hands near the window and emissives
- Decreased lighting intensity for emissive plugin-switches
- Increased lighting intensity for emissive pipe materials
- Step 2 (Arm-station plugin) now triggers an additional light to slightly brighten up the room
- Adjusted lights in hallway
- Adjusted lights in end-screen level
- Increased attenuation effect for purple light in Step 7

The following images are stills that do not accurately represent final lighting (actual lighting is brighter once player is in VR).

Sci-Fi Modular Assets (Week 1) - Material 1 (Floor + Grate) & Displacement Test

Schedule:
Week 1 - Material 1 (Floor + Grate) & Displacement Test in Engine
Week 2 - Material 2 (Wall)
Week 3 - Integrating materials into Unreal Engine 5, Lighting, & Renders

Finished the Floor material and tested it in engine with displacement. The displacement worked surprisingly well from the height map. Some of the values of the material seem to be off once I imported into engine. Most likely due to the display settings of the Substance file. I will look into it later and try to fix it. Unfortunately, didn't have enough time to do the grate material, but it should be simple. Check out the full breakdown of this in the Research section!

Research Project: Sci-Fi Modular Assets Using Substance Designer

Sci-Fi Modular Assets

Goal is to learn Substance Designer workflow and how to create modular assets without modeling.

Schedule:
Week 1 - Material 1 (Floor + Grate) & Displacement Test in Engine
Week 2 - Material 2 (Wall)
Week 3 - Integrating materials into Unreal Engine 5, Lighting, & Renders

Lowering the scope of this project compared to the initial pitch because we only have 3 weeks and I need to make some time to finish up my previous projects. Instead of doing a full environment, I'll be doing a diorama slice which will be one floor and wall material that I'll displace using the height information to create geometry in Unreal Engine 5. References are from Javier Perez (material artist).

Video demonstration of how tesselation works in UE4, I'll be translating this into UE5 with displacement methods instead:

I plan on presenting the materials in UE5 together similar to how Marchand Venter displayed his scene below: