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:

Neon Sidewalk (Week 4) - Final textures, materials, decals, final lighting pass & rendering

Schedule:

Week 1 - Blockout in UE5 w/ first lighting pass
Week 2 - Half of high-res and game-res models complete
Week 3 - All models complete, UVs, normal trim, material IDs, & bake test
Week 4 - Final textures, materials, decals, final lighting pass & rendering

Got up to speed from last weeks stuff. Didn't get to finish all materials/textures this week though. The left car has some weird geometry causing light to reflect off of it weirdly. Probably have to remodel certain parts of it in order to fix. Need to spend an extra two or three days to finish things up.

Common Art III - Sprint #4 Delivery

Back on lighting for the remainder of the project. Did the following for this sprint:
- Adjusted lightmap resolutions according to new mesh UVs
- Added fog cards and light shafts to the scene to add more layers and depth to the scene
- Lowered exponential height fog to lessen brightness in VR
- Adjusted lights to better match emissive materials
- Attached lights to blueprint that calls them for interactive progression steps
- Overall adjustments to detail lighting for factory, hallway, and main room

Following screenshots are stills from the experience before the player interacts with the experience:

Neon Sidewalk (Week 3) - All models complete, UVs, normal trim, material IDs, & bake test

Schedule:
Week 1 - Blockout in UE5 w/ first lighting pass

Week 2 - Half of high-res and game-res models complete
Week 3 - All models complete, UVs, normal trim, material IDs, & bake test
Week 4 - Final textures, materials, decals, final lighting pass & rendering

Fell behind this week. Still need to do the following:

- Bike

- Trash bags

- Spikes

- Placing edge decals 

- UVs

- Material IDs