Professional Brief Practice (Codemasters): Week 1

For my first 3 week project I chose the DIRT Rally by Codemasters inspired brief, where I'm required to recreate a 25m strip of road from google maps in Crete. I think I will learn the most from this brief as it will challenge me to learn new skills the most.

I thought this would be a great opportunity to learn LOD's and foliage and even making rubble; either by baking or modelling modular rubble (which I have been excited to make for ages!). This project will definitely require a lot less modelling than I have previously done but that time will be made up by creating textures in Substance Designer and learning new ways to create terrain and an organic environment.

I wanted to start by making a rough-block out today and a plan. I wanted to give creating a terrain a go so I had a go at messing with it in UE4 to see how it works. This made me realise I should work from the main man-made structures first and build outwards. I think the block-out went well considering I haven't used this before but I will definitely look further into this work-flow.

After getting a general feel for what I wanted I was stuck on where to go next. I was toying with the thought that this project was going to be too hard, as I am challenging myself to learn a lot of new things at once. After thinking about what I want to do and talking to my tutors I decided to stick with it, even if it doesn't go to plan at least I will have learnt skills that I wouldn't have if I had chosen another brief.

I decided as I only have 3 weeks on this project, I'm going to focus on the point where the bins and rubble are and expand outwards. This will give me an opportunity to try everything I want to, without feeling overwhelmed by the larger landscape. When a player is racing around a track the first thing the player would see going around the corner is the outer bend. This is where I want to focus my most attention.

Sculpting Rocks

A good place to start of course, Rocks. I hated making rocks in the past as a low-poly model but today I made a few in Zbrush and found it very therapeutic. I have only started making three very different shapes that I can block together later.

I started off making a rough block out in 3ds Max and took those into Zbrush. I then divided the sub  level and used the TrimSmoothBorder brush to make flat edges. I then DynaMeshed the basic shape and zremeshed it to make the mesh more manageable. This made it easier to go in and add some more details by using a square alpha with the same brush to create a weathered rock effect. I don't want to go into too greater detail as the rocks won't be the main focal point of the environment.

Today I worked on finishing up my rocks and started making a tileable rock texture. As I'm not completely comfortable yet with Substance Designer, I decided I wanted to try a technique that was used in the original DIRT Rally game, sculpting a tileable texture in ZBrush. I had a look at a few ways to do this but I pieced it together as I went along (I mainly followed this video for setting up and sculpting texture in ZBrush https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pdh0peG4oys&t=566s). I then painted it with the normal brush in ZBrush and exported it. I used this to bake it down onto a plane in Substance Painter so I could then texture and export it out into Unreal.

Substance Designer - Ground Dirt

I have used Designer in the past making very basic textures but I still don't feel very confident with it yet. I decided to start making a ground texture towards the end of the day having a look at a Substance tutorial to really learn the absolute basics so I can say I'm comfortable with using substance designer in the future.

I started off following the tutorial quite tightly, to fully understand why each step was taken. After getting to grips with it I used my reference photos to tweak and adapt the rocks and detail to fit what I was trying to achieve for my ground dirt.

I'm sure this may need tweaking down the line but for now I wanted to put it into unreal so I could set up the material for painting onto the terrain. This took some time as it was a lot of trial and error to work out how to set it up right. I am yet to find out if there is a more efficient way to set this up but for now using the landscape layer blend node for each separate texture has worked out fine.

After the material was set up I had a quick go at painting some areas to get and idea of how it works. I think it has turned out pretty well considering I'm very new to this workflow.