Professional Brief Practice (Codemasters): Week 2

I started day one of the second week pretty confidentially. I was ready to make my road texture and it was going pretty well. I started off by blending grunge maps together and then went on to adding small stones into the road texture.

I worked into each map and extracted the maps as I had learnt prior. Although when I had put it into engine it looked completely different. I had no idea what had caused it and had a feeling the ambient occlusions just wasn't being exported. I switched it off in Substance Painter and that was exactly how it looked in UE4!

I had no idea how this potato look had happened. I am guessing I had worked into the ambient occlusion channel thinking it was the base colour by accident. This made a huge problem as UE4 is designed to be physically accurate by default. This means it would be more realistic and better looking to not have AO in direct light (Where as on my environment the road has a direct light onto it). 

Another student advised to blend my AO and base colour together in unreal and I was so relieved it worked, because I had been slowly getting ill throughout the day and my brain had turned to mush. It did end up looking quite harsh so I decided later to blend what I had of the AO in the base colour in Designer so I could get a more accurate look by using gradient maps onto it.

Splines

I was happy to have had that problem solved and out the way especially as I had fallen extremely ill the next day. I still managed to drag myself into the computer labs to work on it. I decided I would try working on something I thought would be a bit 'easier' and wouldn't take too much of my brain power.

After talking to my tutor I decided I would give splines a go for the road, this is how it is done in most studios for this sort of thing as it gives you more control. I just needed to tile the texture and import a strip of road and it worked perfectly! I am planning on covering seams and edges with mesh skirts and decals towards the end of the project but for now I was quite happy with the result.

Towards the end of Tuesday I started blocking out the low poly for the Dustbins and blocking out the bridge a bit more. I want to try and add more to my block out to get a better feel to the environment. I'm hoping to get the bins, gabions, wall and rubbish at least started before the end of the week so I can start on plants, mesh skirts and decals next week (that's the aim anyway).

Substance Designer

For the last couple of days I worked on making a bunch of high priority textures for my environment from the knowledge I had gained from the previous tutorial. I find that you can achieve the same result in a number of different ways so it doesn't matter too much in what order you create parts of the material. If I get time I want to work back into these as they didn't come out quite how I wanted them but I feel they do read well in engine.

The hole in the concrete just for now as I want to make a decal instead to make it less repetitive and more realistic. I also want to make decals for the stains and dirt down the back of the bridge as it tiles horrendously. I'm going to try blending some of the concrete material I have just made into parts of the bridge too to add variation to take that tiling away.

For the gabions I'm planning on making a box with a wire alpha and then having a bunch of decimated rocks inside. I was also wanting to make this mesh tile so I could turn it into a spline to use along the environment. 

I found this tutorial online on how to make a chain-link fence by Get Learnt (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5Qs56zgKz0&t=2242s). I followed it step by step to see what exactly he did to create this effect even though the wire I wanted to make was chicken wire. I then implemented the shape I wanted to use afterwards and began to edit and manipulate the shapes to create what I wanted. 

I then used a Perlin Noise to warp the wired to make it more natural and believable looking.

Although they were to scale realistically, when I put them onto my mesh they were so small and thin you could hardly notice them at all. You couldn't see them at all a couple of metres away, which would be pointless for a racing game. For the sake of the players view I went back into Designer and did some tweaking here and there to make the mesh thicker.

Now you can see them from quite a distance. Even though I warped the material in designer it still looks quite uniform, so I plan to make the box mesh around the rock quite warped to help create the netted cage effect.

Caged Rocks

I was very excited to give my idea a go for the caged rocks. I didn't know if it was going to work well (or at all) but I wanted to give it a try. I sculpted a handful of rock in zbrush and then brought them into 3ds Max. I used the MassFX tool to make all the rocks dynamic and the boxes static.

I then played the animation to make the rocks fall into the box. After I had enough rocks in a good position I baked the animation and deleted the key frames so I was left with a floating cube of rocks.

As there are gaps and holes in the middle of the mesh creating unnecessary geometry I put a cube inside the shape keeping only the main rock silhouettes exposed and decimated the mesh. I think it may need some further tweaking but after unwrapping a part of the mesh and baking it it came out surprisingly well.

Now I just need to distort the wired mesh around the rocks and work out how on earth to tile it but for now I'm happy (and surprised) with how the rocks came out.