Wallpaper!

I switched to the interior for a bit and started working on the wallpaper, please ignore the rest as they're still placeholders!

Since I want to have parts of it peeled off, I thought the best option is to have the base wall (concrete or planks, concrete in my case) and the wallpaper as separate meshes layered on top of each other. In my case since I already had the mesh for the walls, I just duplicated it, deleted parts of it and offset the whole thing a tiny amount to use as a base for the wallpaper. Then I started adding divisions where necessary and detaching vertices to create the peeling and other random damage in Maya using non-linear deformations Bend and Wave.

Apart from that, I started building up a shader for the wallpaper. Right now I am able to vertex paint the opacity mask to erase parts of the wallpaper and also paint some worn off paper onto the albedo. I'm utilizing the 2-sided texturing node to have different textures on both sides of the wallpaper.I'll probably be using the remaining few vertex channels for dirt and moss, or I might use decals instead... will see!

The wallpaper maps were created procedurally (minus the pattern of course which was a black and white bitmap) in Substance Designer

Interior paintover

I decided to try and do a paint over of part of the interior to test out some ideas and hopefully save some time. I grabbed a screenshot from inside UE4 and painted on top of it in Photoshop. It was quite fun and good exercise, I need to learn and do this more often because it's a lot quicker to try different ideas rather than jumping in and doing it in 3D right away.

Substance Designer procedural wood planks

I thought I'd try to do some procedural rough wood planks as I need it for the porch of the house. This has probably been the hardest and most confusing for me so far, because wood is a lot more complicated compared to the other procedural materials that I have attempted to do before.

Here's what I ended up with:

The main challenge was to create the wood pattern and details that look believable, I don't think I managed to do it very well (and missed some detail out i.e. the round things wood has and I'm too foreign to know the names for) but it does look like wood to some extent, so I'm quite happy with it.

One cool technique I learned was to run a Vertical Noise node through HQ blur, directional blur, levels, then through Gradient Map node and some blends together with Wood Fiber nodes to achieve this kind of wood-ish pattern

Dynamic window shutters

I wanted to have the window shutters be affected by wind as well. Similar to the weathervane, it's driven by the Directional Wind which I am randomly rotating inside the Level Blueprint, so it's consistent with the weathervane.

I needed to set up a blueprint actor with some Physics Constraint components that have fixed rotation and keep the shutters attached to the window frame. There are also Physics Thrusters attached to each of the shutters, which are basically applying force based on the Directional Wind direction and strength, which fakes the windy effect that I want.

I decided to keep one of the shutters fixed in the end, as if it's being held back by the ivy that is growing over it, whereas the other one is able to rotate freely.

Next for this is to add some collision effects such as impact sound and crumbling paint, and maybe try setting up some more clever wind which would shoot some rays at the direction it's blowing and only affect the objects that the rays actually hit i.e. if the wind is blowing from behind the house, the shutters wouldn't be affected because the rays would be blocked by the collision of the house.

Ivy experiments and dynamic weather vane

Have finally moved back home, so I can once again put more time into the project.

I re-made the ivy as a small branch which I can re-use to create ivy clusters, which I then import into the engine and use to dress the scene. Not 100% happy with it at the moment and will be redoing it again at some point, but I decided to keep it for now since it is still an improvement from the last one.

The main difference is that the current one is a simple vertical branch, which I can re-use easily to create ivy clusters, compared to the previous one which was a huge triangle shape vine with lots of leaves, maybe good as a unique piece but not for re-use.

One thing I don't like about the current one is that I made it too short, and I should have pushed the leaves out more to cover the stem and maybe add a bit more leaves in general.

It was an interesting test to try and adapt the "Hero LOD" technique from Epic's Kite Demo trees for the ivy, I think it will work quite well and look nice on close-up shots.

I experimented with some ideas for dressing the scene with the ivy clusters, it will most likely change some more sooner or later, but I wanted to try using more of it:

Another thing I wanted to try was to make the weathervane react to the wind dynamically rather than just sitting there. I grabbed the placeholder that I had and started experimenting with Blueprint. I did a rough pass on it, which more or less works besides being a bit choppy, but I know I can definitely do it better as it's nothing complicated, just need to put more time into it.


The weathervane object is split into 2 (top and bottom), the bottom is static and the top is dynamic, which is driven by the Directional Wind Actor that is set to rotate to random direction at random intervals and also random strength.

More Substance Designer

Obligatory tiles this time, all procedural again. Wanted more dirty/broken abandoned look, can easily make variations as well for vertex blending, for example one without broken tiles, one less or more dirty.

Didn't use much reference for this but tried to make something up. I broke it into layers as usual:

Concrete?Dirt?Dirty concrete? for the base
Tiny stones on top, I did 3 variations to vary the size and color a little bit
Large tiles, a checker pattern was used as a mask to create the white/orange color pattern
Small black tiles which are just a tweaked duplicate of the large tiles
Some of the tiles were broken off by tweaking their mask using a combination of nodes and new mask was created to add some small broken tile pieces on top
Some subtle colour variation on the tiles i.e. yellow / orange stains
Dirt all around the tiles
Dust, a bit all around but mostly spreading out of the cavities