Working on a Remington 700 weapon with a bipod for the scene. I haven't made any guns before or know much about them, so this was some interesting hard-surface practice. In the end I decided not to worry much about whether it is all accurate or not as it will only be a prop in the scene.
I thought it'd be a good idea to start participating more in the Weekly Substance Challenge over on Polycount, to practice Substance Designer. Here's my first pass on Asphalt material for this week, all of it is procedural
Some more progress on the interior downstairs. Been playing around with the post process as well, mainly using the announcement trailer of The Last Of Us and also few areas in the game as reference. I liked the trailer because it has some green/yellow color bouncing around but overall it's all fairly neutral without any strong color tints or overly bright and saturated colors, which I thought would look nice here.
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
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.
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
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.
