Week Five

Texturing, Cleanup & Water Spray

My main focus for week five was texturing all of my assets, polishing/cleaning up the scene and building up a selection decals to litter the scene.

Prop Set in Substance

Baking

Before I could start the texturing process I needed to bake back all of my high poly information on to the low poly. I did this in substance painter for all of my meshes. In the baking menu I set the resolution to 2k and selected my high poly for the transfer. The using my ‘high/low’ naming conventions, then bake the information

Texturing

wood

To texture most of the wood I stuck to the same process to maintain continuity in its overall look. I start the process by pulling together my references and having my colour palette on screen to pick from. Once I’m happy with my references I created a new fill layer and colour picked the tone from a wood picture for the base colour. Then on a new layer choose a hue slightly darker and de-saturated then started panting in variation by hand with a low opacity. To get the wood damage effect I used a lighter hue of a fill layer and then applied a smart mask that would use the normal details to drive its effects, taking advantage of my high poly bakes. Then following the same process for creating dirt.

Metal

When texturing the cannon, I took to using an iron smart material, reduced the normal and height influence by 80% so the high poly bake would show through. From here I desaturated the colour and brought up the roughness to help with the worn aesthetic. In order to create some variation, I used a fill layer with a slightly lighter hue and added some damage masks.

Sail

To create the sail I stuck to using procedural tillable fabric, and added wear and dirt layer by layer. Finishing it off by adding in a stencil of across to represent the UK. To create tears in the fabric I added an alpha channel with a mix of hand painting and grunge stencilling.

Tentacle

To create the tentacle’s back I pulled together my references so I could pic and chose which aspect I liked the most of the octopus pictures I had. I started texturing with a fill layer and colour picked a mid-tone red, then followed up with a darker variant with a smart mask, then did the same with a lighter variant with a cloud noise mask to vary the base colour, from here I grabbed my AO bake, and multiplied it into the base colour to help subtly define some of the form I modelled into the creature. Here I started hand panting its warts to add some variation in its colour. Then using the cavity map I in the same fashion as the AO to bring out some of the surface details. The final step for the tentacle back was to make it look like it had a varying reflectiveness based off of the amount of water on its skin, I did this by applying a roughness layer with a tiled clouds noise as its driving factor.

Tentacle texture process

Suckers

The tentacle suckers followed much of the process of the tentacle expect for the flat colour paint around the sucker itself.

Water

When creating the water, I took four water textures from cgtextuers.com two of ocean waves and two of ocean foam. And started layering them over each other with a selection of masks using the AO map and Curvature map to drive the location of the foam on the waves. The final step was to paint over any seams and paint in some variation with the foam.

Unreal engine texture check

Exporting Textures

When exporting out my textures i made sure to set it up as an unreal packed texture set.

making sure that my AO, Roughness and metallic share the same texture.

Cleanup

The next step in the texturing process was to import everything into unreal, and check all of the textures against each other in the scene. This involved setting up some basic materials, and brining in my base colour, normal and packed A,R,M. It was here I realised a couple of my textures were off and some uv maps had anomalies that needed repairing. Mainly my metals were to dark and the wood had some variations that need unifying.

Spray Effect

After the repairs had been completed I moved on to working on the water spray effect to make it look like the water was splashing up against the octopus and the ship, but to also make it look like the tentacle was dripping with water.

I did this by grabbing some splatter textures off of cg textures, taking them into Photoshop and working to merge and change their overall shape until I was happy with 5 different splatters. I then made them black and white so they could be used as alphas on a simple 3x3 plane in unreal. I did this by converting the basic material into a translucent one, attaching the alpha to the base colour and the opacity slot, then changing the plane to a double-sided object. To ad a bit more variation I added a noise node multiplied into the alpha that used the world position to generate its noise, making each splatter unique, even if it was the same object duplicated.

Moss Decal

I made moss as a decal, but remain unsure as to weather or not its presence compliments the scene, but having something organic in the scene was a necessity.