In UE, a quick drop in test for the base wood material.

I was doing my texturing largely in Substance Painter. Photoshop was used every once in a while just to get some quick fixes finished. Most texturing was based off of the stock materials that Allegorithmic delivers. I modified them enough to suit my needs in terms of colors, scale, or how visible the wooden ring patterns were. I was putting together my own saved custom materials against a bunch of the materials that I saw in the photos. Once I got one that was looking good I quite frankly duplicated it and made a quick color tint so that it would look different enough that the difference would read and then saved it out. I wanted to get those base materials in there and playing against the lighting and as quickly as possible to see how the whole thing was sitting together.

As I mentioned I have worked around other computer graphics artists for a long time now and one of things that I’m used to doing in art reviews is the ability to A/B new versions of an asset. I tried to bring a very little bit of that process to this environment build. I set myself up with a bunch of saved camera positions that showed off the space and also covered the lighting conditions and different materials. It gave me a place to go back to to understand my current changes and whether I liked the direction they were going.

Modeling

The modeling workflow is pretty straightforward. I don’t have any grand insights to offer anyone here. I’m not a good enough modeler to have reinvented the wheel or come up with any new tips or tricks. My modeling process is fairly basic with a heavy dose of trial and error on some of the more flowy shapes (i.e. the central staircase). Basically I would take the lo-res shapes from the block out and treat that like the bounding box. I knew that I could model whatever I needed as long as it fit inside that shape. If there were specific connection points to maintain I made note of those as well. Most everything was done in Maya. Occasionally I would jump over to Modo for a few pieces as little experiments. The goal was to get a rough pass of everything in pretty quick.

My plan was to drop in early temp lighting as soon as possible. I wanted something that would be representative of the cubbyholes and negative spaces to get a read on how the whole thing was looking. Because of the size of the space it helped keep me from getting too wrapped up in details too early on in any one piece. (I wasn’t always successful here but some things are just fun to model and the time just slips away.) I swept through front to back and top to bottom looking at the whole thing and trying to get a sense of where there were bare spots. I was constantly discovering pieces that had no block out shape or could be recombined or split up differently. It was a very cyclical and organic process. Sometimes it felt like it would never end but it was just a lot of pretty fundamental basics to get all the shapes together.

The one thing that did continue to evolve as I was modeling was another key aspect of the class. The goal was to was to get you to understand what was a hero piece, what was a modular piece and what details or shapes could be captured in trim sheets. I was building trim sheets in parallel to see the detail that the technique captures. It was really interesting to see the levels of high-frequency visual detail and decorative carvings show up really well when I got it in engine. I was pretty excited by the results.

This was my first exposure to proper trim sheets. I did not understand just how far you could push them. The class and the information Clinton shared was a real eye opener for me. I started allocating space in a sheet for various patterns I wanted to capture. They were all modeled in Maya. The bakes happened in substance. In the end I cut the sheet in half which is what made it into the engine. The removed elements were promoted to their own assets with a different texturing solution. I’m sure I didn’t take enough advantage of the technique in this build; they were still so new to me. I’ll need to go back with fresh eyes to see where else I can put them to best use.