When I model assets, I try and pay attention to which pieces will be the ‘hero’ elements (will be seen up close or front and centre) and make sure that their geometry holds up accordingly. Of course, performance is key here, so the lower poly count, the better, but really bad faceting can make or break a scene! I also get rid of any unseen faces that will only add to your poly count, or waste UV space. Again though, I’m only new to all this gaming stuff, so maybe my techniques aren’t as great as I think!?! If you have any words of wisdom, please… let me know!

Materials

Building the materials has become one of my favorite things to do in Unreal. I admit, when I saw some of the complex node networks people were building just for a simple surface, I freaked out and thought I wouldn’t cope. But thankfully, after watching some great tutorials on youtube, I quickly learnt that Quixel works in a way to really help streamline that whole process. You have the beauty of Unreal presets when using DDO (Quixel’s texturing program), Unreal lighting set-ups in 3DO (Quixel’s realtime renderer), and you can add/remove whichever maps you require. Next, the ‘RGB packing’ technique has been an invaluable bit of information I have learned that has really streamlined the way I do things. For any given object, I generally end up with 3 textures: Albedo, my RGB packed masks image, and a normal map. I have a bit of a system now where I have Roughness in the R channel, Metalness in G, and any particular sort of mask I require in B (AO, paint layer, rusty patches, etc). * See above tutorial pics for general work flow.

One of the things I love in Unreal is the Emissive element of a material. I’ve had a lot of fun experimenting with this feature, and when combined with a post-process bloom effect, I find it a great way of adding a bit of life and interest to an otherwise flat texture. Being a station platform, the emissive feature worked great on making those little details pop just that little bit more.