Breakdown of Textures used to compose final television asset

While creating assets for the scene, my primary texturing tool was the Quixel suite. Using ddo allowed me to work through texturing the assets very quickly, while maintaining good quality. Often I can find myself noodling too much with each little part of texturing an asset, especially larger or more complex ones. Before I textured each asset, I used a material mask that I rendered out of Mightybake that labeled each type of material on the asset with a color. Then using the mask, I found that I was quickly able to take on each section of the mesh one at a time and keep a clear vision of moving on to each part while texturing. At the end, I would go back and add smaller detail touches and overlays to get the final material result.

Laundromat Washing Machine rendered in Marmoset

Blueprints

As I use the UE4 engine more and more, there are more cases where a blueprint will make life much easier and will quicken production speed. I know very little about coding or programming, but knowing some basics can help make simple, yet very useful blueprints. While developing a scene, it’s vital to keep in mind that the composition, placement of assets, or lighting may change during its evolution. The better assets are being managed, the easier time you will have as an artist. Even just grouping asset with blueprints can be a big help.

Some of the first assets I remade from the former scene were the laundromat machines (washers and dryers), each of which had doors attached. While placing these assets in the scene I found it quickly frustrating to continue to place a door on each mesh and rotate it to a degree that looked best. In order to combat this I created a blueprint to set a random rotation on the door every time the blueprint is placed in the scene. Then after I tested a few versions of how far it opened, I clamped the number to make sure the door would never open enough to clip into the object next to or in front of it. I also set the random angle that the door was open to favor being closed or nearly closed. This allowed me to quickly move the asset in the scene until I was happy where it was placed and then not have to worry about the accompanying door attachment.