Assembling The Environment

My Blender scene and Unity scene are actually synced through one fbx file I named “blockout”. This was initially for the block-out of the scene but I later on modeled all my assets in the same scene. This way I could model them at exactly the right scale. I could even model it in the right place (where it would end up in the final scene). Once I got the model down, I zero it out, set the pivot right and export it to Unity. In Unity I arranged all the individual models such as the container, the ATM, the garbage etc. Once I get the scale and position right I make a high-poly model, which I UV map and texture.

The block-out and the buildings were the only things I arranged in Blender. I chose to not go with a modular approach since the scale of the scene is not that big and I didn’t see the benefits of it. Also this way I could make some nice dedicated textures for the building.

Working on Materials

For this environment I made 3 different materials in Substance Designer, the other materials are made or are standard in Substance Painter. As far as I know Unity doesn’t support decals natively so I just painted all the decals in the texture. I could justify this to myself knowing that Naughty Dog didn’t use decals until Uncharted 4 (correct me if I am wrong).

My standard workflow in painter goes like this: Getting my bakes right. This is one of the most important things and if not done right it can ruin your whole texture. Once I got that down, I add little details in the normal map with stamps and bake everything in the other maps. (e.g ao map, world space normal map, position map etc.)

When I am satisfied with my maps I start texturing. Most of the time I take standard materials and tweak these until I’m satisfied. After that I add some wear and tear along with some dirt. One smart material that really works great for me is the “sand” smart material from Substance Share. I could really tweak this smart material to how I wanted it to look. As one of the last layers I often add a fill layer, mask it and add a generator for some extra details, noise, dirt and tear.

If the asset has decals I also add these in Substance Painter. It is worth noting that I only used the standard shader from Unity, no fancy stuff there!