None of the geo I created for my trim sheet is complicated. When everything is baked down to a flat texture there’s no reason to waste time on intricate shapes with dimensionality. Keep it simple stupid! To further decrease my workload I used Modo’s round edge shader to get nice smooth edges in my normal map. This means I don’t have to subdivide anything and therefore I don’t have to care about topology, only silhouette and shape. Almost every part you see is it’s own mesh, but it looks good since Modo’s round edge shader

automatically applies a smooth transition where the pieces overlap. Also don’t bother to model tiny repeating details like holes or bolts, model it once and use it as an alpha in Substance Painter.

This makes it possible to iterate much faster. Reuse alphas from your library. With the new implementation of anchor points it’s perfectly streamlined.

From there it’s all a matter of going through each trim piece one by one, adding details and reusing what’s possible. Create a square plane and align the trim pieces to match. It’s important to refrain from scaling any of the trim parts, since they were created to scale from our low poly. If there isn’t enough space for the trim parts on the baking plane, rescale the baking plane instead. Be as texture efficient as possible and bake that bad boy down to a normal map. I bake the rest in Substance Painter but that’s all preference.

Rendering

The prop is made to be used in a VR game which means it has to be very efficient. I did my best at utilizing my trim sheet everywhere possible to avoid having to model in details and repeat texture information on my trim sheet. It’s only 8,400 tris and all of the textures are 2k, so it’s perfectly suited to work in a game. I used the VXGI branch from Nvidia since it enables me to use their impressive specular solution to generate realtime reflections and HBAO which is a voxel based ambient occlusion method that looks great! It’s much more accurate than the regular SSAO.

To display the prop in unreal I created a level with a showcase blueprint made by Osman from the unreal community. It’s quick and easy to set up and comes with some nice hdri presets. There’s an option to add your own hdris as well. It can be found in this thread on page 3 post 35.

My light setup consists of one key light, one secondary light and 5 tertiary lights. I used a directional light to generate the key lighting coming slightly angled from above with the temperature set to 2000 to simulate some kind of reddish light. The secondary light is a neutral spotlight which illuminates the center of the cockpit. My tertiary lights don’t contribute too much to the overall illumination but instead simulate environmental lights. I made sure to place them so that they contribute to interesting specularity play across the cockpit materials. Also , having warm and cold lights on opposing sides works well to add visual interest.