Then I started adding them into the scene. UE4 has very nice foliage painting tool that helped to paint grass and flowers. For the ivy and beard moss this was not the optimal way so I just simply modeled and placed them by hand in 3ds max. Trees were also added with foliage painting tool.

Building Materials

No matter how old you are, it’s always nice to break things. It´s actually not that trivial to do that in virtual space because you have to think about different forces, materials and how everything affects the end results.

Then I started to think how different materials behave. Metals would rust or become oxidized. Tiles and similar parts could fall down and break. Fabric materials would collect moisture and become heavy and fall down. Sunlight is making things to get really dry, damage different surfaces and desaturate some colors. Rain water would find it’s way into tight spaces and causes different effects depending on the material like rust and moss. I also found out that one key aspect was that outside things are usually more contact with water and other nature forces. Interior parts on the other hand have a lot of dirt and sand because wind is moving dry ground and usually it gets inside the buildings if the windows and doors are open. This was my base idea what I wanted to achieve with UE4 materials and my textures.

For texturing I used Substance Designer a lot. I also tried to re-use the same graph and it was pretty easy to do so thanks to material ID map. I used Photoshop for basic models because it’s fast and I have a lot of experience with it. With every tool I wanted to keep the PBR workflow clean and didn’t want to add too much damage details like moss because my UE4 materials could handle that. I also made few generic looping textures that I could use with different masks and to make generic materials.