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Mini-Breakdown:

Hey peopleI have () UE4 project () hugely inspired by the behemoth tank in the Battlefield 1 DLC, and BF1's train behemoth itself.It's been quite a quick turnaround so far, with most of the work shown being done over a long weekend with my place to myself, some peace and quiet. Substance Painter has been a huge help in speeding up mask-making.I was looking at Soviet and German armoured trains, and figured it would be a neat thing to do, and probably something good to have on my 'folio as making a medium or large scale asset can be a different thing altogether from 90% of props.So I'm thinking that some people on here, mostly new/aspiring artists, might not have much experience with making large-scale stuff like this. I know I didn't before my first job, so here's something that explains my process with this asset.First thing I did was whip up a base painted metal material in Substance Designer. I was after something with subtle variation in the albedo, but it needed to remain a light grey to work with colour tinting properly when I got it into Unreal. There's a bit of normal information, faint bumps, dents, scratches, but most of the normal map stuff comes later. And as you'd expect, I made it quite glossy so that I could dirty and rough it up later. It looks like it has super obvious tiling when you see it here, but it seems to work in-engine, so the roughness has dirt/scratches even up close:To add most of the normal detail, I'm floating quads and strips of quads on top of the main meshes (as a different Material ID) - the material used here is a deferred decal material in UE, affecting Normal and Roughness. So the bolts, welds, etc on the texture appear raised and also aren't quite as shiny as what's underneath. I still have plenty of space on this sheet I can use in the future:Now what makes the most impact would be the UV2 masks each piece of the train uses. Each segment has a unique unwrap on UV channel 2 (UV1 just supports the tiling painted metal and the trim sheet) that I've used for an AO bake, as well as greyscale masks - 1 for blending between the base metal and a tiling rust, and 1 for adding roughness (as well as a slight brown/orange tint) over the top.Irritatingly, I don't think there's a way to paint on UV channels other than 1 in Substance Painter, so what I've been doing is just duplicating all my train segments, moving UV2 UVs to UV1, then exporting them out separately just to take into Painter. For actually painting these masks - especially the roughness bland masks - I didn't worry too much about getting them too neat, I just made sure there was variation and things like drips/leaks that would have a significant visual impact when it's all in the Unreal Material. Painter is also what I used to bake the UV2 AO - I just used a copy of the exported mesh as the "High Poly".Here's an example of the roughness UV2 mask for the largest carriage of my train:I'd recommend channel-packing masks like these to make Tech Artists like you, as they're just black and white maps.And finally, here's how my Max scene looks as of right now - you can see my multi-material in action, with the first material being a checker so all the parts that use the tiling painted metal have the same density, another for seeing the trim sheet details, etc. My decal sheet texture isn't showing up on this PC, but those floating grey squares are where the signage/painted decals are. There are still some unique-unwrapped assets in grey that I have yet to finish up, but those are just made as normal props and placed at appropriate points along the train asset:Hope this helps someoneThis sort of process can work pretty well for lots of larger assets, vehicles, etc. Sorry this has been half Showcase, half Tech Talk