This week was mostly spent polishing my Unreal Engine 4 materials to achieve as high a level of fidelity as possible. During the week I researched further into water shaders to help find direction for my water material. I mostly focused on the opacity and reflection elements, bringing in a depth fade to allow for a varying level of translucency depending on depth. This allowed the shoreline to be translucent while the deep centre of the river was still opaque.
I want to aim with this to use trim sheets and reusable materials, I've tried to develop broad versatile materials where possible. However, this week I tried to specialize my materials a bit more, making materials specifically focused around wood and metal. These are still versatile but I hope offer a better opportunity for high-quality visuals due to the tailored nature of them.
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| Metal material instanced as both bronze and steel. |
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| The same metal material being reused on different assets. |
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| Equipment box and the instance of the wood material used for it. |
One of the larger assets I textured using these materials was the fan in the centre of the room. This was my main test piece for the metal material while developing it. However, the asset does still use a zero to one texture for the blades and candles. Having the asset partially trim sheeted does free up space in the zero to one texture allowing me to get as much out of it as possible though.
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| Fan, in UE4 from above. |
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| Fan, in UE4 from below demonstrating the subsurface scattering on the fan blades. |
While texturing has taken up most of my time this week I have also been sculpting a rendition of the "Blossomajesty" Insect glaive from Monster Hunter: World. Due to the nature of this asset, I do not think it can be textured with trim sheets, at least not at my current skill level. This will instead be textured using a standard zero to one texture within Substance Painter next week. Unlike a number of my high-poly sculpts this module I did the Blossomajesty retopology by hand, the modular nature and shape of the asset made this a relatively straightforward task and allowed me to optimize the geometry where I needed it.
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| Blossomajesty low-poly mesh with high-poly bake within Substance Painter. |
