While last week I predominantly worked on tileable textures and trim sheets this week my work was mainly on zero to one textures. At the start of the week, I began texturing the Blossomajesty Insect Glaive. Being able to cross-reference my work with the real in-game assets helped guide me however I did run in trouble figuring out how to build some of the detail, in particular the molten blade.
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| Screenshot of original glaive within Monster Hunter: World | . |
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| Screenshot of recreation within Unreal Engine 4. |
Another asset I textured this week was the Gammoth head-crest for above the fireplace, Gammoth only appears in older 3DS games so I could not gather a lot about the finner details from the in-game assets so instead, I turned to reference of tusks and skulls. Situated above an open fire there would doubtless be a build-up of smoke and soot so I blackened the underside of the head-crest as well.
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| Gammoth head-crest textured in the scene. |
I also developed textures for a couple of more minor assets as well including the horns and table. Like the other assets this week, these are also simple zero to one textures created in Substance Painter.
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| Textured Horn. |
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| Texture table asset. |
Finally, I created a small flame to be used for the multiple candles scattered throughout the scene. Studying similar effects in games I found most opted for an animated texture that always faced the player instead of a particle effect. I initially felt this would be a simple thing to execute but making the flame always face the player proved surprisingly laborious. Unreal Engine 4 features a component called material billboard what takes a material and loads it into the scene always facing the player, this seems perfect on paper but was ultimately useless to me. The problem with the material billboard was that it rotated the material in all axis so that it faced straight on against the camera meaning if the camera was above or below the flame it would lay on its side instead of standing up. I needed a solution that would allow me to rotate the material on only a single axis and there wasn't a way to do this with the material billboard. Searching online turned up Epic games writing on a way to achieve a similar effect within the material editor. However, it was written for an older version of UE4 and used a custom expression node and while I was able to get the material partially working I could not properly control the way the material rotated. The documentation was also light on explanation for what nodes within the material were doing making it hard to reverse engineer and identify the problems. Finally, I applied the material to a plane within an actor and used the even graph to rotated the static mesh based on the camera. After some troubleshooting, this worked and could be reused. As this solution involves updating the rotation every tick I feel the solution is suboptimal though.
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| Event Graph for the small candle flame. |
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| The candle flame in use on the fan. |
