Gart230 Blog- Week eight, Tile able textures 

This week my main focus was sourcing and editing a set of tile able textures that will be used on the vast majority of the assets within the level, the four main materials that I required are a brick material (which is used on most of the walls and other architectural features such as pillars), a stone tile texture which covers basically all surfaces people could potentially walk on such as the floor, stairs, steps, mezzanine etc as well as being used as a skirting board around the base of most architectural features, a subtle marble tiled texture to be used in and around each of the pools and finally I need a worn aged wood texture for various beams as well as the main body of the ceiling which is a complex wooden structure. there are a couple other minor tile able textures that were required such as a dark black wood and a chrome but these are used to a much lesser degree than the main four. For simplicities sake the materials I used were predominantly those built into substance designer which I migrated across to unreal engine using the substance plugin allowing sbsar files to be used within unreal engine. I then took the maps from these textures and using the shader graph I adapted them to fit the look that I wanted, the base textures I used were as follows:

Wood: Rotten wood

Brick: Midlothian Matt Terracotta

Marble Tiles: White Marble

Stone Tile: Tiles Flat Offset

The main issue I was having was the minor variations in these tile able textures that was needed for certain objects, for example on the walls surrounding the right fire escape at the far end of the room there are slightly lighter bricks every few rows this effect is clearly noticeable in reference images and thus I wanted to replicate it in my environment. Instead of starting from scratch creating a unique brick texture I instead decided to duplicate the already existing tile able brick texture and attempt to recreate this effect in engine using the shader graph. After a fair bit of trial and error I was finally able to recreate this effect by adding a texture sample of a simple black to white and back to black gradient which lightened the relevant bricks just enough to match the reference images without going through the hassle of editing the base material itself.

I did a similar thing with the marble pool texture as the base texture was just a repeating marble pattern so I took the AO map from my tile texture as it had black lines where which marked out rough tiles shapes and added it to the base colour map to make the texture look like marble tiles as opposed to just a flat marble texture. I did the same thing with the roughness and normal map to increase the realism of the marble tiles and ensure that the light interacted with the tiles edges correctly.

Over the next week I intend to properly light the scene which will include my first full-scale integration of raytracing so I am incredibly apprehensive as to what will happen once raytracing is enable, I hope the performance hit isn’t too large and that my current textures work well within a ray traced environment.