Gart230 Blog- Week seven, Texturing unique assets

This week I focused on texturing the more complex assets within the scene, this primarily took place within adobe substance painter as this is the texturing software I have most experience in, I had hoped to utilize substance designer more within this module to create textures of my own but I have found that I much prefer editing materials in either substance painter or more commonly within the shader tree in unreal engine as I find that both of these software are much more intuitive and easy to understand than substance designer. As mentioned in a previous blog entry I hope to keep the number of unique textures to an absolute bare minimum and instead focus on tile able textures wherever possible and thus the only assets I decided to create individual textures for were as follows: the curtain, the elevator doors, the benches, the ice machine, the massage beds and the pillars. this is because all these assets have a distinct texture or combination of textures that I feel is best highlighted by the creation of more unique textures with more accurate damage, wear and dirt.

The hardest part about creating textures for this project has been determining the colour of different materials within the scene, as someone who is severely colour deficient I already really struggle to when it comes to this aspect of my work but it has been especially hard on this project as due to many of the reference images being taken in different lights and the film scene having such powerful blue and red lighting as seen below it is incredibly hard to determine the “true” colour of any given object and until the final lighting setup has been implemented I wont really be able to tell how the textures will look so I made sure that I textured the objects in such a way that I could easily go back and tweak the textures to better work with the final lighting or if necessary I could brute force the colour change within engine with by combining the base colour map with a multiply and vector 3 node to tint the final texture but I only want to use this as an absolute last resort.

The most unusual issue I noticed at this stage was that when I brought textures from substance designer into engine they would be significantly darker than shown in substance designer and that the roughness map was comically smooth leading to everything being brought into engine looking incredibly shiny, I deduced that this was most likely due to my export settings within substance designer and so I switched from ‘unreal engine four (packed)’ to ‘document channels + normal + AO (with alpha)’ which seemed to solve the issue although there was some occasional issues still with the roughness map but I generally fixed this in engine with multiply nodes and constant nodes to tone down the strength of the roughness maps without losing any detail. Next week I plan to move away from unique textures and focus on sourcing and implementing the tile able textures that will form the mainstay of the materials within the project.