Yr3 Week 8: Shop progress

This week has been quite stressful so far. As this project is something I'd chosen to learn new things and experiment with different styles, I've come in to a lot of obstacles and spent a lot of time trying to solve problems and probably creating even more for myself at the same time.

After eventually figuring out better ways of aligning objects in UE4, I moved on to creating the rest of my assets for the scene.

As well as creating extra assets for my scene, I also decided to create back pieces for my building. A lot of suggestions had recommended that I don't model the back or just do it as one object, however I thought making it modular like the rest of the building would be good practice and wouldn't take too long. I simply duplicated the existing pieces and simplified them as they will not be seen as much as the front of the building, i plan to use a few of the window pieces on the back just for some element of detail.

After modelling all of the pieces I assembled them in 3DS Max, meaning I was able to create the assets to a correct scale and tweak any designs easily. The roof I created is an individual object which I made by attaching all of the walls on a separate cloned model and extruding it out, i detached the object and placed it on top of my modular pieces. I was considering making the roof modularly too, but as it is something that is going to be seen very little, I decided against this idea.

After modelling I unwrapped all of my objects, which took quite a long time as I wanted to decided which objects shared similar texture sheets and which used tileables and ensure that everything lined up once the textures were applied. Above you can see an image of some placeholder textures which I applied in 3DS Max, simply to help me see my material IDs and scale/align the UVs as closely as I could.

For some reason I then tried to create a high poly version to bake down on top of the low poly to add the pillars and stone detailing, though I am apparently an idiot and didn't realise that because I'm using tileable textures to use normal maps with them I would have to create multiple of the same tileable texture, each with a different normal map, which completely defeated the point of me deciding to use tileables in the first place, so disappointingly my building is not going to be quite as detailed as I would have liked it to be.

I plan on having my textures hopefully done by the middle of next week and then have the remaining few days left to make it all look nice in engine. I have decided that I'd like to learn substance designer to create some of my materials as it will be nice to explore the program and this is a good chance for me to do so.