Artefact, Documentation and Presentation (Aryan Raj Adhikari)
Unreal Shenanigans
After finishing texturing most of the individual assets inside Substance Painter, I head to Unreal Engine. All of the work left is now in UE which first began with importing all of the texture maps created. I made separate organized files for different textures, meshes and material setups. Please people, organize your UE files. When working in a game studio with other artists, it is very important to ensure that you follow the standard nomenclature and organize files properly so that others don't get muddled up.
Figure 1 (Importing static low poly assets)
Since we are now dealing with individual assets that have individual textures that don't require vertex painting or tiling, we have to create a separate material shader setup for the same. I quickly create a new master material for props that can easily be used with its instances and also allows us to control the full extent of the parameters up for use.
The main thing that stands out here is that I use a new node called MakeMaterialAttributes before the final output node. This node allows you to package all of the final outputs together and returns a single output that can be connected to the master output. Kudos to people over at Epic as they have documented it beautifully in their developer logs on their website.
Figure 2 (Unreal documentation on Material Attributes, (Epic Developer, n.d.))
The other node setups are very similar to the other material setups I have created. It includes all of the material functions minus the foliage and water functions as it is literally not necessary for this material setup.
Figure 3 (Final material setup for the stylized props)
After creating an instance of the master material, I assign it to the wooden logs and start replacing the blockout with the polished final versions of it. It's a fun process when you get to see your old blockouts be replaced with a beautiful latest version of it. I start doing the same for other remaining props; create materials, assign them and replace the blockouts.
Figure 4 (Replacing the blockouts)
I would say this is pretty much the final phase of the set-dressing of the environment art workflow before we head on to lighting and rendering of the scene. Still a lot more to do but I am hopeful and it is turning out to look real good!
