Portfolio, Documentation and Pitch (Aryan Raj Adhikari)
Level Design #1
Since all of the previous phases have been completed without any problems, I move to Unreal Engine to start designing my level for the VR game.
I am not sure if I can use virtual textures for the VR game but it is at least worth trying. I create a material in Unreal Engine that would act as the main virtual texture.
Figure 1 (Creating a virtual texture setup)
For the material to get the signals to perfectly interact with the material so that it blends with the assets, I create runtime virtual texture volumes; one for color and another for world space height.
Figure 2 (Creating runtime virtual textures)
In each of the texture volumes, you change one of them to base color and another for world space height with the following settings enabled. This is normally what you do to create said volumes.
The picture below is the base template for the volumes but what I do is set the virtual texture content of the color volume to the base color, normal, roughness and specular and the height volume to world height. I then set the size of the virtual texture in tiles to 12, size of each virtual texture tile to 4 and leave the border padding as 4 units.
Figure 3 (Virtual texture volume settings)
The runtime texture volume added to the scene will ensure that whatever is inside those bounded box use virtual texturing. To make sure that the bounding box covers the entire landscape, I create two arrays inside the landscape with 2 virtual textures, one for color and one for world height and then click on Set Bounds so that the bound box conforms to the landscape.
Figure 4 (Setting bounds for landscape)
I create a very simple material for the landscape that will utilize the sand tile texture. Not a pretty complicated setup as I opt to plug the texture images to their corresponding nodes for the entire landscape material.
Figure 5 (Creating a material for the landscape)
Figure 6 (Creating a material for the debris pile)
I figured I may have messed up somewhere when setting up the materials for the debris pile as it appears super lit and the virtual textures do not seem to work. Now, I am faced with two options; whether to keep trying to fix the virtual textures under the strict deadline or ditch this and maybe attempt a world aligned blend shader that adds a sand overlay on the stylized assets. Hopefully, I will figure it out by tomorrow.