Environment Art: An October Update

October 24, 2016

Environment Art: An October Update

Texturing/Level Editing Workflow

We learned a great deal in just a short month. Working between Unreal Engine, Substance Designer, and every now and then Maya. Starting with shapes in Unreal known as "BSP's". Basically they're shapes that can either be additive or subtractive geometric primitives. Meaning these are not modeled at all in Maya. They are used as base prototyping builds to achieve the feel of the scale and playability of an environment.

From there we export the base BSPs into Maya to achieve the proper scale. Then model over them with more detailed mesh shapes. We were instructed to add two breakup pieces into the scene. One being the radiator and the other being a pillar I chose.

Although it's not the most detailed reference image it gives us a basis on where to go later on in class. Thankfully we got to fully light this at the end of the month.

Substance Designer & Its Tools

I grew pretty fond of node based non destructive editors when we first used Unreal's nodes in Art Creation for Games. However, within my first few days in Substance Designer I was extremely motivated by the powerful tools it provided. Best texture creation program I've used (Albeit I've only used two).

For our first assignment we had to create 8 materials in one week. Ceramic, Wood flooring, Bricks, Aged Concrete, Stucco, Metal Flooring, Stone Flooring (in any pattern), and a choice of our own. I chose to work a crocodile leather although these 3 were my absolute favorites. I'll better represent how we created them soon enough.

Bricks

Dusty Wooden Floorboards

Patterned Tiles

To put it simply Designer is a gratifying program if you set up your nodes to work for you. Nodes can help scale, transform, skew, warp, and so much more. In the case of the ceramic tiles I had to create a custom alpha set in photoshop and then import and transform them about the tiles until it worked properly. But again, a really motivating process. These are considered single tileable materials, there are no other materials that are added to them. Therefore they are perfect for the next assignment.

Multi Materials

Multi materials is Substance's way of rewarding you with even better results when you have singular textures to then combine them. Now, since Designer works entirely off of multiple masking techniques to achieve the end result multi materials are no different. Other than they are colored rather than grayscale. A multi material can range from 2+ materials combined.