Game Scene Final Project Post

    For our project, my team and I decided to recreate the first moon from Lethal Company, called Experimentation. On the team, I took up the role of the texture artist! Aside from that, I was also responsible for creating most of the modular elements, like the scaffolding found all over Lethal Company as well as Modular Pieces to build the buildings and facility interior.

Another model I made, and by far my favorite, was the snare flea!

I was also responsible for most of the textures within the scene. Due to the simplistic nature of Lethal Company's textures, as well as the aggressive post-processing, recreating the textures of Lethal proved to be quite easy. Because of this, I used a variety of trim sheets to quickly texture the large amount of assets we had created.

Because of the simple nature of Lethal Company's textures, I also took this project as an opportunity to learn how to more effectively use Substance Designer. 

Creating this bumpy metal texture proved easier than I thought it would! I began with a stretched-out circle, then rotated it and used it to create a tiling pattern. By repeating this process with a flipped shape and adding an offset, I was able to achieve that alternating pattern of angled bumps that I was going for!

For this fence material, I had to follow a tutorial that I remembered using during my Digital Texturing Class. From this I learned a lot about the edge detect, histogram scan, and curve nodes!

These next two materials are my favorites of the ones I made from scratch! Starting with the bricks, I started with a basic brick generator. Then to eat away at the shape of the bricks and create some variance, I blended in a noise map of dots using the Add Sub blending mode.

Next, to add some variance to the color of the bricks, I utilized a flood fill to random greyscale node and used the result as a mask to blend between two different brick colors. I really like the result!

Finally, to achieve a good-looking normal map, I blended some gaussian spots over the original brick mask. Then a denser noise map beneath that to get the noisy surface of the mortar between the bricks, although that part is a bit hard to see in these images. Using these techniques, I got to the final normal map.

Here is the final result in Designer and In-Engine respectively! Some of the detail was lost during the aggressive post-processing, but I still think that most of the original look shines through.

Finally, my favorite and proudest texture I made for this project: the honeycomb!

Designer did not come with a built-in tiling hexagon map, so I had to look online for how to accomplish that. This solution I found gave me a great result!

After beveling the original mask a couple times and blending the results, I was able to create the basic tiling honeycomb texture! By using the more intense bevel with a darker color, I was able to add some more depth to the individual cells. However, I wasn't satisfied here, as I wanted to randomly fill some of the cells with a honey texture.

To create the base honey texture, I found a liquid noise generator in Designer. After turning up the contrast a bit, I got a nice blend between the yellow and orange colors I had selected.

Next, to isolate a few hexagons as a mask, I again used the flood fill to random greyscale node. Followed up with a threshold node, I could isolate all of the hexagons above a certain greyscale value to decide how many of them would be filled with honey. Afterwards, I added another bevel to give it some depth.

Using that mask to blend the honey texture with the honeycomb, I ended with this as the final base color!

(looking back, I should have added the honey mask to the normal map on top of the honeycomb, but oh well)

Finally, here it is in Designer and In-Engine! I used the honey mask as a metallic map to give them a more liquid-y shimmer.

Again, some of the original detail is lost to post-processing, but I'm still really happy with the result!

This experience was an incredibly journey for me in levelling up my texturing capabilities. Before this project, I was scared of using Substance Designer, and now texturing in Designer might be my favorite parts of the 3D process! I hope to keep learning and growing over the break and hopefully create even cooler textures in future projects!

Another thing I learned during this project is how critical it is to plan for texturing ahead of time. Many of our models were by themselves in their own isolated scenes, so laying out UVs in texture sets required re-importing models into fewer scenes and re-exporting them with new UVs back to Unreal. We also had to retro-actively go back and organize our huge asset list into texture sets. This cost us some time, but our biggest time sink was re-exporting models to Unreal. Oftentimes they'd come in with incorrect pivots or transforms, and we had to waste a lot of time making tweaks in Maya and re-exporting to restore them back to their original transform.

In future projects, I'll be sure to let my lead know that we need to plan out texture sets ahead of time, group models in fewer scenes organized by texture sets, and set strict standards for exporting models (front of the model facing the "front" view in maya, cleared history, frozen transform, naming convention). This should streamline exporting as well as the texturing process, avoiding the same sort of time loss we experienced during our final sprint!