Prototype, Test
1. 3D model design choices
2. Texturing
3. Intro to Unreal engine
4. Importing .FBX into Unreal Engine & Substance to Unreal workflow
5. Unreal and Unity
6. obstacles
1. 3D model design choices
Workflow
The models is going to be a background piece in the final scene so I kept the design as plain as possible. For this project I decided it will serve a better purpose to the final look if I focus of textures.
Because of the cloth part of the model I decided to start in Zbrush. I used the default female model for the body by editing it into the correct pose. Then I sculpted the cloth on top of the shoulders from scratch.
Cloth
I thought about smoothing the surface of the cloth to make it look more realistic but I though it might be better to leave it a bit rough and hard looking because I would use a glass material later on to make it transparent. This will add extra detail to the texture making it feel like it is a solid structure build around the body instead of actual cloth. It also fits the Sci-fi aesthetic better.
Glasses
The main design choice I had t make at this stage was to make a final decision on the face of the figure. All that was required was to cover her eyes somehow while keeping the theme in mind. I wanted to keep the idea of removing the features from her face (nose, mouth, eyes, ears) that way the face will not distract the viewer from the action inside the scene and this figure shouldn’t feel human. I decided to use the headset as a cover for the eyes because it looks like it could have cameras inside and I can use the screen to add textures and make it more interesting.
2. Texturing
The textures on the pictures in this post are not the final textures. I approached texturing this model by keeping in mind that I want to test importing different types of textures into Unreal. The first few tries did not look good enough and the statue looked completely metal without any detail. I still wanted the metal and plastic to be the main materials but I wanted it to look more sophisticated so I played around with the smart materials.
I decided to add the glowing circle on the glass screen because it gives off the feeling of being watched and glowing red lights usually mean danger.
3. Intro to Unreal engine
The first thing I learned when opening the default scene was that I it was not going to work on my PC.
I immediately got a performance warning so I had to find out how to make it workable. I restarted with custom settings and changed a few things also removing most of the lighting in the scene and the terrain. In the process I learned about Raytracing, Nanites and how lighting should be set up in Unreal.
Raytracing documentation:
Nanites documentation:
There were many tutorials about lighting a scene but most things seemed simple. The only thing that seemed interesting was the shadow casting:
4. Importing .FBX into Unreal Engine & Substance to Unreal workflow
First thing to note when importing is that if I import as .FBX I get the materials automatically exported and assigned which was very useful.
The interesting part was importing the textures. I am glad I spend some time in year 2 to learn a bit about creating shaders in Unity so the concept was not completely new to me. I find it more useful to build up my own shader instead of choosing from a drop down of shaders and assigning textures outside of the material editor. This workflow allows me to easily build and edit things like opacity and height maps because I can see exactly how the textures are being connected.
Assigning textures
I exported from substance with the Unreal Engine 4 default settings but I also added a height map export.
The base color, normals and roughness maps seemed straightforward so I challenged myself by adding emission, opacity and height to the texture set. I have had problems with these maps before in Unity so I didn’t expect it to be so easy in Unreal.
I found there are 2 ways to add a height map – either turn it into displacement or use it as normal map. Both methods are simple but I had to build the nodes myself. In the end I left it as a normal map because the complexity really wasn’t needed for the model it was more for experiment purposes.
The opacity was very easy because the automatic export from Substance sets it up correctly already as an Alpha to the Base map.
5. Unreal and Unity
The experience I have from Unity definitely helped me in grasping most of the UI and sped up the process of getting comfortable with the editor. However I seem many thing that so far feel more intuitive and simply easier to use in Unreal.
First off the starting setup feels much better especially if I want to test how things look really quick. When importing materials they look almost the same way I exported them from Substance which is a huge time saver. I have had trouble matching textures in Unity because I had to manually build up the lighting setting. On the other had I understand the community discussion about having the default Unreal lighting so often in games that it becomes visibly repetitive and lazy.
The material editor is a great bonus for someone who already knows how to generally use a game engine. It seems easier at first the way that Unity is set up so that you can drag and drop the correct textures In the correct spot but the moment you need to deviate from the default shader it gets more complicated. Starting out with a material editor forces you to learn how shaders really work and it is a great advantage when creating good textures.
Otherwise the layout if the UI feels similar and easy to use.
6. obstacles
retopology
I something useful I didn’t know before because I was using the default model from Zbrush. When I exported it to Maya for retopology it exported with most of the vertecies cut off from each other. I couldn’t find a way to fix it on export from Zbrush but I found out there is a way to merge vertecies by distance which in my case was 0 and this way perfectly join the model fast. However this took some time to find.
Unreal saving
I tried saving my progress in the scene I was testing and it reset the scene and kept asking me to save it as something instead of overriding the current save. I solved it by saving the scene right after I set up the basic lighting and then adding anything new.
Roughness map
This is something simple but I didn’t know how exactly the roughness map is setup in the material at first but I found out I have to assign the R G B channels to AO Roughness and Metal respectively.
World Partition
World partition was something completely new to me and the reason I had to go and research it is because I had a problem where the objects I add to my scene would disappear from the editor and they would also be locked in the outliner. In Unreal engine there is a World Partition editor which is a map view of the whole scene where you can choose which areas get loaded. I understand this is useful for bigger projects where I would be working on a part of a bigger Open world environment.
Color diffuse
This is not necessarily a problem but it is something I am used to coming from Unity. I expected to have a ready parameter that can allow me to adjust the texture color over the Base map I’ve imported but I had to build that up myself.
Model inside Unreal with working materials.
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