Full Title: Game 3004 Final Major Project - Exterior Work with Decals, Foliage and HDRIs (Week 6) (13/02/2023)
Making Pavement and Parking Decals and HDRis)
With my interior being planned in the previous week I sought it best to finally polish up my exterior in regards to getting that illusive depth feel of being in a diner in the East of California. The wondrous state has much of the cacti and desert scape stretching for miles and I was fortunate enough to stumble upon a solution to avoiding using the world machine. As I have previously mentioned I love world machine honestly it's my bud, but is is mentally taxing on Unreal Engine to load it. Even if I generate a smaller map or make it lower resolution the performance cost is there. But worry not, HDRIs to the rescue. HDRis are great long panoramic images that are taken and stitched together on a very long high res texture. A sphere is then instances and unwraps this around the scene.
Fortunately a website exists where other digital artists have uploaded their HDRis from all around the world for usage. I want to formally thank the people of Poly Count for their resources (Poly Haven, 2023). Moving on I used the free plugin to enable HDRis and dropped them in. It worked like a charm and I was very ecstatic about the result. However to further sell the effect I made a very simple pavement material which was splined out to make a path further into the HDRI. Kind of blending the scape and the road into one.
Making ADS and Billboards for Exterior)
However with on stretching windows to the outside why not capitalise on the view and drop some billboard's about. This was already in the works due to my original motel concept but I kept the flame alive and sorted to repurpose it here. After all, what doesn't date a time period better than cars and political ads? Did you know Nixon absolutely curb stomped the 1979 election? Well now you know. I created a simple trim that had all these, the diner logo and a little sign that might be too far to read giving directions to other places in California.
Asset Import and Placement)
As previously mentioned I greyboxed around 60 high poly assets if not more (the count honestly scares me so I dare not to keep track of all) and needed to drop them into the scene. Here are the shots of that in action and the painstaking placement of all assets I had to go through. Not to mention assigning temporary materials to figure out metalness, roughness or glass and how it'll look.
Overall it was definitely a useful venture since I needed a reference for how things would look in the scene. But it did come at the cost of my own sanity. You would think that Unreal Engine would have a mass apply material tool by now? Well no, but that doesn't mean there isn't a solution. Formal thank you to Michal Orzelek (Orzelek, 2022). His free script lets you select and assign materials to any flurry of assets as long as you highlight the material first before the assets. It struggles of course with multi material objects but it's good for basic ones with only 1. So be sure to grab it!
Applying Materials to Walls, Floors and Ceilings)
Fortunately the process was much easier to import into the engine but way harder to unwrap for my materials. Due to lighting issues I opted to combine all my modular wall assets into a larger overarching wall and then export from Unreal Engine back into 3DSMax. I then simplified the walls into lower poly variants and longer strips before the unwrap.
A lot of the unwrap went relatively easily as the trim sheet was simple to align now the entire mesh was one however to help provide more of a depth effect for the walls I ended up bevelling out the checker middle section. I followed a similar pipeline for my floors and ceiling just without the bevelling as the ceiling itself was levelled into different layers of elevation. This was to break up the tiling and help expand the material into something else less noisy or metallic and make my design march closer to my structure references of diners.
Bibliography:
Poly Haven, poly haven (2023) HDRIs • poly haven, Poly Haven. Available at: https://polyhaven.com/hdris (Accessed: (13/02/2023)
Orzelek, M. (2022) BlutilityTools: Unreal engine 4, Gumroad BlutilityTools: Unreal engine 4. Gumroad . Available at: https://m-orzelek.gumroad.com/l/BlutilityTools_UE4 (Accessed: (13/02/2023)
Dimitrios Savva, J.G. (2022) Fouriesburg Mountain Midday HDRI • poly haven, Poly Haven. Available at: https://polyhaven.com/a/fouriesburg_mountain_midday (Accessed: (13/02/2023)