Environment Creation / week one journal

From my current knowledge (before research was undertaken) environment creation was where the buildings, trees, crates, lighting and shading effects all came together in order to create an area that a character could interact with and build upon the games story world.

images of other environments here

During the first assessment, which served as a reminder and kind of first step into environment creation. what i found out early was that i still struggled to understand Quixel so decided to dedicate most of the week to watching plural sight videos to reintroduce myself to how substance painter and how Unreal engine functioned.

Before any further work was done i watched through the tutorials provided and created a set of notes.

Substance notes: here

tutorial notes: here

plural sight links to beginners classes for both substance and unreal

First stage was finding inspiration and deciding what kind of modular environment i wanted to make. As i know i'm still very new to 3D software and wanted to keep it basic enough that i wouldn't have too many obvious areas. So with that in mind i decided on a simple entrance way to a house.

The layout was clean and i could clearly see how each piece would need to be constructed and felt confident that i could achieve the modelling at least.

Scaling each to their correct unit, i made sure that each i at the time did not understand the scripts and why it was needed?? but i ended up exporting each part of the modular kit as a separate fbx file....

it wasn't until the end of the second week after painfully going back and forth that i had a peer explain to me that the scripting would allow for an easier and quicker workflow between 3ds max and unreal.

( Above is the image of reference below is the textured modular kit created. )

For texturing i ended up watching another plural sight class; one in which explained texturing and how to go about it in substance.

This helped a lot as i learnt how to properly set out my work space in substance painter and use the projection tool effectively and make my texture look realistic and fit with the rest of the room.

A texture atlas is an image that contains several smaller images, it is where these smaller images are all textures for different mesh's. a website that helped me understand why they where useful for games is: https://gamedevelopment.tutsplus.com/articles/using-texture-atlas-in-order-to-optimize-your-game--cms-26783

Substance painter

wooden floor allowed me to try image projection onto a flat plane. results where nice however could be improved with having the floorboards sculpted in the future.

with the books i messed around with settings more and tried out masks on different materials, helping the speed in which i could paint onto the model and not worry so heavily on staying within the uvs.

Unreal engine

my first attempt at loading the kit into unreal was... eventful. i thought to try a first person project and immediately saw a difference between unreal lighting and the lighting from substance. which affected how my textures appeared.

the more i started going through and applying the textures in unreal i started to come to a conclusion that i must have exported out the wrong maps. as their was a vast difference in the look of painted smudged walls from substance and the dark concrete ones that unreal showed.

i saved the project but decided to try again as i was unhappy with this look. the results where nicer :)

i tried to take further care of how i was lighting the interior of the hallway. however reached an issue as i could not find the right option to set up the trigger at the door once in the blueprint editor. this is something i will come back and revise another day.

as for trim sheets.. i'm still looking into them but started with this article and now looking further: https://80.lv/articles/tiling-textures-in-game-environments/

Thank you for reading!