Digital Mercs » Materials

That’s a Wrap!

Johnny — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 09:29:32 +0000

While this is not the most visually appealing post on the blog, I wanted to give my self a small pat on the back for finishing the UVW unwrap on the Riviera… I’ve never been a fan of unwrapping models, I find it tedious. Thankfully Jon & Bradd showed me some pelt mapping techniques I had not tried before, and the process was sped up quite a bit!

It might not be apparent in this images, but those checkerboards are ruler straight! Thanks Pelt Map!!!

I should hopefully be posting final, textured, renders and in-engine screen shots of this asset by Sunday night.

[This post was edited by Johnny on 2/5/2010]

Update…

Bradd — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 09:01:13 +0000

There’s been a lot of progress in different areas recently. My next focus is getting this truck finished. I put another couple hours into it, a lot of which was spent scratching my head figuring out the best plan of attack. Now things are moving right along and the end (of modeling) is in sight.
Last night I put some work into the warehouse and its textures. Turns out it’s a pretty major part of the game. Deserves some serious TLC.

Material Tests

Bradd — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 00:06:05 +0000

The nature of our project lends itself well to lots of tiling assets. The trick to making tiling assets believable, it to make them look like unique versions of the same thing. In the same way that no two manholes on a New York City street would collect exactly the same wear, We don’t want any two tiled assets in our game to look like exact copies.

To this end I’ve been building some simple tests in Unreal to get the most mileage out of our props.

To give you some background on the layout of this test scene, it’s just a bunch of simple BSP cubes. The floor and back wall have a neutral grey material with no specularity applied to them. You’ll see the color of the floor and back wall change though. This is because the level is lit with a single light with Lightmass (Global Illumination) set to 6 bounces. Since the only real color in the scene is red, everything else gets chroma-shifted in that direction.

First off, the scene with a 128×128 Brick texture applied to everything:

Next, the same material with a grunge mask, locked to the world position.

You can see that the grunge mask adds a bit of nice detail to the otherwise plain surface, but still it’s fairly obvious that it is just an overlaid texture.

Finally, the same material with a grunge mask locked to the world position, and a detail mask of a larger tiling scale locket to the world position. This detail mask is designed to add detail near the ground to make it look as if dirt and grime have collected there.

In the course of putting together this project, I made another personal discovery, Global illumination looks a little silly when the entire scene is dominated by one color (In this case, Red.) In actual application this shouldn’t be an issue.

Finally, here’s the material network I created for this demo. The only thing not shown in this picture are the scale values in the TexCoord nodes. I played with the values to make the grunge appear more subtle, and to make the detail layer fit the block height.