I Have made lots of progress on the assets for my game and have made a sectioned off piece of map to walk around in and test how everything looks and works in-game. So far I am very happy with it and feel that these assets and textures will definitely be suitable to use in the full game.

I started by looking at the textures I had imported already and how they looked and decided that they looked both too shiny and that the normal maps needed to be more intense than they were; so I decided to look up, firstly, why that might be, and then how to fix the problem.

The solution I found to the low effect normal maps was as shown above. Before connecting the map to the material it's red and blue connectors are multiplied by whatever value I input into 'NormalIntensity' and then it is filtered back together before being applied to the material.
The solution I found to the textures seeming too shiny was based around the actual textures themselves.

I have now created and applied textures to all of the modular building parts and have tested whether I will be able to use them to create different building layouts to be used in the game. It took a few attempts as I had trouble setting the pivot points for each object in a location which would allow me to easily place the different parts within an Actor class in Unreal, however I believe I have successfully done so now and will be able to use these .FBX files for the final thing. My next task will now be to create some different variants for each texture to help with disguising repetition and then I can move on to the rigging and animating of the character.

Today I continued creating the textures for the other assets I have made, combining some when needed. I also moved them into Unreal to see how they looked and make sure they worked correctly.

I have been following tutorials on ways to combine the different texture sheets I have made in Substance Painter into one material to save memory while rendering the character. The process I have followed was to export the different texture sheets from Substance Painter in PNG format and then import them into Substance Designer. I then dragged these different PNGs from the explorer into the graph and hooked up the different inputs into one base material, after applying a greyscale to certain inputs such as Metallic.

After doing this for all the different textures I used a material blend node, and a 'rgb-a_split' that separates the alpha channel, to combine the different texture sheets into one, with the end blend feeding into the output nodes and allowing me to export it all as one large, combined texture instead of the four original ones.

EDIT: I also tested the exported textures in Unreal 4 to make sure that export would function correctly and everything works perfectly, I will definitely be able to use this method for all of my assets to save memory for my game.

Progress on modelling my character for my game is coming along nicely. I have UV unwrapped the whole character and have been testing different basic textures on the model, to see whether the space each section has available is reasonable, as shown above. I think it looks good and will be up to the standard I'm hoping for with just a little more time spent on the textures and a larger texture file used once exported. Problems I noticed and fixed during this process have included:

• Inverted normals on certain mirrored body sections.
• Overlapping UVs that weren't supposed to share texture.
• Hidden faces inside the model from when mirrored that didn't need to be there.

I'm not sure whether I'm going to go into much detail with the textures for this character and I think my current plan is to not expend the time trying to create a face texture and simply leave it blank for now, as I would like to progress on to the animation stage as fast as possible to make sure I'm able to make as many animations as I would like to.

Before I started UV unwrapping the model I did a few rigging tests and uploaded the model to Mixamo to see how well the model would move if rigged by the website.

I uploaded the model with the bottom part of the dressing gown disabled, as it would likely not be rigged correctly by the websites algorithm, and the model appears to move as intended with few visible issues. I will need to rig the hands and dressing gown separately myself, however I believe I should be able to use this software as a good starting point to save time on my project.