Lots of progress

Test Map Download

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.

The problem was being caused by the choice of texture sheets to export from Substance Painter and import into Unreal. I found a thread (answers.unrealengine.com/questions/141454/setting-up-a-meterial-in-ue4-made-in-substance-pai.html) where a user suggested using:

• BaseColour
• Metallic
• Normal
• Specular
• Glossiness

Instead of the usual:

• BaseColour
• Metallic
• Roughness
• Normal
• AmbientOcclusion

Making these changes involved manually merging three different texture sheets with each other in GIMP and exporting the textures out it as one file, which wasn't too difficult aside from stitching the normals correctly.

As you can see below, the results where very clear, with the Planter and floor looking much nicer with both the intensified normals and new textures. I'll probably change the planters Base Colour to make it a little lighter before moving it to the full game.

When it comes to importing all of these assets into the full game I will need to re-export some of the other textures, such as the textures for the lamppost, to help make them less shiny and looks nicer in the scene.
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​After I was happy with those changes I used Substance Painter to texture the next asset that needed importing, the rubbish bin. I used an 'old rubber' base material, changing the grease level effect to be much more rough in appearance. Next I used a self-made stencil of a bin sign that I made using a picture from the internet and a gold brush with the metallic slider high and the roughness reasonably low to stencil in the stick figure on the sides and the gold lines above and below it. On this same layer I added a white mask and used various different brushes to add scratches and wear to the gold. I then added another two layers that I used to add both dirt around the bottom of the bin and scratches all over the bin in different depths and sizes.

The final step was texturing the inside of the bin. For this I had to create my own substance material in Substance Designer, using an image I found on the internet and a website that lets you create a normal map from a black and white image.

For the full game I have more colours for buildings created already and will make more variants on how they look, to keep the scene from looking too repetitive as the one above does. I will also redo a lot of the texture exports to make sure that they look as they're supposed to when imported into Unreal 4.