Landscape and Bricks:
The past week has been kind of slow as I’ve been busy with a few other things (like playing Apex Legends… :P). I did some work on detail pieces and protrusions on the cathedral. Then I had a go at making some initial textures in Substance Designer.
I put in a tessellated landscape blending material in, ready to take on a few more textures when they are ready. The muddy one you see is one I created for my Feudal Japan project. I think I like the wet, reddish look though, so I might keep it like that but give it more variety with a second texture.
Facade
I did figure out how I am going to approach the facade of the buildings though. Or at least those of the ones in the distance, still not certain about the mausoleums. I decided I will make some basic brick textures, make a few variations and vertex paint detail on top. But that will be kind of too flat and boring. As such I am going to make some decal planes to go on top, and those I will model in Zbrush, the bake between two flat planes in Substance Designer and color/texture them. If I manage to make some interesting stone ornaments and create a good normal map out of it, it should give plenty of definition.
The blue bits are where the alpha cards/decals are gonna go. I’ll most likely scatter more than what is seen above, but that is just an initial sketch of the idea to guide me along the way. The photos you see to the right and left are what I will try to sculpt and place on those alpha cards.
And here you can see the brick texture I quickly made in Substance Designer. They are famous, brick textures, aren’t they. Or I feel more like infamous. Everyone, pro or amateur alike always has a point of their career where they make one. I guess this is another one of mine going down in the records.
Bricks
I did a parallax occlusion shader for the bricks in Unreal. It gave it a very good dimension but then I decided I don’t want to bother spending ages making a vertex paint blending material that is also parallax occluded. Not only will it be super expensive performance wise, but also from the distance shot I am going for, you can’t really notice the detail it gives. It was a nice exercise nonetheless.
I think I might spend more time in Substance Designer, making a few more brick variant textures. A few maybe quite different than the ones above. More smooth, with jarring whitish color and greater variety in roughness. I’ll then blend those on patches on top to give even more variety. And if it still looks flat I might even invest in a few patches of brickwork that is actual geometry. I’ll make them sort of modular/kit bashing in fashion and then scatter detail with them on the facades.
Until next time, when I hope I will have more exciting than now progress,
Pete.