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Weekly Blog 8 : Studying Substance Designer and crack decals

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This week, I was working on Designer and the Foliage tool in Unreal Engine.  I was especially working hard on Designer to understand many nodes to create a nice decal. First 2 images are options of the tree size. I'm going to change placement of the trees. Also, trees are strongly affected by the sky atmosphere, so I'm going to change it later, too.   These are images for Decal textures in Substance Designer, and below video is a tutorial which I studied. I have an other texture, but I was following the tutorial videos. So it is not shown on this blog. Second texture image is my original texture node after learning a tutorial video. In general, I was learning how to use Distance, Histogram and Flood fill nodes. Especially, Flood fill helps to create a gradation inside of each box and express a slope. Histogram node is useful in many situation. This node detects the grayscale or color range, and outputs layered image. Distance node is used to make random patterns and delete edge

Weekly Blog 10 : Modeling and UV

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This week, I kept creating UV maps and some other objects.  I've done all UVs this week, so I can start texturing next 2 week. There are 8 materials in total, so I'll finish up 4 materials next week and 8 materials in the next 2 weeks. If  it is quickly done, I'll create a landscape object with Gaea (I have an experience in the other project) and create a HDRI backdrop in Unreal Engine. I can say that everything is on schedule this week, too. The first object which I created is a neon board. I used a curve tool and sweep tool to create tubes. I deleted extra edge loops and attached different materials. I did not create the UV map because I am planning to attach emission maps on them. If not, they just need solid colors. Other objects I created are the wall with doors, signboard, and the wall clock, left light-blue object and circle-shape object. Entrance object is based on the other wall objects.  The most powerful work this week was UV of these 3 objects. I especially focu

Weekly Blog 7 : HDRI backdrop in Unreal Engine

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  This week, I was learning HDRI backdrop and scene capture in Unreal Engine. They are tutorials which I referred to create HDRI backdrop. Both tutorials are so helpful to use HDRI in Unreal Engine. I'm going to simply explain steps to create a HDRI backdrop from the scene in Unreal Engine. 1. Prepare the scene which you want to use as HDRI. 2. Create "Scene Capture Cube", choose texture target itself, and create texture file in the folder in content browser 3. You can move the scene capture cube and change the image to capture. If you want the scene to look bigger, move the cube to a lower position. To do the opposite, move the cube to an upper position.  4. Double click to choose the texture file and change resolution bigger.  5. Right click the texture file and create a static texture. 6. Asset Action > Export it as HDR file. These are general steps to create HDR images from the scene view. This technique is useful to other projects, too. And these will be the steps

Weekly Blog 9 : UV

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This week, I created 5 UV maps out of 6-7 materials (I'm going to add other objects and attach them to new material). I could focus on creating UV maps because I separated some meshes such that I could make UV easily.  I've almost finished creating UV maps, so I'll have time to create 2 more objects. It won't be too hard to create, suggestions are wall clock, neon board (just create curve and sweep) and wall with the door.  Counter objects are big and the player might watch carefully, so I created my own materials for them. If I combined it with other objects, smaller objects might look low-resolution. I was careful to keep the face-shape of UV. And I made the edges horizontal or vertical as possible as I could.   I did not use the align tool because I wanted to group the object UV shells close to each other. When I add textures on a 2D view, it can also be easy to edit the whole object if UV shells are close to each other. Of course, I am always careful with the texel

Weekly Blog 6 : Map for HDRI sky 【CAGD 495】

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       I decided to create a map for HDRI sky because the terrain object of our group looks smaller than I thought. In the rendered video, I saw the horizon of the skybox and I felt that the scene is on an isolated island. I suggested my idea to create HDRI sky and worked on that this week. My first idea was to create material in Sampler and terrain by a terrain generator inside of Unreal Engine. It did not seem to look good, so I decided to use Gaea and studied how to use it. After generating the map mesh and texture, I exported to Maya because I could not read the mesh data in Unreal Engine. Error message showed that the degeneracy Polygon cannot be imported. When I imported it to Maya, there’s a weird shadow on the surface. To solve this problem, I clicked “unlocked normal” in Maya and weird shadows were deleted. Also, I edited the shape of the mesh a little bit in Maya too. I just want to make the horizon hide with sharp mountains, so I decreased the height of the center area such

Weekly Blog 8 : Coffee maker and Stove

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This week, I was creating Stove and Coffee maker. It reached my goal to create a stove and coffee maker. However, it took much longer than I thought. Most of the modeling is finished, so I’ll move to UVing starting next week. Just in case, I was taking extra weeks to work on UV, texturing, and rendering. So, if other models are necessary after creating UV every object, I have time to create several models. I think I can say that it’s following the schedule. For a coffee maker, it took a long time to create details. Each part does not take a long time, but there are several parts. So, I guess I do not feel it took a long time, but as a result, it took longer to finish up. I was especially focusing on the proportion of body and coffee spout. I used a lattice tool and compared their shape carefully. For the other spout, I was using a smooth preview to shape the object. The angle which spouts come from is not horizontal or vertical, so it was hard to create it such that it is symmetrical.

Weekly Blog 5 : Decals 【CAGD 495】

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  This week, I was challenging Substance Designer and Decals. I am a beginner in using Substance Designer and studying with a tutorial, so it took a long time to generate this simple map. The hardest part is to delete the circle which is the border of the clip. To solve this problem, I prepared other circles and attached them to the other channel of the blend node. After making a pattern, I created normal, 2 base color, and opacity (gray scale) output nodes and exported them to Photoshop. After exporting to Photoshop, I merged 2 base color maps and created 1 base color map. I had already decided one base color will be the top and the display style will be overlayed. I think this process was successful and could express cracks that are a little bit burning and shining.  Inside of Unreal Engine, I created decals with attaching base map, Opacity map, normal map, and emission map. There was no plan to put an emission map. But I attached it because the whole scene is in low light intensity