Year 3 and into the deep!

So my first blog post of a new year at Uni! So it’s year 3 and in the deep end of it all. It’s time to think of FMP ideas and to most likely scrap everything! But that’ll be a different blog post. For now I’m going to talk about the first project we were giving which was our PBR Texture Project.

So with the release of UE4 I was pretty excited for this project. I wanted to get used to UE4 and have a look at what it has to offer me. Hopefully this time it isn’t as buggy. However what is this metalness and roughness. When I first heard this I really didn’t understand what was going on. It was like I was starting from the beginning again. Well I actually was, but you know what I mean. Although I had a face of pure confusion while hearing about these metalness and roughness maps I felt like it was the start of something new.

 

It was fitting. Don't judge

So having got this project I went out and took some textures. Now I didn’t really know what was going on and ended up taking a trip to Yo!Sushi for food. Cause who doesn’t like sushi?! Even so headed back and started working on my textures. I was ready to start making tileable textures to apply to the texture balls in UE4. We were giving a level template which had the texture balls already named. We just had to create our own textures to apply to the balls.

So in having all the tileable textures done it was time to make the metalness and roughness maps. So to start with I was randomly change the values between white and black and all the grey in-between until I created the right material. I added in some normal onto certain materials such as rust to give it that bit more of a definition. I thought I would understand metalness and roughness but even at the end of the project I’m still wondering how it works. When I thought it was right and it’d make iron look metal it made it look matte. Which confused me. In the end I just kept tweaking the textures until they were right within engine. It’s not a good way to go about it but hopefully with time I will be able to figure it out. I really enjoyed this exercise and sorting out what material needed what property was fun and interesting.

It also has been good to start learning particle effects as well. I hope to get better at these particle effects and learn other ways of creating them and changing them within Unreal. With the spark particle effects I found that it only came out across one plane. I wanted the sparks to come out from all different directions when they spawn and possibly make it circle around the mystical ball before they die. With the smoke as well I have found it difficult to control and get more a mist feel rather than a smokey feel. This probably meant more tweaking and possibly a new particle, however by using the smoke particle I was able to change it in some of the ways I wanted it to look. The only other issue I have with the smoke is that when you look at the smoke in a specific direction the colour changes to black. I couldn’t figure out how to fix it but it will be something I come away with knowing to sort it out in the future.

So here is some pretty renders of my balls.

All together now!!

Happy little family!

It's so pretty!