Project 1

Project proposal

In this project I’m going to be creating three materials from scratch within 9 weeks. I will be creating a single photorealistic material, one hand painted material and then an animated texture as the concept is new to me and seems interesting.

The first material I’m going to create is the photorealistic material. I chose to create a brick wall texture; I am going to need a reference image to be able to make the colour map, specular and normal map. This will take an estimate of 1.5hours to make the maps and half a day to complete it all in unreal engine. My workflow will be Photograph > Photoshop > Unreal Engine.

The second material I am going to create is a hand drawn material, I have chosen to create a floor tile texture, and for this I will need my drawing, hand painted or Photoshop to generate the colour map, specular and normal map. This will take an estimate of 2-3 hours as if I’m going for a detailed material; I’m going to have to spend a lot of time on the drawing. Then 1 hour in Unreal to compile it together. Hand drawing > Photoshop > Unreal Engine.

The final material is going to be animated, using the same aspects of the second material, drawing a texture that can look well animated. I have decided to make a treadmill texture, which would be helpful in the future. For this I will need 4 hours to sort out how the water could look in the colour map, making more adjustments to the normal and specular and making it tillable. My workflow will be Hand drawing > Photoshop > Unreal Engine.

In conclusion I will have made 3 or more materials to use in my other projects and to add to my material collection. I will then go on to use them in my future work.

 I am going to use photoshop to create my texture maps, it is used as a company standard, so it would definitely help to learn and create my materials in that.

I am using Unreal to create the texture using the various maps as it's the closest to the game state it can by while in the engine, the aspects of this software are commonly used in other game development software, making them easier to pick up too.

Plan

Week1- Initial research, Done

Week2- Scene breakdown, Done

Week3- Unreal software experiments, Done

Week4- Unreal, hand painting experiments, Done

Week5- Unreal, photo realistic experiments, Done

Week6- Material 1, Done

Day1- Colour map (Around 45mins to 1hour), Normal map (10-30 mins), Specular map (10-30 mins)

Day2- Unreal Engine: Compile materials (1.5 hours.)

Week7- Material 2 , Done

Day1- Colour map (Around 1hour to 1.5hours), Normal map (10-30 mins), Specular map (10-30 mins)

Day2- Unreal Engine: Compile materials (1.5 hours.)

Week8- Material 3, Done

Day1- Colour map (Around 1.5hours to 2hours), Normal map (10-30 mins), Specular map (10-30 mins)

Day2- Unreal Engine: Compile materials (2 hours.)

Week9-Conclusion Done


Research

Materials

Texture maps

Specular Map

Diffuse map


Normal map



Final Projects
Hand drawn final piece

Photo realistic final piece

Animated final piece

How I made the texture maps

The material properties

The outcome

Evaluation

We were tasked to create 3 tileable materials in the Unreal engine, to create a texture library for us to use in the future. I created a stylized hand drawn brick tile floor, a photorealistic brick wall and a animated treadmill.

My first texture is a stylized tile texture. I used photoshop to create my texture, making the Normal, Specular and Diffuse/Colour maps. I drew out tiles by making one square, drawing in there and copying that one square, expanding and changing the colours to make each tile diverse, which I learnt this from a online tutorial which was extremely useful. I used Unreal Engine to create my material, as it was a little laggy due to the specifications on this computer, so it made it harder to create my material.

My second texture is a photorealistic brick texture. The bricks being really small in the picture made it harder to actually cut them out and create the texture in unreal. I took the photo just outside of the college, It was a poor photo as my camera isn’t great and I took it on a slant, therefore making it harder in that way too. Using the same photoshop techniques to get the same effect, I had a little bit of a struggle cutting out the lines between for the specular map, but it worked out in the end. Moving it to unreal turned it from looking bad to looking great, as the visualisation of making it into a material gives it a 3d look, with the normal map giving it depth.

My final texture I made is an animated material. The final material I have made was a treadmill, this seemed useful in an industrial game, as a small asset, it looked as it was going to be difficult to make, however the animated part was by far the easiest part. The instances of my material were a lot easier than I thought too, simply changing the name of the parameter changed what it was linked with. The emissive on my work was a pain to create as making it required me to research a lot, but in the end it was very effective in my material.

In conclusion I am extremely happy with my outcomes, they have exceeded my expectations from Photoshop to Unreal Engine. I feel as I have achieved the outcome that was I was hoping for gaining a few skills along the way, including how to create an emissive map, generating normal maps in Photoshop and creating an displacement map with relative ease. Now that my textures are complete I can use them in future projects and the skills I have learnt will benefit me a lot in the future with personal, college or even maybe company projects.