Introduction
and Research
To start the year our first task was to create 4 materials
for a Hotel hallway, this would include a floor and wall material as well as 2
forms of dirt materials that we will later be painting on in UE4. The first
thing I did was to look into the different types of interior design that goes
into building Hotels and what building materials are used for decoration such
as wood, plaster and wallpaper. To do this I created a mood board from a vast
collection of images gathered form the internet to try and narrow and get some
inspiration for what I want to create.
After researching into different forms of suitable materials
that are used throughout different types of hotel. I decided that I wanted to do something different and furtherly
looked into Wood flooring and Wallpaper designs for further reference as these are the materials that I want to make.
Wood
Material
Now that I was settled on what I wanted to create I started
looking into Substance Designer. I am new to this software so I started with
the very basics but I feel that I picked it up quite quickly. I started with
just looking into the overall layout of the program, its functions and where
everything is .making very basic and simple shapes and patterns I felt that I
was able to start with making my actual materials. I started with the wood
floor, to do this I used a brick generator to get the right tiling of the floor
boards and to make them had a decent amount of variation between them. After
this I started to create the grains that run along them. To do this I used a
variety of different Noises and Directional warps to create the nice wavy lines
within the grain. After spending a lot of time playing with all of the setting
and getting my bearings with the software I had my finished wood floor
material.
Wallpaper
Material
Now that the wood was complete I could move onto making the
wall paper. After looking into different types of wallpaper I decided that I
wanted to make something with either big swirls or wavy stripes for a more
modern aesthetic. I went ahead and just messed around with different effects
and noises until I got something that I liked. I then settled with this pattern
and moved onto adding colour. For this I once again used the colour picker and
took a gold and a cream from an existing example. The final touches to this
piece was adding a bit of noise to the wallpaper itself to look like it had its
fibres and texture and sharpening up the edges of the design.
Dirt
Material
With the 2 finished clean materials I could now work on
making the dirty versions. For this I decided to go with a mud/dirt texture for
the floor and mould/damp for the wall. I started with the mud on the floor. My
first attempt ended up looking too much like leather and as well as that there
was no space for the alpha and so when painted it would cover up far too much
of the material underneath.
After I realised this I ended up toning it down so it would
show some of the material behind it. To make the dirt I used the same process
as before by picking a few noises that would suit and using some different
effects to get a nice result. I also decided to add scratches and marks to this
material using generators. For the mould I used the same process but altering
the noise input to something spottier so I could get the ring shapes that it
grows in. Furtherly the roughness was much greater as mould is far less
reflective than mud.
Mould
Dirt
Vertex
Painting
Vertex painting was another new process to me but didn’t
take too long to understand. After learning how powerful it can be it will be a
very useful tool for future projects. For this I went into Substance Designer
and layered both the clean and the dirty over the top of each other and exported
that as the dirty materials.
Once I had exported the textures for each I went into UE4
and made the vertex painting ready materials in UE4 blueprints. Then it was the
simple task of painting on the dirt materials. In hind sight I wish that I
hadn’t made the material have so much background space as I couldn’t get it as
dense as I would have liked near the edges of the floor where it meets the wall
as that is where it would have built up more. Overall I am happy with the
overall result as this was the first time I had worked with this workflow and
software.
Final Result
