Boiler

Boiler & Pipe system

Now that I had both my floor and wall materials finished it was time to move back to making assets for the scene, as I still needed to focus on the larger pieces. I looked back at the assets I had gathered reference for in the previous half of this project. After looking through I decided it would be a good idea to create the big boiler that would be situated in the corner of the room.  As well as the boiler I also intend to create a procedural pipe system to go with it.

Research

As I had already previously collected some solid references for this piece I had a good Idea what I wanted to go for.  For my main reference I decided to base the design on the picture on the far right.

With a good reference I started the modelling process. For this asset I didn’t want it to be any more than 2500 Tris and I want to use an x2048 UV scale, I also wanted to use x2048 for the pipe system. Throughout the modelling process I had to keep in mind how the pipe system will integrate with the boiler. To make use this wasn’t an issue I made sure that the openings in the side of the boiler were the same shape and size as the pipes. For the pipes themselves I designed 6 separate sections that can all fit together freely.

Texturing

Starting with the boiler I baked out the normal and A/O maps in xNormal and brought it all into Substance painter. Although the reference I was going off was black and white I looked into materials that could be used for creating old iron boilers in the late 1800’s early 1900’s. The two materials I ended up using was a combination off black wrought iron and brass. As the area that the boiler will be in the scene is a very dark corner I feel the touch off brass will help with reflections and bring the piece out of the darkness. All the texturing for both the boiler and the pipes was done in substance painter accept the gangue on the boiler which was a simple job in Photoshop.

Once I was happy with the asset I decided to take it into marmoset to get some beauty shops for an asset sheet.

The last thing to do was to now take bot the boiler asset and the pipe system into UE4 and arrange them in the scene. As there are a lot more assets to be made for the scene and the layout may change, the pipe layout will be customized to fit the environment.