Materials

I knew for the scene that I wanted to create both a brick and concrete material for the walls and floor. To start with I thought it would be best to start with the concrete floor. This is because I have not used Substance Designer in a while and so wanted to start with the easier of the 2 materials to improve my knowledge of the software before trying to tackle the brick material.

Concrete

To start the process I started gathering a variety of references including concrete and potential damage that could be included in the design. After collecting a suitable number of images to go from I started work on the material in Substance Designer.

I also used a part of the floor in my bedroom as a good example to follow as it has some nice damaged areas and has some interesting textures.

Creation

To start in substance painter I had to watch a quick video to remind myself of the program and started with the creation of the concrete material. To start with I focused on the larger details such as the water marks and damp, and the flow of the concrete . I then moved onto the texture such as grains and finally the damage areas like scratches. The last thing was to colour grade from reference and tweak to lessen the number colours.

         

 Brick

The first thing to do was to gather plenty of references and decide on the type of brick that I would like and would be suitable for the scene.

Creation

I had learnt a lot in the creation of the concrete but I wanted to learn some more about the process itself when creating materials in Substance so I did some research looking into the Algorithmic documentation for the program. This is because I know the bricks are going to be more difficult and as they are going to take up so much of the space in the scene I wanted to make sure they were done to a good standard.

A new technique that I had learnt was the ability to view height maps in the viewer so you can work in a way that’s more like sculpting as you can get a better understanding and realistic view of the material that you’re creating. Knowing this I started working on blocking out the pattern for the bricks.

 

Through the workflow of making large to small details and shapes I finished the modelling phase of the material. This was quite difficult and took a lot of time to make as I was learning a lot of new techniques within the software. From the grayscale height map I had created I made the rest of the maps including; Albedo, Normal, A/O, roughness and metallic maps.

Once I had the maps finished and I was happy this the material I took it into some other programs to see how it looked. I created a material sheet for each program as It would allow me to see how it looks in each of the software packages. 

Once I had the material ready in UE4 I learnt about Parallax occlusion, the ability to use height maps to give more depth to the material. I think that using parallax for this material works really well as it makes the bricks pop a lot more.   

 

Dirt

Now that I had a decent number of assets made and the room has started to fill, I decided to make one last material to vertex paint onto the floor. As this scene is meant to be very dusty and dirty I thought that this would be a good idea.

Process

To do this I went into substance designer and created a very simple dirt material. This will not be very visible in the scene as it will be in the darker areas but it is more useful for making a contrast in the roughness of the concrete on the floor.

Once this material was finished I took it into UE4 and created the vertex paint material in combination with the concrete floor. Once the material was set up I had to remake the floor as a plane with more geometry as else I wouldn’t be able to paint. To compromise I used a 10 x 10 grid for the floor. Then all that was left was to paint directly onto the concrete in area where there would be a lot of dirt build up.