Category: Week 8

I decided to attempt some glass in Substance, as this is something which is fairly newly accessible, and glass works well with natural wood because it allows you to see the wood in things such as tables and shelves.

I started by attempting a glass pane, which was moderately successful. I used ‘glass dirty’ which was downloaded from Substance Share, and I lowered the dirt to almost nothing. This worked fairly well, but was hard to see properly in Substance as it was so flat.

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I then attempted to apply glass to the candlestick. This worked, but the joins in shapes are a little too messy, meaning that the wood can be seen through the glass, with small glitches of textures.

After asking for feedback and ideas on what the issue may be with my candlestick in a Facebook group, it was suggested that my normal map was the issue. on closer inspection, I realised this was an issue in the high poly mesh I had baked in.

I fixed this by editing my normal map in Photoshop, and starting again in substance painter. This fixed my issues completely.

This week was a test of all of my past experiments in one, followed by learning how to manually unwrap UVs, and about why texel density is important.

I started off by watching a few helpful tutorials about UVs here, here, and here. Once I understood the basics, I decided to create a new, lower-poly candlestick using cylenders instead of smoothed cubes. this reduced my polycount greatly on my driftwood, but made it higher on the candles and bases. This however, seemed justified, as it made the circles much smoother than before.

Unreal can handle about 2bilion polys per scene, so 3k isn’t much in comparison.

I created my candlestick, and then created a high poly version, a colour ID map, and created UVs considering texel density. the UV for this model was a huge improvement on past tests, due to applying all the things I have learned, including history deletion. you can see the process below.

Low-Poly Candlestick Creation from Brogan Lawes on Vimeo.

 

After, I imported everything into substance, hand painted normals, textured it, and exported the model out to Sketchfab. Throughout the whole process, I thought that the model was looking to be a huge improvement on past attempts, and normal painting and texturing was a lot cleaner with all of the previous issues fixed. Frustratingly, the candles appear to have an issue, and I am unsure why. This is something I need to look into further.