To begin this project we opened up UE4 to get the right
dimensions of our characters. We used boxes, spheres and other shapes to get
the rough approximations for our character to be able to walk through. From
there we began building very rough versions of our doors, using the frame as a
centrepiece and building around it. While some went for much grander designs
with a much larger for the character to walk through, I kept mine rather
simplistic and focused more on the mechanics of the door.
As with this project the door needed to have 3 moving parts
which could be anything from the handle turning to the door itself opening (or
its opening mechanism). As another project going on at the time of this one was
to create a game prototype, I decided to use my theming from there and make a
door that could used within the prototype as well.
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| First Rough Design (With moving Animation) |
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| Second Rough Design (With Animation) |
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| Third Rough Design |
As the setting of the other project was to be within an
abandoned Asylum, I made my door look like a heavy-duty locked door. Even
though this is still only within UE4, I was able to have a rough idea of what
the door would look like, or rather the mechanics it would use to open. The
door itself would have 4 bars that come down vertically, into a brace that
(once the bars were removed) would slide across horizontally. I liked this
design as looking at it made me think this was a solid door, and there would be
no way to get through it without its key (the main focus of what I wanted my
door to do).
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| Animation Sheet |
From there I exported the rough design into Maya, lowered
the transparency and began to start building the rough shape of the door within
the originals silhouette. I had some trouble early on as although I knew what
the door would look like in my mind, making it real within Maya was much more
work. I created mood boards of different kinds of doors aesthetics as well as
real world mechanics to help me become inspired to design the door.
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| Exported Mesh from UE4 (Made transparent to be able to build upon) |
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| Mood Board |
Once I had the rough outline created and looked at enough
reference material I began working on specific parts of the door, for starters
being its hinge. Originally I wanted to add hinges similar to that of a vault,
being extremely large and heavy, however looking at the overall design I felt
these would be to out of place, as well once animated, I didn’t want to stretch
the polygons or have any defects.
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| Hinge Design 1 (Stretching Polygons) |
I was then able to create my hinges and fix them onto the
door, spacing them out evenly enough to ensure nothing was going to be able to
get through. I looked at different kinds of hinges and found one that I liked, and from there I tried to recreated them in Maya. Once they were created, I fixed them onto the door, separating so the hinges could act like a pivot.
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| Re-Designed Hinge (With Movement) |
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| Door with Hinges |
Once i had spaced them out fully I needed to create the frame for them to be attached to. I wanted to keep the form of the frame simplistic while still portraying a menacing appearance. I didn't want to make the frame to complex and take the attention away from the door, so rather then using a normal frame to go around the entire door, I made the doorframe look like two panels, with bars going in-between. Although this was different to my original design, I felt this gave the door to have slightly more depth then simply being a door within a frame.
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| Door with Frame |
As with Maya and UE4, I didn’t want to waste any geometry
and tried to use more advance modelling techniques rather then simple block
shapes. With some help I was able to create the brace to have as much detail in
a very simple way, of creating the holes for the bars to slot into, and
building out from there, essentially building a 3-dimensional object by
starting it on a 2-dimensional plane. A lot of my ideas came from my mood board
and my overall idea when thinking of a containment door. I thought of where
this door would be, who would be locked away and what kind of environment the
door would be around. Since the door would have been inside an abandoned Asylum
I knew most of my doors detail would come from its textures, however that
didn’t mean I could be lazy in what id create. In hindsight I could have added
some more detail to the top bars, possible adding slots the bars could have
gone into or other aesthetically pleasing design choices, however as I can only
think about this after the door has been finished, naturally there will always
be more I could have added.
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| Making Process of Brace (2D into 3D) |
Once this was all complete, As I had been adding edge loops to each thing that I made for the door to save time for later, i essentially had my high poly model created. All i had to do at this stage was to use the smooth tool within Maya to amplify the number of vertices, edges and faces of each mesh to give them a smoothed edge look.
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| Finished High-Poly Door (Not yet smoothed) |
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| Smooth High-Poly Mesh |
Once the high poly was created. I duplicated the original
mesh again and began deleting edges and vertices of my model to create my low
poly. One thing I needed to make sure of was to not to delete certain edges or
vertices that would lose the overall silhouette from the high-poly, as this
would cause a poor bake later one. With the brace for example, as the player
wasn’t going to be able to see underneath it, I decided to use a flat cuboid
and bake the information of the high-poly on top of it. Although this seemed
like a good idea at the time once baked the quality didn’t look very good and in
hindsight I should have designed it better, with possibly hole going all the
way through the mesh. With parts like the frames, rather then having the edge go all way around and waste geometry; using the Target Weld tool within the program, i was able to pull the to the highest and lowest vertices, reducing the tri and poly count.
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| Low-Poly Mesh |
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| Difference in High/Low-Poly Meshes |
Once all the unnecessary edges and vertices were deleted, I
opened up the UV editor to begin separating the UV islands and making my UV map
for baking. To do this I did an automatic unwrap on the entire mesh and then
began selecting faces that would fit together as a flat surface (such as the
walls to the left and right of the door).
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| Initial Auto UV Unwrap |
The process takes some time however learning from the last
time I did UV mapping (being the time machine project), I had learnt much more
from then, such as how to properly unwrap cylindrical objects and how to make
the most out of the UV space. Before I left a lot of room within the UV space
and wasted some of it keeping UV islands that could have been separated,
together. Although there is much more I have to learn within UV mapping, from
learning from old mistakes I can comfortably say I am much more proud of the
overall bake of my model then last time.
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| Finished UV Map |
Once the UV map had been made, I arranged all the pieces on
top of each other and duplicated the low poly. I increased its transparency and
enlarged it using the transform function within Maya. By making this
transparent and a different colour, when enlarging it I was able to see which
part of the low/high poly model was sticking through, as when creating a Cage,
it cant be made to large as it needs to capture all the information. As the
door didn’t have any outrageous edges or sides, creating the cage was fairly
simple.
Now I had my high/low poly model as well as my cage, I
needed to explode my mesh to bake so I could bake each separate piece; doing
this increase the chances of a higher quality bake. To do this all I had to do
was select each of the pieces as a group, for example the bars as one group,
the doorframe as another group and the brace as another group. I moved each of
these into a exploded version of my mesh in a straight line of one another,
with the low poly, high poly and the cage all sitting together within separate
layers.
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| Exploded Mesh (Front and Back) |
Once all the pieces where sitting together in their own
respective layers, I selected each of the low-poly meshes and exported them;
then going on to do the same with the high-poly and the cage, and once exported
I opened Substance Painter to bake the model. Although normally I would have
used XNormal for my bakes, since we were using Substance Painter to texture our
models as well, we were shown how to do it a different way for this project.
I loaded in my low-poly mesh and went to bake the model,
importing my high-poly model as well as the cage. I chose the maps I wanted
(that being Normal, World, Ambient Occlusion and…) and then bakes the model to
project the high-poly models details onto the low-poly model. Even though the
model was still exploded, since all the UV’s were the same, once I had all the
details within the texture maps, I was able to save the maps back onto my
computer and then move back into Maya to put the exploded model back together.
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| Exploded Mesh in Substance Painter (Low and Baked Versions) |
Now back together, all I had to do was export the recombined
low-poly model back into Substance Painter and the baked maps I had just
created as well, and load them onto the low-poly model. This process created a
much cleaner bake and although possibly taking more time rather then baking the
entire mesh, this process can be used for much more complex bakes on later
projects.
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| Mesh assembled and first layer of materials |
Now I had my re-established model within Substance Painter,
it was time to start adding the textures. As I had used Substance Painter
before (although with a lot of help) I roughly remembered the basics of how to
apply textures and different effects. While possibly quite simplistic the
effect worked most well by having layers on top of each other with black masks,
which would place the material/texture all over the model, and then using
different brushes and alphas, I was able to reveal these textures on particular
parts of the mesh. This process let me add layers of depth and wear to my
model.
Another feature I found within Substance Painter is the use
of generators, in which a level of grunge and spaced out versions of a certain
texture would be places all over the model, combining this with a black mask
allowed me to reveal more realistic grime effects without having to create them
all by hand, which was a very useful process.
Another feature that I found useful was combining materials in different degrees. the walls around the door are made with different kinds of concrete, which by using different brushes and alphas (the shape of the brushes) I was able to make the walls look more run down in certain areas.
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| Development of Mesh Materials using Masks |
Substance Painter’s most useful feature however is its rich library
of materials. These are pre-existing textures within the programme that can be
used to create shocking realistic effects on my model; with the smart materials
doing an even better job for certain parts of the model, these are especially useful as not only is the material detailed, but specifics within the material can be changed, such as dirt, scratched and other details. One of these being the
machinery material that I used for my hinges and braces, with its recognisable
yellow working within that context. Initially I changed the colour to a darker green however the was to dark in contrast to the rest of the mesh, so I made it into a brighter yellow before adding more damage and detail.
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| Initial Use of Smart Materials, redone and Developed |
However Substance Painter doesn’t accommodate all kinds of
materials, and some can be made within the program itself; such as the leaking
oil and grime over the metal work on the model. To do this I took a
pre-existing material of rubber and used a black mask to make it invisible over
the entire model. Then by experimenting with its roughness and metallic values
within the program, I was able to make it slightly shinier and take away some
its matt qualities to make a more oil looking material.
At first I tried simply painting the material onto the
model, however the look seemed too artificial and not organic enough. I looked
at the particle effects within Substance Painter and by testing and
experimenting with them I found I could make it look like dripping oil. All I had
to do was find certain spots that the oil may have leaked out of and use the particle
tool to ‘spray’ on the material (as since the particles worked similar to real
life, such as a dripping effect like water) the look seemed more genuine and realistic,
rather then being able to see obvious brush strokes across the model.
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| Use of Damage and Finished Texture |
Now all the textures were complete, I exported the texturing into UE4 to not only see how they work real time but to also see the door moving in game. When exporting the textures I exported my Albedo, Normal and a new type of export I had learned called an RMA map. This is where my Roughness, Metallic and Ambient Occlusion maps are combined into a single map to save memory space. I did this more to see if it would work and luckily i found it was fairly simple to use. I opened up a new project and imported the door and the textures. As i was used to I plugged my Abledo and Normal maps into their respective nodes. When it came to the RMA map, on the texture nodes within UE4 there was the alpha and then also a red, green and blue nodes. I used each different colour to link to each respective node(Red for Roughness, Green for Metallic and Blue for Ambient Occlusion). As I had already used this model in another project, I was able to simply copy the vectors for each piece of the door and checked to see if everything was functional. From there I created a new material and and plugged each of the textures from Substance Painter into the correct nodes in the Materials graph.
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| Opening Animation Sequence |
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| Albedo |
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| RMA |
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| Normal |
It was very interesting to see something I had made and textured all on my own appear in UE4; seeing it move and look like a real part of a game. While there may have been things I could have worked on I am especially happy with the final result. Although I have created models and textured them before, I've never also have them be able to move within UE4. This project has taught me a lot about texturing, modelling and specifically modelling something with the mind set of it actually working (with the bars and locks). I look forward to creating more models like this in the future and am proud I was able to develop another skill to use in my studies.
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