Mid-week update - Jan 21st

I've really been making some progress these last couple of days and I feel they warrant an update.

The first big update is the second wooden floor texture, I ended up messing about with this one a lot but eventually ended up pretty much making it from scratch.

This is the finished diffuse result. I ended up merging two texture together and working from that. I really liked one texture I found from cgtextures.com however there was just too much lighting information and make it stupidly hard to try and get to tile. I ended up using a much more flat wood grain with the original texture overlayed on top (in grayscale). It created a nice result which I imported into Unreal and tiled from there.

I was also trying to explain my process for the wall/floor textures. I unwrap the walls/floors and attach a material ID to them in 3DS Max, therefore in Unreal I can create a standard material and apply it, this allows me to tile the texture as much as I want but also allow for minimal distortion when changing the walls/floors as all I have to do it re-peal it, not re-bake anything.

I also created one of my larger assets, the large chest of drawers. It was a simple straight forward process using a default dDo material and then editing it to my taste, I typically don't like the default materials but I find them a good base to start from.

I had a couple of issues with the handles not being metallic enough in engine so I used a quick solution of a mask and multiply node to increase the metalic value on them.

Finally for an added bit of detail I added some dust to the very top surface and added in a custom mask to show where the object has been brushed or where objects used to stand. I think this effect actually turned out quite well and I really love the dust material inside dDo,

At about 11pm after I finished the drawers I decided I fancied doing another asset, I figured picking something small would help my sleeping pattern! I ended up sculpting the candle asset in Mudbox, the results we're actually really nice and something I was proud of.

Next I had to decide how to retopologise this mesh which was currently at 365k tris. I took a risk and decided to learn Topogun on the fly, usually I wouldn't advise this but it turns out Topogun is ridiculously easy to learn and I finished my low-poly mesh in 30mins. Easy,

I then baked the high-poly onto the low-poly using x-normal. The result surprised me big time, it was hard to tell which model was which. For your knowledge the model on the left is 414 tris and the right is 365k tris. A huge different but a nice clean normal map can make a huge difference.

This is the latest view as of 21/1/15. It's really starting to take shape now, changes being new floor textures and a couple new assets. I ended up creating a few issues with the mesh around the windows but it can be easily fixed.

I just want to start breaking up some of the straight edges around the environment and start giving it a little more life. I'm not going to mess around with the lighting much at the moment until I have quite a few more assets in. Still hoping to get all the big ones out the way by the end of next week, but as it's my birthday that could be a big ask.