Week 1 - Thursday: Fireplace Asset

I have begun creating the first of what I hope will be many assets, an ornate fireplace for the mansion's entrance hall. Using hard surface transfer techniques within Substance Painter, I will be transferring a high poly fireplace onto a low poly equivalent to simulate detail. This will keep things optimised within Unreal Engine.

 I started by looking at some designs of fireplaces in mansions.

I really love the elongated look of these as their sheer size makes them quite intimidating in appearance. This is a design aspect that I am interested in replicating throughout my scene, as I am aiming to create a sense of grandeur and scale that will be reflected in all the assets of the environment.

Below you can see the high poly model as seen in the 3DS Max viewport:

 The lower portion of the mansion fireplace.

Front orthographic view:

Below you can see the inset hearth that I have treated as a seperate asset because it will be using a different material from the main body:

I also modelled some additional floral details to add some variety to the surface areas of the model:

I created these ornate details within 3DS max. I took my time to make sure the topology was clean, however this was something I could have perhaps not stressed over, as much of these details would only be transferred over to the low poly model. In the future I will most likely reuse these details for other models rather than create more custom details.

Below you can see the low poly model of the fireplace:

I created the model and UV mapped it pretty quickly, however I did encounter a rather frustrating problem when it came to projecting the high poly details onto the model. I found that if certain parts of the model were close together, then Substance Painter would have trouble projecting details onto them. For example the details only meant for a particular surface would bleed onto the ones adjacent to it. To avoid this I had to seperate all the elements of the model and bake the details onto them individually. When this was done I had to bring all the seperate maps into photoshop and manually piece them back together. This took a REALLY long time and I'm trying to find an alternative to doing this for every asset with lots of overlapping details.

You can see how the asset looks so far in Unreal Engine below: