I've been thinking how I can best utilise every element of my environment so that the mise-en-scene feeds the player as much visual information about the story as possible. I have a large area of empty wall space that I think could be put to better use, so today I will be experimenting with ways in which I can make them more thematically appropriate.
Below you can see an image of how the walls look in the current version of the scene:
This is an image from my scene where the walls have no material applied to them.
If you loaok at the walls carefully you can see an early pattern that I have modelled onto them. This is because I originally wanted to use a baroque pattern similar to B.O.W. Qin's work:
B.O.W. Qin's ornate wall panels.
Whilst I felt these looked nice, I didn't think using this element within my scene would be furthering my project goals which is to tell a story purely through visuals alone. I wanted to take this opportunity to show the level of decay the mansion has fallen into and didn't think using these patterns were the best way of doing that.
So deleting these, I have gone back into 3DS Max and created some new walls. I want to be able to give each segment of the wall it's own unique level of decay. I'm not sure what the best way to do this will be, but I know that I want to do this all within the material and not rely entirely on using decals in Unreal Engine. I can still choose to add them later on to further the level of decay on the walls, but I would rather be able to paint unique details in Substance Painter first so that I can make them less repetitive.
My new walls in 3DS Max. Each segment has been individually UV mapped with each one having its own material.
It is fortunate that I couldn't decide on the design of my walls sooner because it has led me to learning about Texture Sets within Substance Painter:
A video tutorial explaining texture sets within Substance Painter.
I have decided to use wallpaper to cover my walls. This is because I think wallpaper gives me a lot of room to get creative with the level of dereliction. I can make some strips of wallpaper peel off whilst others can be ripped. I think this will give me a nice mix of visuals and will push the "abandoned" vibe much more than if I had used the baroque pattern.
This is the wallpaper texture that I created in Substance Painter.
After watching the tutorial on how texture sets work, I found that I can load all of my different wall segments and paint them in on go within Substance Painter. I have made a wall paper
pattern and layered it up with varying levels of decay. When I begin
painting in Substance I will be able to create custom levels of
grime and dirt. See an example of this below:
I can paint on varying levels of decay to my wallpaper material. Some I will leave cracked, whilst others will be peeled off.
I have loaded all of my walls into the program. I had to copy my material layers from one set of materials to another in order for this to work. See the image below for what I mean:
Notice the layers tab in the top right of this image. I started by creating one material that I could paint details on to and when I was happy this looked good, I copied all of these layers into the other material slots. I have 8 materials in total. I've had to copy each layer into a new material slot for this to work. Currently Substance doesn't let you paint them across all the elements within the scene, so I had to cycle between the material slots to paint on certain parts of the walls. Doing this has let me paint each wall segment with its own unique pattern.
So far I am really pleased with the look of these new walls and I feel they are going to be much stronger than what I originally had in mind. After this success I think I will see if there are other areas that I could perhaps make look more decayed.
A close up of the peeled wallpaper I have created in Substance Painter.
ALLEGORITHMIC (2015) Substance Painter Tutorial – Fundamentals 04: Texture Sets [Online Video]. August 13th. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NFXuFQYjvo [Accessed: 12/07/2018].
Q. B.O.W. (2017), My daily study Ⅱ-Ⅰ [Online Image]. Available at: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/8LndO [Accessed: 12/07/2018].
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