Sea of Thieves progress

I've decided to catch up on documenting my progress by making a master-post for each of my projects. This one is dedicated to the RARE Sea of Thieves prop project. As I've already mentioned in my Christmas plan update, the tasks I need to complete before submission include:

- Making procedural posters on the walls
- Adding cloth
- Rendering the scene

Here's the state of my project when I submitted the formative work and where I am at the moment.

1. Procedural posters

The procedural workflow has always intimidated me, yet fascinated as it's a great way to make easy-on-the-engine assets with lots of variety in them. My goal was to create posters for the back of my scene that would differ in design and edge damage, without requiring 2390452985 different maps and alphas!

Firstly, I've made a diffuse map of all my designs, I made these very quickly, basing them on existing symbols seen in Sea of Thieves. The main thought was - my scene could be for example a tavern table corner, what kind of posters would it have? Probably advertisments, wanted posters etc etc. So that was what I was going for, however I didn't want to put in too much detail that they take attention off the foreground models so there's no writing or complexity on them.

Below you can see my texture sheet which is in form of an atlas and my moodboard.

With my texture sheet done, it was time to import it into the engine and start working on the shader!

Starting point

Making my texture tile and display a different chunk of texture everytime it changes position. It was crucial to make it in a way that doesn't show any edges of other textures, I needed it to be just one image at a time and I used a noise node for that.

Below you can see why that was important

Before:

After!

This is the end results, on the bottom you can see my diffuse nodes, you have seen in the previous screenshot. The ones above grouped as left side, right side, top and bottom are my edge variations. I've made a very simple opacity map that is tiled and rotated just like the diffuse textures are!


I'm very glad I have attempted this and have definitely learnt a lot in the process :) The node intimidation is starting to fade away and I'm more tempted to play around with settings now as opposed to using unreal as a simple render software only.

2. Making cloth

In my concept art, there was posters and cloth making a backdrop for my objects. I didn't want the walls and the floor to make the scene too artificial so I needed something to break up these hard shapes.


On the gif process below you can see how my model has evolved, starting with a simple low poly blockout in 3ds max made to scale with my other assets, through sculpting in zbrush to a ready to texture model!

I'm happy with how it turned out, however I still need to learn on texturing fabrics and making them interact with light so maybe the light could shine through it. Also, I should gather my own reference next time as it was very difficult to find suitable one online and I feel like my model is suffering because of that.

I've made a cloth material for it with some minor wear and tear in forms of scratches or staining that's a bit glossy so that it looks like liquid was spilled on it.

Another cloth I decided to make was the table cloth my assets would sit on. I felt like it was necessary for the composition of my scene as it brought the attention to my assets. Before, the floor was kind of blending together my props with candles a little bit and adding a pop of colour on there ceratinly helped with that. I chose to make my fabrics contrast in colour to break up the brownish, organic tones of all the other textures and lighting.

Below you can see the progress of that. The process did not differ much, in fact it was easier as I did not have to model as many folds.

3. Rendering the scene

To make my scene complete I've used atmospheric lighting and touched up my render with some lighting adjustments, tone curves and a touch of blur.

Overall I'm very happy with how my work has turned out. I enjoyed the project because it taught me on how to follow an art direction guide, making my own stylistic choices to fit the theme, texturing a variety of materials as well as composing a scene to display my models.

Final note, for me or anyone that is reading this (but mostly me because I always struggle with this and lose marks because of a simple mistake)

To export a model without making it lie on its side once in unreal engine, export it as an obj with the YZ axis flip checkbox unticked