Week 5

Week 5, in the same vein as Week 4, has been extremely productive -- so much so that my diorama is pretty much complete.

It started with moving my completed assets into Unreal Engine, setting out the scene so I was satisfied with the layout.

As you can see I applied the starter content material 'M_Tech_Checker_Dot to make sure there was no stretching or UV problems for the assets (thankfully, I was clear on that front).

One I'd done that, I needed to finish texturing the remaining assets -- the main one being the coffee cup.  

It is a well-known joke that Starbucks misspell people's names when ordering in store. So with that in mind, I asked my friend for help to 'barista-fy' the name 'Max' as this is the protagonist's name in Life is strange. 

She provided me with a few various iterations, and out of those I chose the best to create an alpha from.

After that, it was time to start applying the textures I'd made to the models in engine. I did this by importing each Unreal Engine (Packed) texture map that I created in Substance Painter. 

It was a little jarring at first -- I must reiterate that I am not versed at all in Unreal. Bringing the meshes / texture maps in and then changing the name to fit in with UE's naming conventions was certainly confusing. However, it didn't take long to figure it out with a little help from one of my Journeyman teammates (my Junior Art Lead, Jake). These naming conventions were as follows:

• SM_[Name] = Static Mesh
• T_[Name]_D = Diffuse Map (Base Colour)
  
• T_[Name]_N = Normal Map
• T_[Name]_MRAO = Metallic / Roughness / Ambient Occlusion (Packed Map)
  

Each of the textures were plugged in using the Material Editor window in Unreal, my packed AO / R / M map being split into RGB inputs to the mixer node (in that order). I also used a Multiply on my Diffuse maps with a shader node, so I can control the brightness of my textures without having to go back into Substance and re-export. 

There was a slight problem with the coffee textures, as I'd used transparency to make the coffee contained in the cup to be more realistic (bubbles and height maps utilised in substance painter). So after a little research, I found a tutorial that showed the correct parameters and settings to use to get this to work in my project. It involved re-importing the model as two meshes and not combining them in Unreal when given the option, meaning I could make two materials; one of them being completely opaque and the other being translucent. 

To get this, I duplicated the Coffee Cup material, set the Blend Mode to 'Translucent' and the Lighting Mode to 'Surface TranslucencyVolume'. Then I connected the 'A' output to Opacity. 

After checking in with my lecturer, I was advised to add a pen of sorts, add a little more roughness to the base, and to try and add some dust / fog to give it more of an atmospheric feel; all of which I plan to do next week.