Creating Materials

With most if not all of the modelling finished, I began to work on creating materials for my shop. I started by messing around with Unreal's premade materials to see how it all worked.

I wanted to test if I could apply multiple materials to the same mesh, and after a while I figured out that I just needed to apply basic materials to my objects in Maya first, and then Unreal would understand that I wanted them to be different.

As such, my next step was to colour-code my objects in Maya. Dark red was for any surface I wanted to be brick, green for tiles, blue for metals, white for glass and brown for wood. This helped me to stay organsied while working with lots of different materials.

I played around with creating a master material before moving on to my brick and roof tiling.

Starting with the brick wall material, I decided to use Adobe Substance Sampler. I was aiming to create something similar to the brick wall in the reference, with dark purple or red colours.

Here's the final outcome, I added lots of layers to create surface damage and cracks on the bricks. For my first time using the software, I really enjoyed it, although I did struggle with making the cracks appear random instead of like a pattern. As I want the material to be seamless, being able to clearly see repeating elements is not ideal.

To create the tile material, I changed software again, going into Substance Designer, which I also hadn't used before.

 I found this one a lot more challenging, as the amount of nodes required to make something like this was quite overwhelming.

I went for a similar colour to the bricks, but aiming for a slightly darker red.

This was the final result. I did notice it looked quite different after importing into Unreal, although part of that was just the lighting. Still, I think I may have made a mistake somewhere. Despite this, I was happy with the overall look once it was applied to my shop, even if it wasn't exactly how I planned it to look.

I also went back into Substance Sampler and created a copper/brass material which I intended to use for my brewery tanks and pipes. In the end I decided to go with gold and silver versions instead.

With my tiling textures complete, I applied them to my shop in Unreal to see how they would look. As you can see, there was quite a lot of distortion, which meant it was time to work on the UV maps.

Heading back into Maya, I created UV maps for all of my walls, using the checkerboard to get them all about the right size so that the brick texture would line up well. I also took this opportunity to UV map the rest of my meshes, including the roof.

After I took the shop back into Unreal, I noticed the bricks weren't aligned properly, so I went back to Maya and rotated them so that the writing was the right way up on each UV. This made it so that all the bricks were horizontal instead of vertical.