The Set Up: Log #2

18/02/2022

Blocking out

I spent this week getting the very baseline features of my scene in UE4, including the assets and smart materials I made last week!

Firstly, I don't actually start using my assets straight away, as I know I'll end up just getting carried away in all of the little details. I instead start with a really simple block-out of the very base shapes that I want; the mushroom castle and landscape.

As you can see from the screenshot above, there is actually some differences in my initial sketch (from my last blog post, if you're curious); you'll notice a lot of the surrounding mushroom houses are gone. I decided that all of the little houses surrounding the bottom half of the hill really drew away from the main point of interest here, and it was hard to distinguish what the main objective actually was, since everything started to look a little samey.

Of course, I ran into a little problem! Although it was easily fixed, I initially forgot to make an appropriate light map for my assets, which is why you can see the lighting goes a bit funky in the screenshot above. This is where the cuts in the UV are.

I also prepared a very simple foliage brush for future use, as in a lot of my previous research, having really nice stylised grass always elevated that piece in my opinion, and adds a bit more dimension to this scene.

Here is another smart material I made with Substance Painter to be used for the stems of my mushrooms. I actually more so looked at references of concrete compared to real life mushrooms since I wanted a more rugged stylised aesthetic.

Again, here is a close-up of the mossy stone material I made on the Substance Painter sample model - the Jade Toad. I really loved how all the moss changes depending on the curvature and crevices of the model, and felt like this showed off this material really well. As you've already seen, this is used as a statue in the middle of my pond in the scene.