Pumpkin PBR Refresher Project - Presentation

 Pumpkin PBR Refresher Project - Presentation

I am writing this point quite a bit later on now that I have another project's experience in presenting in unreal, which means that now I can give my previous work justice. I also would now classify myself as confident in designer, so I can make much better materials than just a month ago even. I did an attempt at presentation back around Halloween, with some questionable quality results to show for it. 

The initial attempt

I followed a  tutorial on how to make substance materials - specifically this "Floor with Leaves" tutorial (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMMBK0Xjpf4&t=511s&ab_channel=3dEx) which provided a groundwork into using nodes like the tile sampler node and how to construct elements like leaves using shapes and mirror nodes. 

This original material looked like this:

Original Material + Node Set up

Original Material up close

This material looked good within designer, although I was annoyed at how often the leaves would intersect each other. From what I have now learned I know that to avoid this is through a very laborious process of less dense leaf layers height stacked together, but this gets very intensive and complicated graph wise and just for a presentation stand I was not too concerned.

I then made a simple plane to stick this material on which looked bizarre, but I did not know how to fix this. I would like to preface as I did in my previous post on the tortoise that at this point I believed that I was restricted both in textures AND in tris, so I had to make all my presentation on about 40 tris spare I had managed to scrounge from my tortoise model. I thought I had to keep the presentation limited at a single 1024 sheet, and I made a VERY primitive "trim" material in the end to make layered leaves in a strip at the top of the material that I could use as a border. This masked material was modified to make this combined end result:

Masking step to add the "Bush" element to the texture

This process was still quite amateur at the time - we had not been formally taught designer yet so I was still using this material node in the middle, and I was only just grasping how to output textures. The final result was this, after using a basic "exponential height fog" component and a simple top down lighting set up.

Initial Presentation Attempt

I tried a couple of other things that are slightly noticeable in this image: Light functions and a leaf particle system. I isolated my leaf texture in my designer graph to produce a simple particle texture that I then put in the scene, setting it up by following this tutorial (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJe1ysBGbXs&ab_channel=DeanAshford). The light function was a simple dappled intensity map that I made into a material, set to the light function material mode. I then set this into a spot light and put it above the pumpkin to produce a inconsistent light similar to tree cover. This was a lot more effective in my head, and did not really pan out how I thought it might. I think these light functions would be best used in cases such as stained glass, where you want a very particular shape in light on the floor. It also was not really visible from the camera looking at the tortoise and did not add to the presentation, so I would not implement it again in this project.

As a quick side to this - I posted the picture above of Barty into a discord server called "Experience Points" which has a lot of industry professionals, students and hobbyists, and he actually won the Halloween pumpkin competition they held in the 3D category and I got a free tutorial from it, so that was a real confidence boost!

Fast Forward to Christmas

I now have a separate project's work under my belt, getting me back into prop workflows and improving my artistic eye for what works well in a scene and what doesn't. The presentation I had with Kat and Pat really opened my eyes to how to make a scene work and elevate my project, and this is what I was focussing on:

• Edge dressing/borders
• clean normal maps on designer materials
• Materials that are readable (lighter in value and cleaner in roughness)
• Accent lights to highlight surface qualities
• Not a flat black background, add a simple tone to the back to broaden the scene.

I actually had a issue file wise - initially I did not use OneDrive as a file location on my computer in labs or at home. during each session I would drag and drop files into the drive to back it up because frankly I did not know this was a thing. I found this out a couple weeks into the backyard slice project in fact - and since I am now tackling the presentation away from Leicester while I am home for Christmas I do not have access to my original unreal file or even some of the textures I had saved for it - like the updated "trim" version of the designer file I started. I took this as a blessing in disguise to be honest, and restarted presentation with a fresh view. I knew that I could spend a bit more on making a decent presentation "island" for Barty, and I was actually inspired by a fellow student Iz Green (https://www.artstation.com/artwork/5XQyrz) and her pumpkin project to make a small diorama for him to sit on. I did also consider rigging him for some added posing potential, but since the geometry was not really made for that and I do not have as much time as originally planned I think I will leave him as is.

to begin the rework process I went to my files, and found a very basic version of the original ground file was there that I could use as a starting point. I wanted to add some foliage like small bushes and grass blades to the material, but I was very aware that I did not want aspects of the material reliant heavily on height tessellation. I did not plan on using a displacement method for the floor in ue4, and I did not want this material to appear really flat like my original. The material ended up looking like this:

New Substance Material

I also have learnt now how to publish this material so it could be used within painter, and I planned to use this to my advantage. I made a basic ground plane again with a slight curve in max, and made a simple grass tuft and collection of rocks. These were all unwrapped together, and then imported into painter to make sure these assets could be given more custom treatment. All of these new assets came to about 500 tris in the end, mostly in the grass tuft and the rock which I would instance multiple times in unreal to be budget conscious.

Painter Texturing

Within painter I also added in a translucency to the edge of the island to remove a harsh outline, and I think this really helped soften the whole composition; It helped keep the focus on Barty. I also added more individual strands to each chunky grass blade, which faked detail on each grass tuft and helped immensely at making the model feel softer too. I then imported these all together into unreal, setting up the materials in the basic formation. I added an exponential height fog component again this time basically removing the height fall off to make the colour of the background a consistent light-mid tone orange to complement the colour of the pumpkin. I did not add a particle system in again, partially because I thought the detail of the ground elements was enough interest and also with this orange background they wouldn't show up nearly as obviously. After doing these basic steps, I was happy with the result and chose not to over complicate it. It made Barty look like he was in a warm comfort environment outdoors, and I was really happy with the leap from the first attempt.

Beauty Shots:

Conclusion/final comment:

I am really proud of how I have done with this project. Considering it was just a simple Halloween pumpkin model brief, I think I have done a great job twisting that and making a creature has really served as a rewarding learning experience for the future. There is not much I would change now knowing all the problem solving I did to create this result; I am just happy I persevered and pushed myself where I did. It is actually quite rare that I feel proud of something I have made so I shall enjoy this feeling while it lasts :)