modeling & engine prep

Setting up UE4 and checking how my scene looks at the moment

First:

Make sure to have history of objects deleted
Change pivot points of everything to a proper area (edges or middle depending what they are)
Freeze Transformations
Make sure things aren't grouped in Outliner
Everything is to the grid and snaps to grid.

File -> Send to Unreal -> Selection, and then it makes you select the Unreal project/folder to export the selected assets to.

After I made the simple shapes to export them to Unreal Engine I now have to set them up properly as they are now just assets in the Content Browser. I see that I am missing some pieces and as I am creating more assets it will look more like the "sketch" I made in MAYA.

At this point I am considering making a back wall to the whole scene to make it look more "contained" and

I tried using automatic generated UVs to see if the lighting was better with it, and I also created a new file (left one was a standard pack one with some stuff I had to delete) and this is how it turned out.

When I exported the file out of MAYA (using the Send to Unreal option) everything looked fine and was snapped to the grid. Once I got it into UE4 and put the scene together I started noticing small things here and there that wasn't appearing in MAYA.

Spaces, things not aligned and going off/past the wall that originally was fitted "perfectly" before exporting. However the same issues appeared once I re-opened MAYA and the scene file that I worked on. Which makes me think there was something that I forgot to do, like set the pivot points correctly but in my head I had already done that - so back to MAYA to do double checking!

Update

After some feedback from other students and my tutor it seems likely that these issues were caused by not using the "Game Exporter" with the right settigs. What I did here was exporting it "directly" to UE4 by selecting everything I needed and hitting "Export to UE4". After some thought and looking over my scene and time remaining I decided for the time being I would create my assets and "re-design" my scene.

unique assets

Assets to add at the moment:

Tree (s)
Spring
A proper loop

Updated Unique assets

Bridge
Goal
Ring
Checkpoint

feecback and more changes

This session basically were a show and tell and to get feedback to what we could add, remove or alter to out scenes, as well as to get a look at how far along people are and what needs to be done next.

I was advised to break up most if not all of my pieces to make it easier to UV and texture. And at this point I had sent a previous file where the scene/assets were much bigger in scale and I was already aware that I needed to scale it down. Not only just scale it down to make it easier to work with, but also to make it "real to life" or in this case how big a Sonic level would be I suppose. To help me do this I downloaded a roughly 5'5" character model and sized it down to what I believe Sonic's ingame size to be and model the pieces according to that size.

My current (updated) assets:

Wall / Ground floor

"First floor"

"Second Floor"

"Third Floor"

Ramp (s)

Goal

Bridge

Ring (s)

Checkpoint

My scene is now basically a building block set, where most of the pieces are just duplicated and put various places across the scene. Adding unique assets to it later on will help colour and make the scene more unique.

Since every stage has a Goal, I needed a "place" for it to be. When I was looking over my scene I figured the left side of it was kind of empty and by adding this section to it, it also adds more to the 3D aspects of the scene in general.

Below is also an updated version to the checkpoint and the ring (s) as I felt they were too jagged compared to the rest of the scene and made the checkpoint simpler for UV-ing sake. I also just assigned some colours to them to make them easier to spot and see in the scene as I work.

To the left is also an added side "panel" where the goal and a bridge to it is. I felt the left side of the scene was a bit empty.

I've added some temporary colours to make things stand out a bit more, and to maybe get an idea of what colour things would be to picture the over all colour range of the scene. The bridge currently has a temporary texture added to it that I made quickly in Substance Painter, but it needs more work as the UVs are also not lining up correctly in this image.

Uv-ing

When UV-ing we also want to make sure the Texel Density is at 5.12, so we get a 2048 (2k) texture applied to it for a good quality. We can apply this by clicking on the UV shells, going into our UV Toolkit and the Tools section, and write in "5.12" in the Texel Density box. It will also state the map size (2048) underneath that tells us it is at 2k.

If we have "tiny" or smaller objects, we might want to set it to 5.12 anyway, but increase the size of the UV shells just so the textures won't act weird later on.

Added a UV map to get a better look at how the UVs will look once they're done, to see if it wraps around it well.

Currently having issues with this "Goal" asset where parts aren't connected. Currently this is a mess as I have tried many different things, making sure to merge vertices, adding more edges, making sure some edges are connected to others, and double checking the star is actually connected to the ring itself.

Leaving this for later so I can move on.

After some feedback I managed to fix the issue, and just made sure all my vertices were merged. Using a planar map I re-tried to UV and after applying 5.12 density this is how it came out like. Will be increasing the size of the tiny pieces a little bit so the textures won't look wonky once it's applied.

The "Checkpoint" UVs were the most weird ones to do as it was a very different asset than the others. I basically created cuts where I imagined cuts would be and confined them in the 0-1 space.

Update on scene before adding materials/texture and porting to engine

Texturing

To get the most out of the colours for my assets I imported a colour profile known as "ACES" as it is not a default setting in Substance Painter. It's basically a colour profile that makes sure that what we see on our screen, is what we will get in engine and is more consistant.

Using the link to the ArtStation /Download page by our tutor I downloaded and imported the files as "colourlut" to my shelf, and made sure the Display settings were set to the correct settings for this colour profile.

Activated Post Effects - Set Tone Mapping to "Log" instead of "Linear"
Activated Colour profile "ACES_UE4_Log"

Then as another fill layer I just chose a very light colour for the wood, and exported this out with the settings shown to me below as they were the most important ones.

Since tga. will compress beter than PNG will it is preferred to use this when exporting as otherwise it can create issues moving into UE4.

After adding a wooden texture and adjusted the colour I wanted, I put the maps into Maya to see how it would look like. It seems I have to adjust my UVs for it to look better/proper. But at least I now have a texture to work with.

After doing more research and watching tutorials on how to texture in Substance - or at least the basics of it, I decided to re-do the wooden bridge as I had a better idea of what I wanted. Although I would still be using Smart Materials.

Put a temporary texture to get a feel of what it would look like and what I want.

Temporary water texture added to the floor - looks quite awful but at least it is only temporary. Exploring the idea of adding water underneath everything.

Updated Assets (for a more aesthetic look and not as blocky)

Ground level - sand texture (not final in image)

3rd floor - Mossy ground texture, might swap to same texture as 2nd floor.

Hovering platforms

Added the Smart Material "Aluminium Brushed Warm" (standard material in Substance) as a base texture to the object, then changed its colour to red. Added a fill layer to make the bulbs and the streaks in between blue.

Water Smart Material found on Substance Share - by Wolfgar7474.

Looked up some palm trees that I remembered from the "Green Hill Zone", and I made something similar to that. The leaves are just planes although I might add some "depth" to them as it might look awkward after I put some texture on.

Using a smart material called "Wood Walnut" in Substance Painter as a base, I changed the colour to a lighter colour - and added two fill layers. One layer for the leaves, which I might add texture to later, or maybe keep like this for

Looked up some images of a "spring" from Sonic games, and went with a similar but the simple type of spring.

Using a Steel Smart Material in Painter, I was able to get a decent look of the base of the Spring, as well as using the "Copper Red Bleached" Smart Material for the top - using Black masks and Polygon Fill I was easily able to "separate" the bottom from the top and choose exactly where I wanted the colours to be.

In the Alphas, I was able to find a star shape, and using a Stencil Layer and lowering opacity I got a Star placed on top.

References:

Concrete Structure Forest, Substance Painter Smart Material - by Henrique Del Nero 0 on Substance Share3D.

"Ocean Water, Seamless, WT", Substance Painter Smart Material - by Wolfgar7474 on Substance Share3D.

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