Throughout week 12, I have been mainly focusing on further developing the trimsheet texture for the necessities and buildings that I started in Week 11, applying it to the meshes and setting up all of the materials and textures in the project inside Unreal 5. Working and further developing the trimsheet
Testing out the trimsheet early on showed me that the rough layout that I had created for each piece was close to the sizes of the meshes I was applying them to. This ensured that texel density would be decent and stretching minimized, but still unavoidable on some occasions. I moved on to add more textures such as the soffit and some stone slabs that I was going to use for the school necessity and the majority of the house buildings. Testing the look in Maya was good but not close to the final result, so I decided to map all of the meshes to the trimsheet and test out how it looked in Unreal 5. For this, I also quickly created a color map for the trim and moved to Maya for the UV unwrapping.
The biggest issue so far was the fact that my Student license for Substance Designer expired, and I couldn't renew it for unknown reasons. This put on hold all of my work for the rest of the week, regarding texturing.
Mapping the trimsheet
This was the most time consuming process so far- I had a lot of meshes to unwrap and I was still not comfortable with mapping UVs to trim textures since it's a bit more complex technique, having to keep all of the UV islands as straight as possible which gave me troubles at times. I was also experiencing a lot of technical difficulties since Maya was crashing quite a lot but saving did 'save' me a lot!
Testing in Unreal 5
Next step was to test out the results in engine. It's important to preview the results in the actual engine or game since that's going to give us the most accurate looking result.
Proper naming convetions, setting up master materials and textures in the project
So far, I have been working on a separate scene and project from the rest of the team, meaning they didn't have access to the art files so I had to take care of that. Before transitioning all of the assets to the final project, we had to set up a proper naming convetion for all of the assets, so it's easier to work with across the different teams. After that was done, I imported all of the asset in Unreal. For the materials, after discussing with Maria, we decided to create 1 master material from which we would create instances. This would provide us with the flexibility to easily create different materials in short amount of time. I also exposed some parameters so that the colors could be tinted, giving us the option of having more variety in the textures if needed.
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