In this solo project, I took the role of a material designer as I built out a scene using almost entirely tiling materials built in Substance 3D Designer.
The project took ~1 month and is displayed in Unreal Engine.
My goal for this project was to start learning Substance Designer and how to make game-ready tileable materials that could be used for repeated props, terrain, and even common buildings/structures.
I created a handful of low/mid-poly props I wanted to use in the scene. In UE5, I made a basic blockout to capture at least a bit of the final feeling I wanted to create with the scene. Placeholder materials were created and assigned to respective objects before finalized materials were created.
The first few materials I created included a sharp mountain-rocky one, a natural dirt one, and a polished wood grain one.
The idea was to focus on the texturing of the environment and foundational props before completing textures for the more 'robust' or detailed ones.
(Roof tile node setup example)
My next 3 materials included grass, house walls, and house roof tiles.
In-engine, I created a basic graph to be able to blend the dirt and gras materials in the terrain paint mode.
I also used a basic setup to make a water shader. It works by panning a water normal map in multiple directions over each other.
To add real physical displacement to my mesh, I subdivided the textured faces by a large factor (in Maya), then used the displacement feature in Unreal. I set the mode to use a 2d map, and plugged in the height maps.
The buildings and their roofs now have real 3d depth instead of a simple fakery.
Finally, I made some grass cards that I placed into the quadrants of an atlas. I set up a material that would select one of the 4 corners at random when painting it onto the terrain.
(Final materials list)
