Week 13: Final Additions

THE ADDITIONS STEP

My scene was at a point where set dressing elements were needed to help bring it all together and give it life. So as a start I took inspiration from my own bookshelves and a page from Environment101 and chose to make some books.

Figure 1: Personal folio collection on bookshelf.

My covers were all made in Photoshop taking inspiration from my personal folio collection. As per every other step I then moved into Painter with each being converted to an alpha with a height/normal intensity modifier to give an extra level of impact and appear embossed into the leather.

All of them were done on one texture sheet, thus be rendered in a single texture call.

Substance Painter: Book Cover Designs

For the tarot deck the more industry based workflow was used, with a texture applied to a single rectangle mesh for optimum efficiency. However on the books I allowed myself the extra polys to bevel the spines edge, which I think overall doesn't add that much worth but should a player interact with them up close or if they were used anywhere else they can be used as props outside of the environment and not look visibly low poly thus a new mesh wouldn't need to be created.

If this project was involved in an actual game environment utilising LODs would be an efficient next step or where these will eventually be used on a bookcase a single texture of all the books on the shelves can be swapped out for the actual placed assets.

Unreal Engine: Book Covers

I created a water puddle decal to be placed below my guttering, to enhance realism and add an extra level of environmental storytelling, in addition to some more trim furniture to house my books.

Finally on my plants I added a subtle wind effect, following yet another previous lecture by William Pryn. This was mostly done due to the inclusion of my spinning elements caused the rest of the scene to look unnaturally static, so the slight movement will help to sell believability.

This was accomplished using the SimpleGrassWind Node built in to Unreal. When combined with the shown nodes (WindIntensity, Weight) and plugged into the WorldPositionOffset it can move the vertices around by those given values.

KEY INFORMATION from the week:

I created some custom books and furniture to dress my scene.

Figure 1: Personal folio collection on bookshelf. March 2024, Somerset. Photograph by Jack Ferrari.