Week 9.5: Lighting Pass & Vertex Painting

Continuing on from last week's feedback relating to breaking up the repetitiveness of my brick walls I began exploring the applications of Vertex Painting in Engine.

As normal I began with watching a collection of videos the most helpful of which being:

How To Create & Use Your First Vertex Paint Material in UE5

Braytonks3D [1]

Vertex Painting in UE4/5

Robot Army [2]

The process of vertex painting utilises Unreal's inbuilt painting mode to apply different coloured channels on an existing mesh to show or hide texture layers above/below.

In Substance painter I created a new plaster material that could be applied atop of my brick, much like in several of my original reference images. The next step was moving into Unreal and creating my most complex material there yet.

Vertex Paint Material Setup: Unreal workflow for Vertex Painting

This material works but displaying a given texture on an RGB channel. So above the Green mask was set to apply a brick multiply layer (thus darkening those sections).

For the Red I created a weight mask that would prioritise apply between the bricks (plaster will hang on to the coarser mortar more than than brick) but with higher concentration will apply over the bricks.

This effect whilst relatively expensive, requiring a large amount of vertices to function when used sparingly could be really effective and achieve a higher quality result than using decals.

Finally this week I did a very basic lighting pass to present my work.

Whilst it does give the project a dramatic feeling, really drawing attention to the building as the focal point it's not very appropriate for showing off the modelling and effort that has gone into it's creation. Additionally the "in a void look" isn't suitable for the desired game environment (of Diagon alley) since most of it is in complete darkness which can be a powerful tool but not in this context.

Moving forward the addition of an actual 3 point lighting setup will help lighten up the scene but also aid with an overall more professional presentation/ feel.

First Lighting Pass: Basic pass for scene lighting

KEY INFORMATION from the week:

Experimented with Vertex painting within Unreal. A more expensive but greater quality method of creating variation within my brick texture.

Also created a basic first lighting pass to familiarise myself with the system.

[1] www.youtube.com. (n.d.). How To Create & Use Your First Vertex Paint Material in UE5. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hP6tm0nbw0E&ab_channel=Braytonks3D [Accessed 17 March 2024].

[2] www.youtube.com. (n.d.). Vertex Painting in UE4/5. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHQLq1mMeh8&t=395s&ab_channel=RobotArmy [Accessed 17 March 2024].

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