Backyard project: Lighting in Unreal and Substance Designer

Lighting in Unreal

After finishing basic unwrapping, I export the selected scene and import them on UE4. A little adjustment on the sun's position and changing the light to shine from the left instead.

I wanted the scene lighting to resemble evening rather than nighttime because my light source in this build are only the lights from the store signs and the store windows. I wanted to add details to the scene that should be seen in brighter light such as stickers, posters and decals on the machines/garbages/window.

Substance Designer

The program was quite hard for me to grasp at first, I didn't understand what a lot of functions did and maybe that was also due to me skipping through the tutorial.

The first texture I wanted to do was street tiles.

I went just outside of the Vijay Patel building to get this type of tiles as a reference.

After getting my reference picture, I search for a tutorial on youtube to follow along ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGOLLSQnvYo ) to create the tiles. Most of the tiles I search for did not match the tiles I wanted, so I settle for a marble tiles tutorial and adjust the surface texture of the marble to be grainy on my own. I struggle with this a lot but I got it to work in the end.

There are feedbacks from Pat and after I adjusted the texture a little more and add in colour gradient, this becomes my final tiles for the walkway street tiles.

This is the final look of the tiles, with colour and grainy texture to the tiles as the improvement.

The second tiles I made are the concrete that will be on my building. I didn't look at a tutorial for this and tried to use my understanding of the first tutorial I watch and slowly build up the texture for it to resemble a white concrete wall.

This is the final result after adding colour gradient to it

The second one lower is also a concrete texture but with less noise and chipped texture. I will use this as Vertex Painting so the concrete texture won't be as repetitive.

This is my first time using Substance Designer, it is very poorly done and can be improved a lot by adding more texture and learning how to make better interesting tiles. But for my first few tries, I am very proud of myself and will improve myself for future project.