Decals, 3D Text and Media

Decals

What better way to add details to a scene than using decals.

I downloaded a bunch of png images with transparent background to create decals for my scene. I also added some emissive value to them so that they would be easy to read. Creating decals was much easier than I expected and here is how to do it.

Here are the decals I made.

3D Text

I wanted to create some 3D text for the shops that said opening soon or something similar. One way to do that was to model the letters in maya, texture them and then place them as assets in unreal. I wanted to avoid this as I did not have enough time for it. It also seemed unnecessarily lengthy to do and I was sure that there was some easier way to do it. Sure there was. I came across a video that utilized a 3D text plugin in unreal that could do this. It also could divide the mesh into various parts and let us have different materials for each. It also allowed various fonts to be used with the text. This plugin however is in beta. The name of the plugin is “Text 3D”. Here is how to use it.

Media

This was the most exciting part of the project. I wanted my scene to be lively and have video ads running in a loop. I found the perfect video that helped me learn all this.

I went to https://www.canva.com/ and made a few custom video ads. Some of them were quotes, some fake movie posters and some fake business ads. It all turned out to be good.

Now the only things left are improving lighting and rendering the scene in a good looking animation.

Texturing Complete

All of my texturing is now complete and the final layout is also done in Unreal Engine 5.3 along with material creation.

I have learnt a lot of texturing and material creation in Substance and Unreal 5 from this project. In unreal 5, I learnt about the difference between masked and translucent blend mode and used both to create materials for my assets. Masked has the opacity channel but it only works as an off/on button for opacity. For example making a fence texture that has holes in between will make use of the masked blend mode. Translucent on the other hand is used to make materials for assets with variable levels of opacity, such as glass, transparent plastic etc.

I initially had some problems with the glass material that I created. The glass was very weird and had no specular reflections. The thickness too did not affect visibility through the glass as it should because of refraction. I later realized I had to turn on raytracing and the refraction setting in my plugin and material node. The video below helped me a lot.

One interesting texture that I had learnt to make for the project is the texture for my barriers that are used as warning signs for closed shops and as signboards above the gates. They are animated textures with text and signs, with emissive values that move from one direction to other. We can also select what text to run from a trimsheet like texture created beforehand. This texture could be created in any software. I have created this texture in substance painter. It is just a black and white texture with white text on a black background. The material allows us to change the emissive colour, text, speed of the text and the background texture on the text. This background texture is also customizable with whatever desirable to the artist. Mine is a simple square checker.

This was the video that helped me make my animated texture.

Here is mine.

I also created my street floor as individual asset instances of square blocks of 1mX1m that randomly select a colour from the 3 options in the materials.

References

• https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.3/en-US/material-blend-modes-in-unreal-engine/
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wV3SoL2McFc&t=359s
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxYS2eTQ6sw
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mdejtyy14L4

Making Trimsheets

I wanted to texture most of my metal assets with a single trimsheet. As this is my first trimsheet I had to look for a good tutorial on trimsheets.

This was the best tutorial I could find and it honestly helped me understand the process very clearly. It also improved the way I textured assets in substance painter. This series consists of 2 videos and I highly recommend it to anyone wanting to learn about trimsheets.

I used a 4mX4m plane that I had made in maya, subdivided it into smaller parts for my Trimsheet creation. I used a 4mX4m plane because it is how much space a 4k texture will take in real life to have a texel density of 10.24 pixels/cm. My two trimsheets looked like this :

I used Trimsheet01 for pipes, gritted floor before the shops, wall panels, grills, pipe covers, railing, emissive colours for walls behind the panels and a few normal details I might need later on.

Trimsheet02 was used for slanting walls, vents on the wall connects, and platform texture.

After the trimsheets were done, I rearranged the UVs of these assets to fit my trimsheets.