I just wanted to share the final submission for Polycounts Throne Room Challenge with you since we used Unreal 4 to make it
The original thread can be found here: ://www.polycount/forum/showthread.php?t=147331
This project was a collaboration of Labmonkey and me. He worked on some smaller rocks, the throne itself and the inner shell of the throne as well as the materials used by these assets. I was working on the scenes blockout, the big rocks, the outer throne shell and all the lighting/mood/materials.
If you have any questions on how we did things, just ask I can also add more shots of the scene when I am at home again, but for now, I only have the ones from the final submission.
I totally agree with the mentioned points and I might just change a couple of things to the scene just to be fully happy with it in the end^^ Sadly, we didnt get to do all we wanted in the timeframe of the contest.
Actually nothing fancy^^ We were in quite a hurry because we have lots of things going on at the office right now and both of us are parents^^ So yeah…we didnt have that much time for the contest, so in the end it was all about efficiency. There are still whitebox assets in the scene and we are not happy with how a lot of things turned out in the end because we didnt have the time to iterate more on them. So we just did things in a way that makes you notice less how quick and dirty they actually are xD This is one of the reasons why we also chose a darker setting, because you can hide errors better
So yeah…materials were done super fast and simple. Normally I would make textures manually tileable since this gives the best results. But this time I just wanted to finish nice looking materials instead of spending hours of work in photoshop in cleaning them up and making them tileable. So yeah…some of the materials tile pretty poorely, but you dont see it because everything is vertex painted with at least 3 different rock surfaces or blended via masks. So that also did the trick of hiding it.
In general I did it like this:
google for some super large rock images
just drop them into bitmap2material
make it tile there
remove a bit of lighting there (but just very subtle…dont really like the auto tools for these kinda things^^)
make a good relief for the large shapes (slope based detection is the king! :D)
copy/paste the tiling diff, normal, ao and height over to photoshop
level the diffuse and do some frequency separation to remove lighting information from the texture
create roughness map based on the diffuse
if needed, make a detail normal out of the diff with ndo to further refine the one I got from bitmap2material
export all that stuff over to unreal
make a material function for it so I can call it in a material and tweak the roughness in the shader to really look spot on the way I want it
add micro grain to roughness for that kinda slight noise effect you get on basalt or cold lava and in general…micronoise makes a lot of materials mor believable
and yeah…thats actually it^^ takes like 15-30mins for a material
