After last week's break, I feel a lot better approaching the project again with a fresh mind. It's been a productive one :D I've been organising the attachments ready for baking and baking out the rounded edges in Blender 2.79. I then took them into Substance Painter to texture them and then exported them into UE4 ready to produce blueprints.
Here are some screenshots from my works in progress:
Having looked online, I found a way to mass place switches and buttons without impacting performance. This method is called mesh instancing and can be used to place thousands of instances of a single mesh by using loops and variables inside the construction script. Here is the blueprint I created that would allow me to customise the amount of switches or buttons placed at the location of the certain actor:
By using various nested for-do loops, the vertical and horizontal amount of instances can be defined and can be changed when needed. In order to make random lights turn on or off, the function 'PerInstance Random' in the UE4 material editor can be used to generate a random float value between 0 and 1 based on the random seed in the blueprint. This is used to scroll through the position on the UV map of a perlin noise texture, hooked up to a floor node, which ultimately decides which lights are turned on. One problem I found with this method is that the random values do not change when I duplicate the blueprint. To fix this, I took the actor position value and multiplied it by the random node, which essentially offsets the UV position and gives a more random value.
I have also been texturing the seats in Substance Designer / Painter:
I have also been adjusting the lighting in the scene to make it look more atmospheric:
I have also created a material for the periscope/throttle quadrant in the centre of the dashboard (based on the real life Vzor Soyuz component):
In order to create the illusion of an image being reflected in a periscope I used a bump offset node to add parallax to the UVs and two spiral blur texture nodes in order to create a diffused blur effect.
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