Making An Unreal Bouquet
This was among my first few serious dives into using Unreal Engine 4 and Substance Designer, and I easily fell in love with both of them. At the time of making this, I was still a little green around the horns with these programs, and with that came a bit of a learning curve. On the bright side, this has been one of the most fun projects I've worked on in a while.
New Project = New References
I had a model from CGTrader that I wanted to make two different versions of textures for, a fresh version and a week-old one. This bouquet had two of my most favorite flowers: anemones and magnolias. The first hurdle was identifying all the different types of flora, and the second was to find references. I wanted to keep the color palette rather simple with pale pinks and green.
UV's or Disaster?
After getting the model, I needed to first make sure that the uvs were in order. Because this was a found model, I ended up making all entirely new uvs (which looking at them now, I could definitely have improved them). I don't really know what I did after the original set of uvs were all said and done, the next time I peaked at the uvs they were not as I left them. At the end of the day, it was probably me forgetting to save before I closed the program; unfortunately, I ended up redoing them three times before I could bring it into substance painter. Here are a few screenshots of the original set of uvs.
Designer Time!
This was my favorite part of this project: building textures in Substance Designer! I had very similar textures to work with, mainly different leaves, petals, and stems. For the older version of the petals, I made a separate height and normal map to add onto the original petal texture.
Substance! But This Time It's Painter
Bringing the textures into painter was a breeze, but the word that soon became my best friend was masking. Almost everything was masked off, it wasn't hard but it was tedious. This was also the fun part where I started to work on some of the older textures with some hand painting of dying bits and holes in the petals.
That's Unreal!
Bringing this into Unreal Engine was so exciting! After all the issues I ran into with the uvs, this was the most rewarding part.
The Take Away
This bouquet has been one of the most frustrating and rewarding projects I've worked on for a while. I've learned so much, especially when it comes to the potential of Substance Designer and Unreal. This is certainly something I want to revisit in the future!