Tropical Dish: Raw vs. Cooked
Over the last three weeks, I have been working on a realistic tropical dish scene where the focus is creating realistic materials/textures in Substance Painter and Designer and applying them to a small scene in the Unreal 5 Engine. Also, there is a version where the assets are raw and a version of cooked.
For a more in depth analysis, a pdf has been provided-
Inspiration and References
The main inspiration behind this dish was to create something bright and colorful and create assets that use multiple materials. I also wanted to focus making on a smaller environment as my previous environments have contained several single material assets.
Modeling
For each of the assets, I started with basic low poly models with some additional beveling added later. The focus was mainly on the mackerel and fruit assets for this project so the palm and sticks were secondary characters. The mackerel was then retopologized, UV'd and brought into Zbrush for some details that I could bake in through Substance Painter. I knew in advance that I would be making the scales in Substance Designer instead of Zbrush to advance my skills in said program.
Texturing
For the textures, I started a majority of the textures using materials I made in Substance Designer, but when brought into Painter and later Unreal 5, I had to make some adjustments and a lot of hand-painting with coloring. A majority of the assets share nearly the same texel densities, so all of the textures were set for 2048px.
In Painter, there was a lot of hand-painting to be done, not just in the base color, but also in roughness, normals/height, metallic, etc. Since the mackerel had several materials made, I couldn't just UV the sections that materials would easily apply to, I had to create several masks to blend each section properly. Below is the final painting of the maps used for the mackerel, applied on the model and flat. Through Unreal, I adjusted the maps seperately to match the final look in Painter.
Final Renders and Video
Final Thoughts
I enjoyed working on this project and am starting to feel a little more confident with Substance Designer and more confident with Unreal overall. Modeling and texturing has always been something I have enjoyed but this project definitely kicked my butt with texturing the mackerel, which did not turn out exactly how I hoped it would, but I think the practice at least helped me out and, again, I still enjoyed making it.
The surrounding environment could definitely be better. I was definitely feeling the deadline (as this was a class project) and I feel like I could put more effort into it. There were issues happening with the palm leaves and the sticks look plastic like because of the model's shape, so I hope that I can come back to this project to fix it.
Even with these issues, I felt a lot stronger with cameras after this project, mainly in my still renders but the video still looks good, and the project was a success!