I had become slightly addicted to Substance Designer. A few weeks ago I couldn't even use it. What's the simplest thing I could make I though. Something that tiles. That's right, tiles.
Of course my results progressed rapidly with the help of my friends. Substance became a very simple program. I decided to put this material in engine to see how it looked. It didn't come out terribly but in contrast to the Substance viewport everything became very shiny.
At this point I felt the urge to place a red chair based on the sort you get in American restaurants like Frankie and Bennys.
Modeled a chair, simple enough. Chucked it into Painter. Oh my, it seems like i'm on my way to make an entire diner. I then modeled tables, double chairs and the sort of divider things in between sets of chairs. The tables were quite interesting with the white pattern. But I used a layering technique similar to how I would in Substance Designer but just in Substance Painter instead.
The way I work is very non linear. I can't model and texture everything if I don't know how it will look and react in the engine with the lighting setup. So I got to work. At this point I was a bit down because I realised I'd have to make an entire outside because I have windows everywhere. Then my friend Will messages me. He says, "Chris, they're remastering Bioshock". Great game by the way. And I think to myself, hey. This is the solution. Why not just make it underwater. I wouldn't have to make anything outside cause it'd be too dark.
The lighting started to take place by removing the sky light to make it darker and adding a harsh directional light. The roof was an issue. I wanted something interesting and obviously modular so it'd fit in. I opted on references.
Bingo. This kind of roof was perfect and would react well with the directional light casting through the glass.
The lighting was definitely falling into place. You'll notice the materials looking off such as the wall. At this point I'd go back and modify it to match the lighting. Trial and error. I also added a landscape outside with some point lights scattered about to try and start to get the effect of a city off in the distance.
Worked on the glass shader slightly. I was trying to influence the roughness to make parts dirtier with no effect. I realised I should be changing the alpha channel and not the roughness. The glass was also a pain to try and match to Bioshock as reference because in Bioshock they had a sort of wibbly post process effect going on outside of which I'm yet to match in UE4.
I blocked in the bar and considered having the place flooding. But that took away from the lovely black and white tiles.
The doors were modeled next and were inspired straight from Bioshock. A spot light was added from above to give the door a sort of menacing feel.
My girlfriend noted that the windows looked kind of stupid without any trimming on them. So that was added next.
Trimming with rivets.
Regarding the materials not matching, the leather chairs weren't catching the light as expected. I realised they had little to no surface detail. I also added little fishes and seaweed planes outside. As well as rocks that were modeled quickly. I tried to recreate the wibbly wavy water effect (try saying that five times fast) by just turning up the refraction on the windows a lot.
New normals.
Once the bar was all set in place I needed a top part. I flipped the bottom part realising it would work and re-modeled it slightly to fit a light. Propulation (props & population) was the next step. What goods a diner without food.
I polypainted each section to that when it was retopologised I could colour ID match the corresponding parts easily.
After this I went on to set dress the entire level. The project was done to practice materials, lighting and hard surface modeling. Thank you for reading.
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