Texturing

For the rocks’ topology, I decimated the rocks to get a lower polycount. I would then go over to Unreal Engine and see how the forms would read. Moving forward with this process can vary depending on the vision for your scene. My goal for this project is realism, so I came to the conclusion that the rocks could use more geometry to keep that extra form detail. If I were going for something more stylized, I perhaps would have decimated more to take advantage of the simplified forms.

Once I got something I was pleased with, I used the UV master to draw where I wanted to cut my UVs. I then head over to Maya to fix and edit the low-poly mesh. While decimating is super convenient, you can get some irregularities on your UVs. This can be resolved by cleaning up your topology. This step is really important since you want all of your textures to read nicely and to be strategic with where your seams appear.

After I make sure my rocks have decent UVs, I head over to Marmoset to bake my high-poly rocks. Make sure there is enough texel density for a tileable texture. After that, I head over to Substance 3D Designer to create my base texture. This will be layered over my bake. Next, I bring my maps into Unreal to make my first rock texture. For this process, I open my node editor for the mossy rock and blend my normals with a MakeFloat3.

This gives me the finalized normals. However, now I still need edgewear, moss stains, and dirt. I accomplished this by making masks in Substance 3D Painter. Each material gets its own RGB mask to layer on. I started with the edgewear mask, which I chose to paint manually. Using generators really helps you get grit fast, but I recommend masking them out further to get something more accurate.

Next, I used a mask and dirt generator for the moss stains. Then I repeated the same process for the dirt. I then add an additional mask on my dirt layer to further carve out where I want the variation. Now for the moss cards, I head over to Maya, where I take my opacity map and preview it on a flat mesh that I subdivided to make my cards. I make sure that the cards have some twists and aren’t flat to make them more natural.

Once I get 3 good moss clusters, I bring them into Unreal Engine. After that, I opened Substance 3D Painter to create the moss material. For the moss material, I paint a mask where I want more green subsurface scattering to show. Then I add a subtle dirt layer and mask over that. I brought my materials into Unreal Engine, tested them on my cards, and adjusted them accordingly.