The pCube
PBR Environment made with Unreal Engine 4.8.
I choosed to make this scene to learn how to work with Substance Designer and Unreal Engine 4.
Here is the background that i had in mind:
In the 80's, some scientists secretly worked in an old structure to study a mysterious cube. They collected data and tried to understand from where it comes, what was his function and who can create a cube with such perfect precision.
Click on the pictures to see them bigger.
All the pictures come from UE4 (except the reference)
Workflow
Maya > Substance designer > Unreal engine 4
To construct this scene I started to grab references, then I did some sketch followed by a quick block-out with the BSP from UE4. Then I put some light to test diverses ambiances and, when I was happy with the result, I did a paint over just to give me a better idea of what i must do.
Once this step completed, I started to create the assets. I tried to exploit all the modular options that Substance Designer (SD) gives us. So the workflow was to create new meshes and create/update the materials from SD.
I explain here the various methods that I used.
1 - Materials
I made the basic materials for all sorts of contents on Substance Designer (brick, wood, copper, etc.) and I gave access to all kinds of parameters to rapidly make various versions. I selected and exported some of them in bitmap on the UE4. With this process, new textures variation took me about 20 minutes.
Some examples of variation from my brick sgraph:
On UE4 I used the instance of my Master Material who allows me to change the tilling, roughness, metalness and albedo of my textures, to activate the emissive, displacement and detail normal map, and disable the unwanted map like the metalness for the insulator materials.
More over, he automaticly adds a dust layout on my meshes, using their world space normal. This dust layout is configurable and can be deactivated.
Click on the picture to see it in better quality.
2 - Basic assets
For the basic assets (stool, box, pipes, etc.) I used bevels and I tweaked their vertex normals to have a smooth render without normal map. I assigned them the instances of my base materials via their material ID and tweaked the visual.
For some assets, like the chair, i used a dedicated normal map in addition of the normal from the material instead of bevels because it would cost too much polys for a clean result.
3 - Major assets
On Maya I made the high and low polys to bake a normal map. I sent everything on Substance Designer where I blended my material via an ID mask.
Next I added some wear and I made some mask in Photoshop to add specific details like scratches, marks or inscriptions. At the end, I exported in bitmap and I used my Master Material to tweak the result in game.