Side Project: Graver Yard (Part 2:Texturing)

I've been working on the textures needed for my Graveyard scene. Part of the reason I did this project was to get me more familiar with Substance Designer, so every single texture in this scene will designed from scratch using no images at all. I'll be tweaking some here and there, but for the most part they are done.

Bark (for the twisted Tree)

Granite (for tombstones)

Granite Bricks (for mausoleaum) 

Grass (defo tweaking this)

 Roof Tiles (mausoleum)

Dirt Track (as a path)

Stone Wall (surrounding the graveyard)

Update 31/07/16


I've been working on texturing the assets using the materials I created in Substance Designer. All textures were applied in Substance Painter 2. The textures are no where near the level I'd like them to be but I'm happy for now and I'll most likely improve on the next project. These assets are mostly finished although I will be making some small tweaks before exporting the textures to Unreal.


These are the more unique looking Tombstones:

And these three are a bit more generic, I'll mix them about so it's not too obvious:

The Mausoleum (Pillars on the side aren't done yet)

And finally the tree:

Update 01/08/16

I wasn't happy with the Moss on the Gravestones. I felt it was a shame that I'd rushed that part when I'd put the effort in to all other aspect, so I went back and spent some more time on them. I spent more time looking at photos and reference images and used several more layers and smart masks to get a more realistic result. I worked on all of the Tombstones, but here are some before and after examples:

Update 03/08/16

I've been exporting and importing all of the models and texture maps into unreal. I've hooked them all up to the materials, although it took me ages how to connect Packed Metallic/Roughness textures up in unreal (Red is roughness and Blue is metallic). 

I also notice that almost all of my normals didn't look anything like they did in the Unreal rendered compared to the SP renderer.. I figured out that it was the roughness maps for some reason. So I added a multiplier to the roughness input and brought it down to about 0.85. I found I was able to make the normals stand out more without loosing too much of the roughness. Not sure if this is the best way to do it, but I'm going with it for now.

Open Grave

I made some assets for the open grave from my original design, which I totally forgot about.

For the open grave I decided to make the mesh and texture it with an altered version of the texture I made in Substance Designer for the Path in the graveyard. I deleted the colour for the stones and blended it with the mud colour and softened the their normals with a blur node... and made it a bit darker with an HSL node. 

I also re-used the wood texture I made for the Mausoleum door by adjusting the hue and lightness slightly. In Substance Painter I then added a dirt mask and used the above mud texture to make it look like a load of it was scattered over the coffin.

Update 15/08/16

I realised that I was going to need some foliage, so this is my first proper attempt at some plants and grass. I made the grass, daisy and dandelion by using a basic low poly mesh and some PNG images I found online. 

In photoshop, I cut out different bits of images until I had all the pieces I needed. I used Puppetwarp on some parts.

I was Also unhappy with the boring layout of the grave yard. I found trying to plan every bump and hill never worked and looked clinical and fake. So I increased the sculpt tool in Unreal Engine 4 and sculpted randomly and blindly. Then I looked at what I had for inspiration and started to make alterations. 

There are much more interesting shapes and silhouettes now and instead of viewing most of the grave stones in one show, the player has to walk around and go behind small hills etc. I'm now going to have the open grave with a Lantern next to it, a path of daisys leading from the hill to behind the tree which will reveal a small, handmade cross. and the glowbugs will be behind the mausoleum where the coffin will be rested up against the wall. I started to give it more thought in terms of guiding the player and giving them reason to explore.