Next gen it up!

I finally picked upgraded from UDK and into UE4 the transition was rather simple and the new unreal feels very intuitive to me and more stable. I added some more props and textured the assets. I would like to retexture some of the assets that are in the scene that I already have a texture just to make use of Substance - unreal integration, which works seamlessly and makes texturing a breeze. It seems unreal now uses physically based rendering which looks great and uses 2 new maps (roughness and metallic) which is pretty intuitive. I find this way of texturing completely different from the photoshop workflow, perhaps a bit less artsy as it takes a lot of the painting by hand out of the equation however it is also a huge time-saver in the end because textures are procedurally based and once I create a certain type of material I can just easily reuse it with other items. I still need to experiment with substance more to take full advantage of its features (primarily wearing down materials) but this scene is a great way to get started because most of the textures are clean so I am essentially getting a solid foundation.

The first new item I created is this microscope, I went with the high poly workflow which took a little longer but I think in the end it was worth it.

I created new texture for the seating in the room, these 3 objects are sharing a texture/ substance.

Moving the scene to the new engine was pretty painless and I was glad that I initially was organized in the way I set it up. Its pretty alpha at this point but gives the overall feeling of what it will look like in the end. My goal is to get it as close to the concept as I can, I know in the game it was altered and brightened to give a different feel but I would like to retain the dark mess that is present in the original concept.

Finally I wanted to show a couple of substances that I created for this scene so far. They are the substance I use for seating (chairs and couch) and the substance that I use for the console screens that gives a brief overview of how the materials are set up. The modules into which the material is broken can essentially be reused, for example the brushed metal I used for the console I simply copy pasted into the chairs substance for the office chair.