Reel Run (WIP)
Reel Run is an action 3D Beat ‘em Up made using Unreal Engine 5.4 by a team of eleven people, including programmers, artists, and designers. This project will last 30 weeks and is currently a work in progress.
Our level was designed with a planned approach to utilize repeating elements in the construction of the overall Saloon space. This gave me a reason to solve the problem of 3D modeling the environment by creating a modular kit, along with some clutter assets, which would reference a tilable material and a trimsheet, with some assets having their own textures.
Modular Environments
This was a proxy block-out piece that would accommodate our train level. These pieces served as a good foundation to understand how well the modular pieces work together and gave a good idea of the direction we should take in terms of texturing the environment. We opted for a mix of tilable material and trim sheets.
One of the issues we faced is we wanted to have a material that would have the capability of adjusting texture maps, in case an asset needed to be present in a different themed area. I tackled this task by creating the functionality behind this master material, that allows for adjusting AORMN, and the addition of detail normals, as well as eases the process of artist implementing their assets.
Materials
This is an example of the functionality of the tri-planar material, and how it was able to align the wallpaper textures. The benefit of having this material is that we were able to change the tiling amount, to set the scale of the texture to what I felt was most appropriate for the space.
After completing a block out of the Saloon, we encountered an issue where some of our wallpaper textures didn’t align with each other. A plausible solution that I decided to go for is to program a tri-planar material. This solved our issue of the tileable textures not lining up.