FMP Week 9 - Substance painter and Designer

   Before I go onto talk about my wonderful week of texturing (Not sarcasm). I just want to go on to mentioning about my frame rate issue. The one that I've been having for the past few weeks. First off, for those that don't read this, and have started here. I was having issues with my frame rate sitting at a steady 20, or 21 on a good day. I figured it was the amount of assets in my level, or overlapping collision issues, or more than likely my shallow knowledge of lighting. Turns out, over the weekend I fixed it. All I had to do was walk home with my hard drive, and open the scene at home. Without doing anything to it, it sat at 65/70fps. Not bad at all really. The issue I was having, was down to the uni computers. So with a little switcheroo, going from one of the lesser computers, to a nice Alienware one. Its all fixed. WOOP! No in engine attention needed, to date anyway. Obviously I'll still need LOD's down the line and some texture modification in engine. But for now its all good.

   Mike Pickton came round to have a look at my frame rate issue too this week. But obviously it'd been fixed my this point, so he just gave me some advise for the future. The main cause of performance issues generally start with particles, followed by overlapping alphas (which is what essentially particles are). Next would be the lighting layout and amount of light and setting you have on them, and way down the list comes the amount of assets in the scene. A bit further down the list would be the amount of tris in the scene, mainly if you have a large number of them in a small area. After that, which surprised me was textures, Mike said they usually don't effect the performance that much really, I used to think they were a huge drain.

   Now onto the good stuff! Starting with substance painter. I'm always learning new things about the program every time I use it. This week I've learnt a bit about smart materials and sub layers. Its made altering individual channels within a layer so much easier. Previously I had to go into Photoshop and alter the roughness of an image I use on a fill layer. But now all I need to do is add a levels sub layer, and tweak it. great stuff.

Railing textured.

   A little snippet of one of the assets I textured this week. I did have more work done, but unfortunately I lost half of it due to corrupt files, and not enough backups. Remember, always make a million backups kids!

   Later on in the week I had a play about with Substance designer, to make a procedural plaster texture. I only intended to make a handful of textures within designer, but now I think I'll have a go at making them all.

First finished substance designer texture.

Plaster in engine

   After I'd finished with the texture in Substance designer I took to a few tutorials to find out how to import it within UE4 with working parameters. Its fairly simple and the you choose what parameters you want to set. Its a great system to use, and I believe it doesn't have a large impact of performance. Now to get to work making more for the other walls and tiling textures. One thing I did notice was the seems where each panel meets. I need to make some small adjustments to compensate and add some more pillars in places, nothing an hour or two wont fix.

   Mike K came round to give me some crit too. He believes I'm doing a great job overall, all seems in order, nice shadows with the turbines moving, but he did mention that the plaster texture might want to have more parameters, especially with the colour. It all looks fine up close, but when you move away it sort of all fades to one colour and looks very plain. So that needs to be addressed. Along with the statue, Mike feels it needs altering again, with three levels to it. this will be better for composition and the overall look of the statue itself. Other than that I'm on the right track!