Week 5: Hard surface modelling

Module: GAR106 environment art 2

Brief: “Model, texture and present in UE5 a Victorian three-storey terraced building with a shop on the ground floor facing the street.”

House: Gryffindor

Plot number: 16 (corner)

Week five: Mon 20th Feb to Sun 26th Feb 2023

Signage in Harry Potter seems to be overall consistent with Victorian period signage; eye-catching fonts in a grand style, with the sign itself being relatively large. I decided to focus on incorporating these elements into my own sign and decided that having a sculptural sign might be beneficial and allow me to have more creativity with my design.

I ultimately decided on making it a dragon’s claw holding the sign aloft as it gave me a chance to explore something slightly more fantastical, which I believe fits with the theme of Diagon Alley well; the mix of standard shops that you would expect to see coupled with a touch of magic.

Ahlquist’s Animated Antiques is, of course, an antique shop. Most antique shops seem to follow a trend of having coloured exteriors and large fonts for their signs, with a lot of clutter in the front to show off their wares. I decided to keep these facts in mind for potential later application to my shop. I first started by creating the low poly version of my sign and UV mapping it, keeping everything fairly simple at this stage. Once I was happy with that, I duplicated the sign and began placing edge loops on the duplicated version to soften some edges and harden up others to create my high poly of the sign, smoothing at the end to create the final version.

The low poly version is the imported into Substance Painter and the high poly version is baked onto it with the ‘Bake Mesh Maps’ feature. Baking is an important feature of the workflow and is particularly vital for game production; utilizing the low poly version and baking the high poly details onto it results in the asset having fewer triangles (ergo ‘low poly’) which allows a game engine to continue to run at an optimum performance as it isn’t hampered by having to use more processing power to render the asset. This means that overall, the game engine runs better and the developers can still utilize detailed models.

To texture my sign, I used a combination of black masks and fill layers to isolate areas that I wanted to texture and made use of a stencil alpha that I created in photoshop to create the text. Then it was a case of exporting my texture maps and putting the sign together in Unreal Engine 5.