Week 9 - More Textures and Lighting Tests (22/03/2024)

While installing some of the complete assets into my Unreal scene (as well as some placeholders for the time being), I used a rectangular light and placed it near the window frame of the door to try and emulate in-door lights shining through it. While I've yet to have determined time of day the final layout will take place in, the rectangular light does look promising and could potentially work with just a few adjustments.

Thanks to Quad Drawing the High Poly model for the pincushion, the baking process was thankfully very trivial. The textures took a bit of thought to get right but in the end I settled with some photos of stock clothing fabrics from the campus that I felt was interesting enough for a more detailed model like the pincushion. The band going over the cushion would then be manually painted on using the texture of a seating cushion, which I feel nicely contrasts with the aforementioned texture.

While I was initially dreading having to redo a bunch of models so that they would bake properly, a lecturer told me that since my "high poly" models are already fairly low in poly count and not too much of a hassle to UV map, the baking process might not actually be completely necessary. Thanks to some guidance, I was able to get a decent UV map for the thread pillar with just the UV editing tools that are readily available.

My initial rendition of the spiralling thread texture for the thread pillar looked too meaty and organ-like for my liking as seen on the left, but since I didn't have any thread I could use for textures on me I decided to improvise with a photo of the sleeve on my hoodie. With some hue adjustments, I was able to create a surprisingly and much more convincing thread texture as seen on the right.