What ?! No posts for like a month?! Yes loyal reader(s), I have massively dropped the ball on keeping the blog up to date yet again. I don’t want to make excuses but there are a couple of reasons for this.

The first is that for a while I didn’t have anything to update you on.  I moved on to trying to paint my model of a house and hit a massive brick wall. It turns out I knew far less than I thought about materials, UV maps, and painting textures on models. I’m starting to feel that at this point a good alternate title for this site could be “TL;DR Turns Out I Didn’t Know Shit”.  I spent the first week failing at UV mapping. I then spent the next week learning to UV map my model and break it out into separate materials.

The Second big obstacle is that I lost my old PC. I woke up one day to a total disk failure on the primary drive.  I keep my stuff backed up and never use my primary drive for storing data anyway so this was much more of a time, and money setback than anything else but that still managed to knock out about a week and a half. On the plus side I used it as an excuse to upgrade my dev rig so I’m using a much more powerful machine now!

The third big obstacle is that I’ve massively changed my workflow since my last posting.  I plan to write more about my workflow once it’s nailed down a little better but  gist of the changes is that blender is out. I loved it but it did not play well with Unreal engine and trying to UV was wearing thin on my sanity. I’ll probably still use it odds and ends but my replacement is Modo.  Modo seems to play better with others, it’s now available on a decent subscription plan and I’m really starting to enjoy using it. I also moved on to using Substance Designer and Substance painter for texturing assets. I think that in the long run all these changes will do me good but I feel like If I see another tutorial any time soon I’m going to lose my mind.

So enough with all the excuses and on to the Progress!  I leaned how to unwrap UV’s and texture models! I used a mailbox to test my skills first.

It came out alright but then again its a pretty simple object. What was less simple was the house. the house was a nightmare. Trying to figure out where to put the seams and where to split faces to separate materials to increase resolution took forever, and I’m pretty sure I’m still not doing it right. I still need to learn how to use tiling textures for larger assets. I was able to create my own substance for the exterior walls of the house and manipulate its inputs in Unreal to get a bunch of materials with different colors and wear pasterns, which was pretty cool. Check them out.

I have some issues with the colors on the houses not really matching but all good things take time.