Berlin Apartment WIP 2 - Setting up basic structure in Unreal

When working with Unreal, I like to get a basic structure in there with the actual materials applied as fast as possible. This enables me to bring the objects as I work on them to use unreal's awesome engine to quickly visualize the final result and iterate on changes when needed. The image below shows the final result of this step.

After bringing the model from Max, I setup the lightmass importance volume. This is very important to make sure all the lightmass calculation goes to the right area of the map, saving a lot of time whenever we calculate it. Since I'm here I throw in a post-process volume as well.

The floor will be made of wood... French Oak to be more exact :) . The albedo texture was downloaded from the internet and altered in Photoshop. It was then used to generate the roughness, which was used to generate the normal map in xNormal, which was used to create the ambient occlusion and roughness maps, also in xNormal.

A basic shader network was created for the wood material. Nothing special here. Hooked up the textures above to their correspondent outputs and added functionality to change the normal intensity and tiling for everything.

Below you can see the final result.

The wall was made in a similar fashion...

... textures created in Photoshop and xNormal. Note that roghness was not needed for this, since it's a plaster material with uniform roughness all across to give it a nice unblemished look.

The material is slightly more complex, since I wanted to be able to use the same material for both white and dark gray walls, by just adjusting the tint parameter across material instances. Result seen below.

Finally added a sky light with a HDR map, a directional light for the sun, and light portals on both window openings.

For this stage, I decided to use the "Medium" lighting quality, without any lightmass.ini modifications. When the work is final, I will be changing the photon count in the ini file and switching to "Production" light quality.

We can also see the baked light only, without any of the detail added on top. This is useful for looking at artifacts caused by either bad lightmap UV's or bad world settings for the lightmass bake.

This is good enough for this part, since all we really want is a stage to place all the assets that will be created to fill up this environment. Unreal also provide great visualization tools for the different pbr material properties. Below you can see the "Overall" buffer vizualizer with various PIP screens for the different buffers. They can also be displayed separately as a bigger screen.

And finally, my personal favorite... the "Detail Lighting" visualizer, which removes the albedo and GI information, so you can see the PBR materials properties more effectively.

A couple of reflection probes for each of the 2 bigger areas and pumped up the Screen Space Reflection settings in the Post-Process Volume parameters.