The Hunter’s Table

Project Breakdown:

The Concept

  • I recently finished both Little Nightmares video games and am a big fan of the tone of these games and the world-building

  • It is interesting how they have taken certain fears, especially ones that children experience, such as hospitals or the dark, and use them to create a whole world to explore and survive in

  • I wanted then to create my own spin and narrative based on a fear so I chose blood.

  • My goal was to create a scene that encapsulated an unsettling environment

  • This project has two versions

    • The “fresh” state which shows recent use

    • The “clean” state which shows a cleaned workspace

Little Nightmares 2 (both images). Developed by Tarsier Studios and published by Bandai Namco Entertainment.

Planning and Collecting References

  • The first step is to collect references and create a plan

  • A lot of artists seem to forget how important collecting references and planning is to the project

  • I think we get so excited to jump in and make things pretty that we forget to learn how things work first

  • It’s important to know what the scale of everything compared to the player so that must be kept in mind

Images taken from various sources online. All rights to their respective owners.

Gray Boxing

  • In Unreal Engine 5, I used box brushes to create a rough block out of what I wanted

  • The main focus of the project was the inside of the cabin but I did feel like having a rough idea of the entire structure would be helpful to me

  • Depending on the areas where the Hunter would walk, that would change the placement of certain objects such as:

    • The orientation of the knife

    • Placement of the cutting board in relationship to the stool

  • This allows me to visualize where components will go and allows me to adjust pieces of the composition

Retopology, UVs, Other Optimizations, etc.

  • The meshes I used were mostly created by other artists (excluding walls, table, the bucket, stool, and the butcher’s knife)

  • The focus of this project was to improve my use of materials and texturing using Substance Painter and Substance Designer

  • Due to the meshes being free of charge, they typically had to be fixed in some ways depending on the mesh

  • Optimization and fixes were done in Autodesk Maya

  • The bucket, stool, and butcher’s knife were so messed up that I remade the meshes entirely instead of using the ones I found on TurboSquid

  • For these specific meshes, issues included extra geometry inside geometry, n-gons, unreadable and incorrect UV layouts, and double vertices

  • This experience will help me better troubleshoot issues when given 3D assets made by other people

 Texturing and Materials

  • Now texturing could begin

  • I had never used Substance Designer before this project and have learned how powerful it is

  • The ability to create so many parameters is very useful

  • I had never created custom parameters before which definitely comes with a learning curve

  • I found that I always had to have a very clear idea of what I specifically wanted to change

  • I also believe that there is a somewhat less is more workflow to Substance Designer

  • We have to be efficient and mindful of so many other pipelines due to the technological nature of this field of work

  • Having a smaller Substance Designer graph with efficient custom parameters is much more valuable than a giant confusing graph

  • I spent a lot of time layering colors to achieve the look I wanted and spent the most time texturing the hand

  • Taking the time to learn about how intricate the skin is was very helpful in this layering process

  • I started with deep reds and continuously built a base that I could overlay with other colors

  • Subsurface Scattering was also helpful in achieving the look I wanted

  • Subsurface Scattering is a lighting effect that occurs in the real world and then is faked in software like Unreal Engine or Substance Painter to achieve a more realistic look for objects

  • There were many settings and checkboxes needed to activate this effect but it is worth it

This image shows the graph for the base bone material for the severed hand in Substance Designer.

This image shows the graph for the skin material for the fresh version of the severed hand in Unreal Engine 5.

Unreal Engine 5 Implementation

  • After all objects were textured in Substance Painter, I exported the maps as targas files which allows us to keep the alpha information of the file

  • In Unreal, we can manipulate different aspects of the materials with parameters

  • A common use of this would be manipulation of the value of the roughness of an object. If a material is too rough or not rough enough, we can easily plug in a value between 0 and 1 and get a different result using a constant node

  • You can hit the 1 key on your keyboard while in the material graph in Unreal to access this node

  • It can then be right-clicked and converted into a parameter which can be changed per instance of the material

  • I learned about a node called “SimpleGrassWind” and I used this instead of a panner to create slight movement in the hand during its “fresh” state

  • Panner nodes are usually used for water movement and other similar movements but I found that the SimpleGrassWind function made for great jerking motions

  • You can see this the most clearly in the video at the top of this webpage

Rendering

  • I used sequencer in Unreal Engine to capture various video clips of my scene

  • The final video is hosted on YouTube and can be found at the top of this page

  • I used the Movie Render Queue plugin that comes with Unreal for better video quality and I exported my footage as a JPG sequence

  • I used Adobe Media Encoder to create the separate videos and I placed them into Adobe Premiere Pro

  • I ended up cutting a lot of footage because my video was sitting around 2-3 minutes

  • I was able to add music sourced from Freesound.org into my final video

  • It’s the tiny details that create the whole project and build up the scene and this is the difference between a good project and a spectacular one

Conclusion

  • This was a challenging project for me

  • I learned so much more about texturing and materials. I feel much more confident in my ability to create textures and materials across Substance Designer, Substance Painter, and in Unreal Engine 5

  • I am better prepared for the future when I will next need to create textures and materials and I also feel that with this new knowledge and understanding, I can continue to improve and grow my skillset in the realm of game art

  • Thank you for reading

Next

Dorm Room