April 5, 2017 Bug Scout Close-Up, Textures

Hey buds.

I’m Chris, lead artist at Fourth Axis! We are currently working on the indie game “Bug Scout”. Being lead artist means I wear a lot of hats! I do texture work, models, build materials, and create tools that speed up the level design process.

We, Fourth Axis, hope to share some of that magic with you in these small posts, giving general or specific breakdowns of our own process, so that we can all learn together.

This week, We’d like to focus on Textures.

The Texture process is a broad subject, everyone has their own way of building textures. Depending on the project, a variety of methods are used to best facilitate the project’s art style. For “Bug Scout”, we wanted a colorful, simple style. Something that would be easy to develop for a small team. Out textures, as a result, are all hand painted using photoshop. We wanted to achieve a balance between eye catching shapes and finer details. We begin the texturing process by laying out our major shapes.
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This begins to give us a rough idea of what the final forms of the texture will look like. Once these shapes have been developed to give the right shape of the texture, we then move onto the mid level details.
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These details will help to break up the flat surface of the texture, beginning to give it some depth and less even value. The final level of texture creation is making the fine details. These will break up the forms of the surface giving it a more real and natural texture.
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As you can see, it’s really not until this point that the texture really begins to take shape and resemble its intended material. The last step in the texture creation process is “channel packing”. This process allows us to create modular materials within Unreal Engine 4 that can be modified on the fly.
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Although the above image may seem like a step back from the previous, this is ultimately what the texture looks like in the engine. Each of the R, G, and B channels house unique textures/masks which are interpreted within the material. This gives us full control over the textures, colors, and other shading elements allowing us to derive multiple materials from a single texture map (to see more of this, check out my (Chris) previous Close-Up Doc: Art)

​Thanks for reading, and I hope you’ll join us next time for another Bug Scout Close-Up! -Chris
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