00:07Hello and welcome to Inside Unreal, where you can see how to make content for Unreal Engine 4.
00:12I'm Zach Parish and I'm joined today by Epic Games Senior Technical Artist Jordan Walker.
00:17Hi Zach.
00:17Hey Jordan.
00:18Now I understand that you worked on the Infiltrator tech demo that Epic released earlier this year.
00:24Can you talk to us a little bit about that?
00:25Sure. So, Infiltrator is a real-time tech demonstration that we use to show off the capabilities of Unreal Engine
00:314.
00:32In it we have high dynamic range reflections, GPU particles with collision, material layers, as well as many more features.
00:45Now if I recall correctly, you used the new material system to help define the look and the feel of
00:51the characters in Infiltrator.
00:52That's correct. So, a character artist would hand me a character model and I would create material layers and textures
00:58to define how those surfaces react to light.
01:01Okay. And we're going to be seeing a little bit of that today.
01:03That's correct.
01:04Awesome. So, why don't we start by taking one of the characters from Infiltrator, and kind of how he looked
01:09in the final cinematic,
01:10and then you can break down how you were able to achieve that look using the tools in Unreal Engine
01:154.
01:15Sure. So, this is the character as he appears in the demo. You can see he has a couple different
01:23surfaces.
01:23There's some chrome buckle here. There's like a military fabric stretched across his chest. There's this padded fabric down below
01:31as well.
01:32And as far as the workflow goes, we would start this the same way we would start a character before.
01:38So, a character artist would create a high polygon model. They would process a normal map from that model and
01:45hand that off to a texture artist.
01:47Once the texture artist received that asset, they would create a few different textures, one of them being a material
01:54mask that kind of color codes where each material goes on the surface.
01:59Now, in this case, when you say where each material goes, are you talking about like the different types of
02:04surfaces that make up the character?
02:05Right. So, here you can see they colored in where metal goes on his mask, and then down here they
02:12colored where like the fabric padding goes and where the black plastic goes.
02:18Okay. So, it literally is color coding the different types of surfaces that make him up.
02:22Exactly.
02:22Alright, cool.
02:24Here you can see the artist creates an asset that's basically a texture that defines where grime resides on the
02:31surface, where dirt collects.
02:33You can see in the cracks of things this texture is a lot heavier, and it's basically saying this is
02:39where the surface is dirty.
02:41This final texture that an artist creates says where the scratches and the scuff marks happen, and they would do
02:49that on the edges of objects.
02:50They do it where a surface maybe like rubs against other things.
02:54So, this is an example of a variant that we made where I took just one of the layers, which
03:00was composite plastic, and said now it's this like orange-y copper metal color.
03:06And that used all of the same textures that we created before. I just swapped out one material layer.
03:13Yeah, and the touch of color actually looks really amazing there. Very nice.
03:16Now, in the infiltrator demo, you actually used a combination of the traditional approach along with the incorporation of these
03:23layered materials.
03:24Can you talk a bit about how you did that?
03:26Right. So, we used a traditional approach to create the material layers.
03:29So, an artist will create a tiling base color, a tiling roughness texture, and a tiling normal map the same
03:35way they would before.
03:36They make that material layer look good, and then they use the new techniques of material layers to combine all
03:42of those together.
03:43And they still use traditional techniques to create the masks, right?
03:47Like, those are created using Photoshop or 3D paint programs to blend the material layers together.
03:53So, how do you benefit from using this hybrid technique?
03:56So, you get the benefits from material layers, which is a really high-resolution tiling material, combined with the benefits
04:02of traditional techniques where an artist is saying,
04:05you know, I want a scuff mark on his shoulder pad, or I want copper on this part of his
04:12body.
04:12And so, you're allowed custom surface information, but it still looks really high-resolution and highly detailed.
04:27So, I understand that Unreal Engine 4 uses a physically-based shading model. Why does that matter here?
04:33It's nice because when an artist creates a material layer, they know that it's going to react to light in
04:38a consistent manner, no matter what lighting condition it's placed in.
04:43This keeps the artist from having to tweak their surface for individual lighting conditions.
04:48So, as an artist yourself, what is it that you want other artists and designers to take away from this?
04:55One of the really cool aspects is that it's very easy to make consistent art across your entire project.
05:01So, you make your metals, you make your cloth, you create your materials that you know you're going to use,
05:06and wherever they're used in your project, you know that they're consistent and they're high quality.
05:11And it's also useful because, you know, say you have this paint that's used in your game,
05:16and you have an art director who says, you know, could we make that slightly more blue?
05:21You can update that one asset, and since it's used across your entire game, everything updates automatically.
05:27So, there's a look at creating highly detailed character assets using Unreal Engine 4
05:32with some of our new material tools and techniques.
05:34Thank you very much for watching, and we hope to see you on the next Inside Unreal.
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