Process

I have always had this idea for this scene of an apocalyptic dessert with a creature exploding out of the sand using vellum simulation in Houdini. While I refined my Houdini skills, I though it would be a good idea to prototype the environment and scene in Unreal Engine 5 while getting practice creating and blending materials. I also wanted to get some more practice using Unreal's landscape and foliage features.

I started by creating a master material that I could customize and create instances of for all my projects moving forward. I made sure that there were user parameters for saturation, brightness, contrast and all maps. I also added a slot for ARM textures since I work with a lot of ARM and it is a more optimized approach. There are also parameters for roughness strength, normal strength, as well as AO strength. This material is very similar to UE5s shipped master material, however, I prefer to make it myself to have a better understanding and so that it is easier to edit in the future.
‍

I got to modelling in blender and started with the sign. This was pretty simple to model and keep pretty low poly since it is made of pretty simple shapes. I decided putting the text in Unreal would be optimal since the mesh for text in Blender is messy and quite annoying to work with. I then moved on to modelling the actual motel which was even simpler I knew I wanted the motel submerged in sand so I didn't bother with many details. Again, the focus of this project was materials in UE5 so I didn't spend too much time in Blender. I then UV unwrapped both models and moved to Substance Painter.
‍

I really enjoy the artistic features of Substance Painter so I always love getting some more practice when I can. I decided to do only the sign in Substance since I also wanted to work with blend material. I picked apart materials from Wes McDermett and 3DWolf's tutorials to understand the basics of how to create this effect. I had a lot of fun with this smart material and was able to create a very worn and chaotic effect

The motel I textured with materials created in UE5 using the engines basic blend material. This material works by using vertex painting to blend between 3 layers (stored in RGB channels respectively) of textures. The main problem I ran into (although obvious and easily fixable) was that my model had very few vertices. this meant that have an artistic and easy workflow for this method is rather clunky. I would rather work in Substance to create one texture, but this workflow is good to have in the toolbox and is has better editability.
‍

Lastly I created a emissive shader that uses a noise texture to manipulate the time scale of a sign wave. This created a flickering effect that I used for the actual lights. I also added some decals and debris around the motel for some smaller details
‍