Sci-Fi Quarters: UE4 3D Interior

I completed my sci-fi quarters interior in June, below are a few in-engine renders.  Challenge link here

Overall I am quite happy with it - Sci-fi is a bit of a weakness for me, so is a new experience.  There is room for improvement, but thought it's a good idea to wrap it up in the time allocated.

I learned quite a lot, and even reverted some work with the shaders to better suit my needs.

Everything has been properly UV'd and optimised for games,  which actually takes more time then just creating cool stuff to show off in UE4.

Process

The overall process was typical.  White boxing, and low poly assets created, which are then each developed in stages.

Here's the white-box, basic materials, then detailed & textured assets

 It took a lot of time experimenting, and re-working ambitious ideas, and simplifying assets.

The sculpting was the simplest part of the process.  Here I sculpted the organic/fabric assets.  I made sure that I was efficient with the UV space - creating single cushions which I could rotate around to add variety and break the repetition

Here are some of the major props.  Ideally speaking I could have been more generous with the triangle count to add more detail.  For example the plant on the left is not optimised and has 3,000 triangles, which matches the sofa

The architecture was all optimised and unified by making a flexible material in substance designer 5 & Painter.

In the end I stuck with a basic, but flexible material which required 3 texture maps to make adjustments easily in engine.
I also created a complicated texture which could use one texture map (a mulit-material-mask), then adding other detail layers.  This involved about 20 lerp nodes, loads of static switch parameters, but was ultimately convoluted for the scope of this project.  It is of course saved still, and may come in handy for future development.

Conclusion

Quite successful - Many doing the challenge did not completed it.  I learned a shed load, and have bolstered my experience and asset library.  Importantly I have some very useful graphs in Substance Designer, and materials in UE4.

Looking back I could have taken it up a notch by retaining higher poly assets, more/larger textures and decals.  But it is suited to lower spec systems, although I would look into removing the diffuse texture maps and making them more procedual, possible removing normal maps too.

One area I am very happy is my unwrapping - My UV'ing is pretty good.  Also the topology is very clean.  On top of this the process is very structured, and I can amend everything from scratch pretty easily.