Artefact, Documentation and Presentation (Aryan Raj Adhikari)
Creating Tile Textures
As commonly seen in Valorant, vertex painting is definitely the name of the game. Lots of different architectures with wall plasters with bricks underneath or overlaying it is very common. I did create a symmetrical brick tile, however, when going through the countless number of pictures I had taken as references, I noticed that Valorant likes their assymetrical brick tile textures for vertex painting a LOT!
Figure 1 (In-game screenshots from Valorant)
My entire project follows around replicating the theme of Valorant's artstyle. Hence, it would be a crucial opportunity missed if I don't try recreating similar brick tile textures for my environment art.
Normally, I would have used a Tile Sampler right off the bat to generate a simple tile that I can work my way up from. But, I noticed smaller details like deformed edges, bumps and irregularities in the brick tiles in Valorant. Thus, I started with a Shape node which is what it basically does; creates a shape for you to use. From there, I use a Crystal node as an alpha mask to control the edges of the shape which I kept reusing in different variations and blended all of them together.
Figure 2 (Creating an irregular brick)
I then plug the data into the Tile Sampler to generate a seamless tile. Note that you can also increase the number of input needs to generate your tile meaning, you can always create a lot of variations if you want even more details for your individual bricks. However, I wanted variations in a non-destructive manner which is where Flood Fill reigns as the king.
I plug the output of the Tile Samplers into a Flood Fill node and then plug that output into a Flood Fill to Random Grayscale to again control variation values of the Flood Fill. This process is repeated over and over again. Think of it simply as scanning individual bricks as its own UV shells and working on creating different variations for each different UV shells in a non-destructive manner.
Figure 3 (Flood Fill node)
I make use of a new node called Distance node. It takes the position of the nearest white pixel in a mask and returns a gradient for an output. This node helped me return certain brick tiles that could easily be extruded non-destructively, allowing for an interesting variation and introducing depth to the brick tiles.
From here on out, I use Warp nodes to introduce deformation to the brick tiles and also make use of the Ambient Occlusion nodes to get a sharper lightness value for the brick tiles that I could use for my color base. The height information was already created and from it, I extracted the final outputs and also created the ORM map from it.
Figure 3 (Warp masks and Distance node)
The color setup is pretty simple. I focused on the left architecture present in the concept art for the base color of the tiles. I would create a shader setup in UE later that would allow me to chnage the tint of the color at will. I was super impressed with the result I obtained and was falling deep in love with the intricacies and the beauty of Designer.
Figure 4 (Final color shader setup)
