To start off with, I made a rough base of what the saloon would look like (in Maya) and placed it into my scene in Unreal for pre viz.
Then in Maya, I made all the different parts of the saloon separately using the place holder model as a rough guide as to where everything would go. I made different planks for the different parts of the saloon I.E. the walls, floor, foundations etc as well as the stairs, banister, windows and doors.
Then once I had modelled all the parts of the saloon, I imported them into Unreal and put them together to create the saloon, replacing the place holder I originally had in the pre viz.
Most of the planks in the scene that make the saloon were taken into Zbrush to sculpt on details making them look like worn wood. Originally, the plan was to use an image of wood grain and alpha stamp it onto the mesh, that didnt really work however, due to not being able to find appropriate images to use as well as the mesh poly count having to be ridiculously high for the image stamp to look good.
So, to get the sculpted wood details, four different brushes were used: "Trimdynamic", "Claybuildup", "Damstandard" and "Trimadaptive". Trimdynamic was first used to blunt the edges and make the look worn and uneven. Claybuildup was then used to brush across the front and back faces of the plank to build up layers, creating a layered look. Then Damstandard was used to cut dents and splits in the wood (stroking the brush across the plank like what was done with Trimdynamic). Lastly use the Trimadaptive brush to flatten the faces to get the result as seen in the last image below.
Once the sculpting of the assets is complete, the next step is to texture which was done through Substance Painter. So to start off, open the asset in Substance and bake the mesh maps so that when using the smart masks and materials, it will map appropriately around the maps. Add a smart wood material to the plank, make any adjustments need to achieve the desired look I.E. the colour or splinter patterns. After that, add the rough wood texture on top and add a mask to that same layer. Make sure to change the colour of the wood to make a dirty/dusty look to help sell that its a worn piece of wood. Use the mask parameters to adjust how strong the mask is and if needed add a paint layer to the mask and paint custom areas of the mask to help.
Once all the planks had been sculpted and textured, they were then reimported onto the scene to overwrite the clay versions as shown earlier in this post.
