Terrain Edit - Vertext Painting

I wanted to find a way to break up the floor texture, So I decided to look into the terrain editor with this tool in UDK you can create a piece of terrain and apply multiple textures (Materials) and paint and erase them as you select each texture you can also add height to the terrain bumps and indents, I feel this will be a great tool to use within my scene.

UDK  - Terrain Editor

The image below shows a quick practice in how this works when vertex painting within the editor itself as you can see as long as both materials are seamless they will blend in quite well you also can adjust the strength in-which you pain which helps to blend in further.

Vertex Painting - Test

Going beyond the concept

So I started looking at my scene and the direction it is currently in and although I am following the concept to the best of my ability, It does not seem to offer a main attraction for the viewer this it seems to lack so I've decided to add to this and make my own, I think having a street section with medieval buildings I feel this will allow a main point of view as well as break up the scene.

Image 1. showing how this fits into my scene at a basic level, image .2 showing medieval building 1. which is work in progress, I will be producing only three building types, I started this with modular pieces but I found it to be very time consuming for myself during the production process, although this is a great technique for level design for this particular project, I will produce three building varied shapes and sizes, they will each have individual textures for the extra variation I can have doubles of the textures with varied effects this may help break up the building if they become too repetitive. Building one contains only 280 tris at its current state which is great for memory consumption.

image 1. 

Image 2 - Medieval Building, 280 tris

Scene Update

Trying to break things up - Trims

After finishing my wall and floor textures, I took a step back and noticed how repetitive it looked, I know that once I have created more assets the scene will come together but the texture itself wall/floor both look to repeated for my liking.

Before I move onto the wall texture I started looking into various ways to break up the sense of repetition, So I looked into trims which are great way to cut out noticeable repetition, as you can see below I have added two trims that go in between the floor these are made up of another asset which is the same length as the floor asset so it connect easier (modularity) it works top/bottom also to the sides if needed, I do think this breaks it up.

I did find difficulty which what texture I should use for the trim I tried several ideas but I went back to the floors texture and worked from that, as Realistically it would be made from the same material as the floor (Stone), So my next steps will be this with the wall textures around my scene, although it should not be too noticeable once I have added in windows, ledges, torches and city flags which will break up the overall wall.

Finding the right texture

As an 3D artist I think that the most important part of the 3D process is the texture work, to me anyone can 3D model, but the models come to life with the texture the artist has created so this to me is the main part of being a 3D artist.

As I finished my main floor texture I started looking for a texture I could use for my wall, I could not just grab any old texture and hope it works well as I'm working from a concept art is also needed to be relevant to that, It does not have to be the exactly same just similar and needs to make sense for this scene. 

So I started looking at various stone wall textures which I think would look well within my scene (Image below) although I have only chosen one main texture for my wall I will still keep the others if and when I need to add varied stone work within my scene.

I began to work on my chosen texture within Photoshop I needed to make it seamless like my previous texture, I also wanted to bring out the color of the stone work after this I started to work on the material set-up within UDK, again I used normal and specular maps and a bump offset tool to define the stone work, I believe this material does need more work on the normal map as its still not as defined as I would like. (WIP - Material Below)

Wall Texture _ UDK Set-up

Image below both wall and floor textures at their current states within UDK. 

Floor, Wall inside UDK

UDK - Material Enhancement, Displacement map

Displacement map is a technique which works hand in hand with bump mapping and normal mapping in-which you use height mapping to give a certain desired effect over the geometry, it pushes out the surface texture to give a greater sense of depth and adds extra detail.

This technique I think will really help my scene come to life with this added extra depth, I added this to my stone floor material in UDK with a simple set-up using a bump offset expression and while combining both the diffuse texture and normal map.

                                                               
Comparison shown below, with bump offset and without.                                                                    

Without displacement map 

Displacement Map

Both in UDK game editor

Final Block-Out