Kevin Kincaid
Game Designer & 3D Artist
Food Platter Material Study
January 2022 -
March 2022
Scene Created in Unreal
All assets created by Kevin Kincaid
Food Platter Material Study is a video rendered in Unreal meant to demonstrate materials. It depicts a cheese board consisting of sliced meats, honey, jam, fruits, and cheese. The video shows the same four shots twice. The first pass shows the cheese board with fresh food, and the second shows the same board after several months have passed, with mold growing on the cheese and the fruit now rotten. The underlying model does not change, only the materials are different.
This project was created as part of my Materials Production class at Savannah College of Art and Design. The focus of this assignment was learning to create biological materials. Each material was to have a 'fresh' version and an 'aged' version. The materials use subsurface scattering as well as height displacement to achieve the intended appearance.
Completed Materials
Development Process
This project required several revisions as I slowly improved on the material creation process. We had a different milestone to complete for every class, but I still had to backtrack to improve earlier steps. One of the main problems I had was in having to revise the model many times after finding the geometry was insufficient for the detail I wanted.
The model originally started out with four separate materials being used (middle version). It grew to seven after the first review milestone, and the final version had ten different materials. I also worked to balance the effects that should created in the material vs creating them with geometry. For instance bubbles in the honey were created with small low-poly spheres.
The image to the left shows the first application of materials in Substance Painter. This was using one of the early models, hence why some geometric elements have such rough edges. The model was revised before being imported into Unreal. Additionally, I added subsurface scattering to the materials to assist with the biological appearance.
This was the first test of all materials in the Unreal Environment. I created each material in Substance Designer with a specific exposed parameter to transition each material from 'fresh' to 'aged' versions.
Each material aged differently, but there were two broad categories: rotting & molding. Rotting applied for the fruit. The materials had additional texture inputs to create spots of discoloration. I also used a height map multiplied by negative values, so the fruit appeared to have deformed inwards as they rotted.
Molding applied to cheese and meat. For the cheeses I created simple mold patterns, and then used them as tile generator inputs to create a random pattern. The salami & ham were simpler, only applying a broad texture across the surface. The mold patterns could also be easily manipulated so that they did not appear repetitious across the food platter.
Two materials did not follow this pattern. Crackers don't tend to mold within the time span depicted here, and honey crystallizes, so I used a height map and changed the opacity.
I am very happy with the outcome of this project. It isn't perfect, but it allowed me to improve my modeling ability and learn material creation. This improvement to my art production skills have helped me to create prototype assets to assist in game development.