Queen's Park Subway Station
My goal for this project was to create my first environment, with a focus on tileable materials, material variations, material blending, and trim sheets. It also gave me a chance to dive deeper into material shaders and Blueprints in Unreal Engine 5.
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Since the scene only has a handful of elements and materials, a key objective was to avoid it feeling too repetitive. I created decals, mesh decals, and masks to help break up the tileable materials. I also created several detail normal and roughness maps for objects such as the bench, tracks, and ceiling slats. For the vents and pipes, which needed some more detail, I blended tileable materials in engine using grayscale masks created in Painter.
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Special thanks to Vincent Dérozier for his excellent mentorship throughout the project. As well as Jeremy Estrellado and the DiNusty Discord community for the constant feedback and support.
Roughness / Detail lighting / Lit / Base color / Metallic
To avoid obvious repetition in the wall and floor materials, the shader allows for slight changes in the color, roughness, or normal that can be driven by either the object’s world position or art directed with parameters. (Exaggerated here to visualize)
I created a simple vertex painting function to allow for blending between a few different materials. This was mostly used on the concrete, walls, floor, and truncated domes to blend between normal, dirty, and damaged versions.
With many elements duplicated along the length of the subway platform, I created a reusable Blueprint to allow for easy placement and subtle randomization. The lights and cables use similar Blueprints with options for light intensity and cable droop.
I created all materials from scratch in Substance Designer. Most materials had clean and dirty variations to be used with vertex blending.
Some of the references I used. While the majority of the scene is based off the Queen's Park station in Toronto, I took inspiration from other TTC stations for the ceiling and tracks.