Wrapping up 2022 as I'm getting ever closer to the finish line with this project. It's taken a while to get here but I'm so happy I took the time needed. A few iterations here and there to the composition, removing some assets that added too much noise, as well as some shader work!
The ropes are in place to make the scaffoldings look more realistic and secure, as well as metal rings securing the larger ropes and flags to the cliffs. I'm really happy I'm a place where I can polish things, like the cloth shader which now is way less intense and looks a lot nicer. Furthermore I took some inspiration from Cairo Goodbrand's RGB mask shader to add more details into my assets. For this I used a secondary UV set, with simple colors assigned via constant 3 vecors in the shader itself. Red channel gives a slight color variation, green adds dust/dirt, blue adds some wetness (also changes roughness) and the alpha channel adds some very slight edge highlights.
All this is now setup neatly for me in Substance Painter using a smart material for the masks, and a template scene so that I don't have to set up my custom channels in Painter every time I need to make another mask.
To help break up the rocky shapes in the scene I decided to reuse the pebble assets I created previously for my ground. Thanks to RVT blending and matching the textures quite well to my scanned ground they looked quite decent even when scaling them up, and didn't really feel out of place. I'm letting these serve as my medium shapes to help the transition from cliff to ground.
Finally it was time to get even more movement into the scene using the cranes. I simply split the crane up into two separate meshes (crane + platform) and brought them separately into the engine. In the engine I combined them into a Blueprint which I then animated using a timeline curve along with exposing the default turn angle I wanted for the crane, enabling me to make each crane's starting position offset from each others.
All of these changes are putting me into an excellent position for finishing this project in January. The final stuff is to get the rest of the RGB masks done, as well as some decal work to really tie it all together.
That's all for this year! Thank you so much for all the help, feedback and support everyone. Now let us look forward to 2023, happy new year!