Procedural Carousel Tool
Procedural Carousel Tool Demo
Overview
This project was a three person group project for CIS 5660, Procedural Graphics.
Goal: Create an artist friendly tool for generating wooden toy carousels.
Personal Contributions
- Ornament Tool developed in Houdini
- Developing materials in Substance Designer / Texturing carousels in Substance Painter
- Scene creation in Unreal Engine
1. Ornament Tool (Houdini)
I created an ornament tool to decorate the walls of the carousel. In our final renders, you can see delicate gold, silver, and sometimes wooden ornament details that are chained along the circumference of the carousels -- I think this really helped to pull the charming, vintage look of the carousels together.
Ornament Spiral Structure
I decided to break down the structure of a basic ornament piece in the following way.
- Spiral Spine - the main spiral that acts as the backbone for the branching spirals
- Spiral Branches - the smaller spirals that grow out from the curve of the spiral spine
- Centerpiece - the part of the ornament that is positioned in the center of the left and right spirals
There were a few visual elements with the tool that I wanted to hit:
Tool Goals
- Adjustable shape for the main spiral spine -- I wanted the user to be able to adjust the contrast of the scale of the two spirals that make up a spiral spine
- A variety of spirals oriented inwards and outwards from the main spiral spine -- the spiral branches can be oriented differently on the same spiral spine, making the end result more visually interesting
- Adjustable position of the spiral branches -- I wanted the user to be able to adjust the position of the branches relative to the spiral spine
- Stylized, wooden look to the end mesh -- since our carousel should have a wooden look, I wanted the ornament detailing to match this
Here are some close-ups on the final carousels!
2. Custom Materials (Substance Designer) + Texturing (Substance Painter)
I had been wanting to learn how to create materials using Substance Designer for a while and I thought this project would be a good opportunity to. I was also curious about the workflow from modeling to texturing and then scene creation, so I was happy to be able to touch all parts of the pipeline with this project -- starting with figuring out a workflow for applying textures to our carousel mesh.
Custom Materials (Adobe Substance Designer)
I ended up creating a few basic materials in Adobe Substance Designer, including two wood materials and one metal material I used Adobe Substance Painter to apply my custom wooden bark material to the roof of the carousel. I then layered a variety of the provided materials in Substance Painter to create a worn down painted effect.
Here are the materials I created with the guidance of several tutorials:
Texturing (Adobe Substance Painter)
The final look on the carousels is a combination of the custom materials I made in Substance Painter and texturing I did in Substance Painter
Washed out paint look on carousel box:
This effect was achieved by layering the Paint Spray and then Paint Roll materials on top of each other, which created an overall paint-like look. Then, using a couple of Grunge Maps, I created the darker paint strokes near the top and bottom, leaving the middle to look lighter and more worn out.
Wooden base:
Using a stylized wood material, I created the wood patterning in the base. Then, using Grunge, I added some more variation in the coloring of the wood.
Metal ornaments:
I used a metal texture for the ornaments because I thought this would help distinguish them from the rest of the carousel and then added some red undertones to mimic reflection of the carousel's pink base.
3. Scene Creation (Unreal Engine)
I textured a handful of more carousels following the same process. Here are some below:
I then exported the material files and created custom materials in Unreal Engine using UDIMs. This was a lengthy process as the textures created in Substance Painter mapped the textures to each individual component and simply importing the model into Unreal and creating a single material for the entire model resulted in funny mapping distortions. After long hours of experimenting with different workflows, I found that separating a carousel's components (such as into the base, crown, column, animals, etc.) and utilizing the UDIM tile workflow to handle mapping UVs and textures allowed me to correctly apply the textures I created in Substance Painter into the models in Unreal Engine.
Lastly, I built the scene in Unreal using a custom wood grain texture for the bookshelves, hand-placed over a dozen carousels and tiny toy animals (plain animal meshes we use for the input to the carousels), positioned lights, and rendered the scene. I also created a simple Unreal Blueprint for animating the carousel's base and attached animals so that the carousels would spin. I applied this blueprint to each of the carousels, changing the rotation speed slightly for each one.
