This was a concept that I had been working on a while back which I have gotten round to finishing. I fisrt drew these mock up sketches from different perspectives, based on a mix between tge spaceship designs in the game Destiny and also on the X-wing and Anikins Podracer from Star Wars.
Next, I focused on creating both a high poly and low poly model within Maya in order to bake the normals. This was then textured by using nDo2 to trnfer the normals into an AO and Cavety map and creating a base diffuse and gloss from dDo, which were then edited and masked in photoshop to create a Albedo, Roughness and Metallic map.
Textures (left to right): Albedo, Metallic, AO, Roughness, Normal.
A material was then set up in UE4, with the Metallic, Roughness and AO being placed into the RGB channels to save on space.
Using another set of masks from Photoshop, I was able to sperate the hues into parameters which could then allow the spaceship to change colour in engine, while keeping parts such as rust and grime the same as in the base Albedo map.
Overall material workflow.
The instanced material was then given parameters to control the colours of the base and decals, the emissive colour and intensity, the strength of the AO and how rough or reflective the materal was.
