Originally the plan was to try and use just Quixels library so I could focus entirely on the composition, lighting and decaling; building on from what I felt was lacking in my previous environment. In the end it turned out I would need my own props to make up the difference, it wasn't really an issue because it gave me the opportunity to learn Blender more thoroughly and get some experience with modelling workflows that aren't high-to-low baking. All of the props here are made with weighted normals and then baked and textured in Painter with no need for a high poly.

It was important that they blended well when sitting next to megascanned props and I think for the most part I managed to make it work.

- Beauty Renders -

- Wireframes and Triangle Counts -

Where is learnt to create the Wireframe Shader set up for inside Unreal: https://youtu.be/KyvndFgepBU

Simple blinds are made in Designer, and then with a material set up to allow Subsurface Scattering to get the appearance of depth behind the blinds. A good place to start with SSS: https://youtu.be/I5Z7tyoxhd0

-Additional Stuff -

Everything bears mind to remaining texel correct. To reduce texture amounts minor props like above are all sharing one texture set and on top of that the Occlusion, Roughness and Metallic are packed into one, this goes the same for any masks for larger props with different types of dirt split between channels and the AO in the alpha.

This is a good video to understanding channel packing in Painter: https://youtu.be/oQTNky2N1GM

This is a good place to look if using Blueprints interests you: https://youtu.be/ieGNMntRV4E

Propping, decaling and lighting are complete so now its working on the renders. Below is a quick render done to practice with UE's camera sequencer.

There is some edits needed to be made with some fill lights in areas like the boxes at the end that are unnecessarily bright.

Finished my pass on grunge decals for the scene as well as included some posters here and there. I had to do some tweaks to Quixels own decal master material to get it working how I wanted it to.

The next big piece is to clean up the lighting and post processing and to fix up some textures and strange glitches that only appear when I took screen captures (there is a very noticeable one in the bottom right of the third picture down. A lot of fill lights are doing most of the heavy lifting right now so I'm going to go about introducing more hotspots for lights to shine.

Some subtle before and afters.