Creating Debris/Rubble in Maya for UE4 games?

Oblivion2500

What would be the best method of getting started on creating a pile of rubble & debris inside of Maya for use in UE4 games? How would the models be created? Multiple meshes combined with a single UV map? How would the texture be created?

JoakimMellergard

Your thread made me think of this script a friend made. Junk Pile Maker.
http://filipericsson.com/
You select meshes you want to use and the script makes a junk pile for you.

So If you want to do that you should start off by creating some junk assets and I'd probably say that you should use 1 material per asset. So fill the whole UV layout with one mesh. This way you can reuse the assets in a more effiecnt way. The only bad thing with this is that you might want to bake an AO map after the junk pile is created. But then again, youre using UE4 which can bake down those ambient shadows.

Oblivion2500

So I could just make 4 different objects and use that script to throw them into a pile. Then I will have to make separate materials/textures for the 4 parts and somehow fit them all into one UV map with no overlapping UVs (UE4 does not like overlapping UVs). Does anybody know how the debris was done in Gears of War, Metro 2033/Last Light, and Fallout 3/New Vegas?

These are the meshes I want to create:

• Pile of Concrete Rubble
• Pile of Dirt
• Pile of Wood, Rubble, Concrete Parts Debris

Is there any artist that made debris for their gaming art portfolio / project that can break it down for me?

JoakimMellergard

I'd say separate UV maps if you want to mix the assets for other usage. The type of objects you are mentioning though is maybe not very relevant to use with that script.. A pile of dirt is more of sculpt kind of think i suppose.