Vertex Painting

Vertex painter is a feature in Unreal engine that allows an environment artist to paint materials directly onto the geometry to produce unique looking effects like snow or rust to make things look more natural or maybe to lessen the effect that textures are tiling over and over again.

First of all, we need to start by opening up a pre-created Unreal project, which was provided to us on moodle. We were tasked to vertex paint three boulder assets stuck together. Now we need to move into brush mode with all three of the boulders. We then clicked on the drop down menu on the left and entered red channel mode.By doing this, all of the selected objects turned red. We can now start painting over each of the objects by clicking and dragging with the mouse, if you need to erase something because it looks to much just hold shift.

You will notice that when you do the highlighted red will turn black from wherever you paint on. If you turn the red channel mode off and go back to normal you can see that where that black was, it was painting snow on to the boulders.

To create the pathway we must start by going into geometry mode and duplicating a boulder and moving it the rough distance you want the pathway to be away from the original boulder. The next step is using the blueprints available to place the walkway and duplicate it and angle it until it lines up with the second boulder. Because the pathway only has one railing on the side of it we can use the second blueprint available to place a railing onto the bridge and angle it so it lines up and then duplicate and repeat the process until you have a relatively straight railing going across the other side of the pathway. Next we go back into brush mode and start painting the snow onto the railings and pathway to make it look natural and it will also help to cover up any clipping issues between the pathway and the boulder. Once the pathway is completed and has been painted we can move on to creating a material to paint onto another service.