Overview
The objective of this project was to develop a high-quality asset pack of procedural materials commonly found on boats—such as aluminum, chrome, wood, and fiberglass—that could be dynamically tweaked in real-time within Unreal Engine. The majority of boat models in the project were imported CAD assets, which made traditional UV-based texturing workflows inefficient.
To address the need for rapid iteration and varying degrees of wear and surface treatment across assets, a Substance Designer → Unreal Engine pipeline was adopted. This allowed the team to apply scalable, parametric materials that were performance-friendly and visually consistent, with minimal manual adjustments.
The result is a library of reusable, game-ready materials tailored for marine applications, with real-time customization capabilities to meet the evolving needs of design and simulation.
Tools and Techniques
1. Substance Designer – Creation of fully procedural, parameterized materials
2. Unreal Engine 5 – Real-time material integration and customization
3. Substance Plugin for UE – For dynamic parameter control and runtime adjustments
4. Material Instances – To manage variations in wear, gloss, color, and pattern
Challenges
1. Texturing CAD Models Without UVs: CAD imports lacked proper UV layouts, which required materials that could adapt to mesh topology without distortion—procedural materials were a perfect fit.
2. Scalability and Consistency: Ensuring visual consistency across multiple assets with different shapes and sizes demanded a modular approach to material creation.
3. Wear and Tear Variability: A key challenge was building materials that could represent a range of conditions, from pristine chrome to worn aluminium, while using a single, tweakable source.
4. Optimization for Real-Time Use: Materials needed to maintain a high level of detail without impacting simulation performance, requiring careful parameter tuning and channel packing.
Learnings
1. Gained expertise in building production-ready material graphs with clean parameter controls and efficient node structures.
2. Improved understanding of non-destructive workflows using procedural design, enabling faster iterations and consistent results.
3. Developed a reusable Substance → Unreal material pipeline that saved significant time in asset prep and improved overall design agility.