GTE: First Blockout

For my first month, I'll be creating this abandoned surgical room in Unreal 4. For my blockout, I kept the layout of the room very simple (a plain box), and created pieces of geometry for the walls, floor, and ceiling. Most everything else in the environment is a prop, so I left them out of the blockout for now.

I acquired base textures for the walls, floor, and ceiling, and created their normal maps and roughness maps. Roughness is a fairly new concept to me, but from what I understand from researching the value in Unreal 4's documentation, it's similar to older Specular maps I used in past classes. The ceiling piece has a base material of plaster, while the floor is concrete and the walls are tile. I feel my normal map for the floor may be a bit too intense, so it will definitely need some adjusting.

I also established the lighting, using the base light source that Unreal provides in their default levels. Since the light in my image seems to be sunlight, the default directional light fit the role I needed perfectly. I upped the indirect lighting value to illuminate the inside of the room some more (as it was pitch dark upon putting the roof on top) and adjusted the color to give the scene that hint of yellow-green. There seemed to be some light leaking issues along the edges of the geometry pieces, so those will require some troubleshooting. There's a nasty problem I keep getting with Unreal 4, where the lighting will refuse to bake in my project after a certain amount of time, so I keep having to restart the project by moving my assets into a fresh project folder. I have no idea why this happens or if there's an easier way to fix it, but it sure did put a damper on things the first few times when I had no idea what to do. Here's hoping I can fix it soon.