Manhole Cover

Although we were pretty much finished with our scene, I noticed that the floors outside seemed quite plain, and so asked if I should add something like a manhole cover or drain. A drain would have probably more time consuming and difficult to implement as it would need to cut into the ground. I instead opted for the manhole cover, which could be simply modelled using a plane.



I had a clear reference for the type of manhole cover I wanted to make, and began development in photoshop, creating the arc shapes, text, circles and ridge. Using this I was hoping I could use it as a alpha to generate height in Substance painter.



I plugged this alpha into a channel and it successfully provided me with the height information I needed. However, I also wanted edgeware inbetween  the shapes, but for edgeware I required a curvature map. To bake a curvature map I also needed a normal map. I was able to find a website in which I could convert my alpha to a normal map, then after inserting this Normal, I was able to bake the remaining maps. This granted me the ability to create edgeware.



After group feedback, they wanted the manhole to look as if it was wet, so adjusted some of the masks and roughness values to create a version that looked wet.