Drone Robot - Simon Fuchs Tutorial

I finally decided to try out this excellent Blender tutorial by Simon Fuchs - if you want to try this exercise too, get it on gumroad to support him! Tons of content and knowledge, it's absolutely worth paying for it if you can!
https://simonfuchs.gumroad.com/l/AzaOi?layout=profile&recommended_by=library
Even though I've been using Blender for a few years now I learned a ton of new things in the process of working through the tutorial. Until now I've always struggled with creating and rendering realistic textures, and I've never been able to get a handle on hardsurface modeling - so this project was a tough one but a huge level up for me. I feel way more confident with Painter and I'm looking forward to trying out more hardsurface stuff in the future. Super proud of this little bot! I also decided to do final renders in Unreal 4, I often use Toolbag for this but wanted to see if I could push my lighting and postprocess a bit more.

Using the RGB mask and a custom built HSL function in a master material, I can alter the basecolour tint of all non-metal sections of the drone. Seeing the final result come together was super satisfying!

Here's a clip of the customisation options in action

Default BaseColour texture exported from Substance Painter. All textures on this project were 4k

Mask for the decals used in the Unreal material, packed in the alpha channel of the BC map

I used a packed RGB texture for the remaining maps

Colour ID map used for masking different sections of the model in Unreal so I could independently control the basecolour tint of each area

To speed up the process of creating colour adjustment parameters for each section of the drone's UVs I used a material function I built on a previous project, designed to work like a HSL filter in Photoshop or Substance

Here's the internal setup of the HSL function - super simple and straightforward to build