Sci-Fi Hatch

Sci-Fi Hatch

First time being introduced to baking normal maps & texture creation in substance painter.
My most optimized unwrap and mesh I ever made and never will beat.

short workflow description:
I first started looking at reference and letting me be inspired by real life space station hatches to Sci-Fi game hatches.
after having a few ideas I started making sketches, top views & side views, keeping mind I only had a flat plane to work with.
After a few rough layout sketches for the hatch I chose the best ones an iterated on them.
Then I moved on to 3ds Max and started on modeling my High poly and Low poly Mesh.
Texturing in substance / PBR workflow was still new to me, so I made a few mistakes.
So a few months later after making complexer normal bakes and more texturing in substance painter, I decided to revisit my hatch.

The end result
Real-time lighting in Unreal Engine 4

Flat Plane vs Tessellated Plane in unreal
You could get away with a flat plane at this angle

Lower angle to have the tessellation do it's work.

Without the red lights, since they could be overwhelming

AO // BaseColor // Metalness // Normal // Roughness

Let's not forget the Unwrap

This is the best I can do
100% of the pixels are being used

yes this was necessary

I also tried to make the material-shader as cheap as possible by using grey-packing and replacing the blue channel from the Normal map.
I could have used the Alpha channel, but I assume it takes up more memory, and defeats the purpose of grey-packing
I used a screenshot on polycount how to have a normal without the blue channel and still get the same result in the engine.

I only needed to load in 3 Textures to get the same result
I put the roughness in the green channel because it can store more data than red or blue
and the blue channel also get compressed more so that's why I put my AO in that channel

Base color (consists of color duh)
Grey pack (R = metallic, G = Roughness, B = Ambient Occlusion)
Normal (R & G = Normal Data, B = Displacement Map)

Optimized Mesh

Tessellated Mesh