Hi All,
I am a self-taught environment artist, currently living in Krakow, Poland. Having background in CAD furniture design, I decided to develop into a different direction, targeting hard surface modelling. It has been just over 2 years that I've been working on my portfolio gradually preparing to apply for an Environment Artist position.
[ABOUT THE PROJECT]
I've written this article to share my thoughts with you on making the UE4 environment.
First of all, I wanted to give my special thanks to Christoffer Radsby who was my mentor throughout this project.
It took me 6 weeks to comeplete it, from start to finish. Working mostly at nights, trying to juggle this, my full time job and my family life. It was pure fun however and I cannot stress enough how awesome it feels to be getting feedback from one of my favourite artists.
I have learnt a lot, especially managing modular, moderately complex environments in a way that saves time. One of my major points of focus was to create something beautiful, radiating with the Cyberpunk-ish vibe.
Firstly, I had in mind that cyberpunk world is inherently pessimistic, being characterised by:
- fast pace of life
- chaotic and cofusing city environment
- technology on every corner
- moral questions on the process of human augmentation
- Hi-tech vs low-life
Secondy, I wanted to make something that would bring relief, serenity and still be inspired by the Cyberpunk vibe.
[INSPIRATIONS, CONCEPTS]
The inspiratin for this project originated from my interest in science and the technologies of the future.
In the nearby (Cyberpunkish) future of overpopulated world food shortages may be one of the most burning issues. Vertical farms are already addressing this problem in places like Singapore, New York. This technology not only saves space by effectively farming in 3d but also saves water.
Final render:
Concept:
The environment above, was my main inspiration. That is because of the interesting radial composition and lighting, that gives room for some volumetrics and high contrasts.
I gathered tons of references on my Trello board but most of vertical farming facilities turned out to be very industrial and "boxy" looking.
Radial design helped to avoid the situation when after 150h of work I might have ended up with a very square, non-interesting environment just because I had started with dull perspective. Picking this design also caused some challenges, described later on (Modelling).
The final stage of planning required from me seriously down sizing my initial concepts:)
[ REFERENCES ]
To stay on top my references I always use Trello board. I like it because I can add any ideas even on my smart phone and it is very simple.
Below, you can find a fraction of my references. I was inspired by new Cyberpunk gameplay, Deus Ex - Mankind divided, Mass Effect, Ghost in the shell designs.
[ BLOCKOUT ]
Looking back it seems simple and obvious but at the time I had many issues with scaling the objects in the scene.
Importing Unity's Ethan helped me to grasp of the scale of the environment.
At this stage, I was still not sure about the scope of the environment. The modular geometry created for this environment was also good enough to create other structures, such as below. But finally, I decided to cut down the scope of the project and focus on the quality instead.
I concentrated on radial geometry area and left the rectangular pieces and hallways, just in case I have too much time on my hands. Well...I did not :).
The modular pieces were used however, later on to create hallways - an eye-catcher that opened the scene a bit.
Blockout for me was also a very important part becuse I learned planning. I created prop sheet where I listed all the assets and marked them according to their placement and stage of the production.
Usually it was
1. blockout
2. re-visit
3. final asset
Truth be told, I had to come back to final assets many times over. Mainly to fix UV's, light maps or re-organize\combine geometry.
Nevertheless, my prop sheet sped things up enormously on initial stages.
It helped me to focus on the whole scene, not on detailing individual pieces too early.
Naming convention was, in my opinion, one of the most important takeways I carried of this project. It is easy to overlook it when you are focused on all that "art jazz".
Looking back on it, it feels that I saved hours by properly naming assets.
My naming convention is quite easy but it does the job.
Eg. below:
I assign a name to the group of the files in MAYA and name them for eg. desk01, desk02, desk03, desk04 etc...
Desk props eg. below:
This group of assets from MAYA is reflected in UE4 in a folder with the same name like: "Desk".
Here, I assign the same names to the assets like 1,2,3,4,5 etc...
[ MODELLING ]
Picking radial design uncovered some issues as soon as I created modular pieces. Quicky, I realised that transitions will be a big challenge down the line. That is where I had to come up with some creative solutions, like stairs below.
I wanted to create smooth transition between radial and rectangular modular pieces that would feel seamless. That created the need for non-modular pieces.
The transition non-modular piece below.
For props I used 2 different workflows:
- Unique texture maps
- Face weighteted normals + tileing textures + decals
The Drill is baked in SP with 2048 unique maps. (maps and geo available for inspection)
It was created using face weighted normals and decals only. All the textures are tilled.
[ MATERIALS, TEXTURES AND VISIAL LANGUAGE OF PATTERNS ]
Starting this project I was sure that I will want to use Voronoi tessalation in some way. It was consistent with the concept. At the beginning, I experimented with the voronoi style columns but ultimately, I decided to place it behind the plants, to underline the organic nature of the scene.
I created simple mask in SD and plugged it into one of my material copy to create the structure that holds the prop in the middle of the scene.
Also, I wanted to underline the SCI-FI-ish atmosphere with hexagonal pattern, that I used for micro details on plastics, rubbers and metals.
Most of the materials in this scene are variations of these 3 basic materials.
All the maps for below materials are exported from SD and combined in UE4. I prefred it this way because I could keep my UE4 project tidy.
This is UE4 setup of my Plastic material.
Plastic base material:
Rubber base material:
Metal base material:
Hardware material
Decals.
I created few trim sheets, decals and cut the details into the trim sheets in MAYA.
Below, is the decal I utilised heavily throughout the project:
hard-surface trim sheet
Substance Designer graph.
[ DOWNLOADED CONTENT ]
1. For this scene, I used hard-surface alpha pack that I found on gumroad. Created by Jonas Roscinas. His products are awsome and they all cost peanuts, compared to the amount of time that they save, when making a scene like this one.
Link to his Gumroad products: https://gumroad.com/jroscinas
2. For the various labes and logos I used a pack made by Munkhjin Otgonbayar, who is another amazing artist, creating materials for hard-surface/Environment Artists: https://www.artstation.com/iif/store
3. All the foliage used in the scene is taken from one of free projects available on UE4 store.
[ LIGHTING, CAMERAS AND POST PROCESSING ]
The main challange for the lighting was, actually, tight space. It might sound funny at first but appart from the main skylight that comes from the hole in the ceiling there are 48 individual baked lights on the shelfes. Not to mention all the little unmotivated lights, placed in the scene for exposition purposes.
Placing individual lights was a challenge because if they overlaped the lighting would roll back into real time automatically. To avoid it, I had to be really precise. I carefully placed the first light on the shelf and knowing that every shelf is modelled to snap every 15 degrees, I copied and rotated eatch ligh every 15 degrees as well. Having all the lights implemented, I grouped them and started tweaking all of them at once. That gave me consistent result.
For post-processing I simply added some blue tons in the shadows and adjusted their exposure. This eliminated hard contrasts and near dark spots. Blue tons in the shadows are naturally occuring wherever there is skylight.
[ CONCLUSIONS ]
I would like to thank amazing Chris Radsby and all the "the mentor coalition" again for support and the expertise. I think the mentorships are the best way of learning 3D art. It obviously takes a lot of self-determination and work but it is the best way for a self-taught artist to grow. I learned a lot by making this scene and the skills and knowledge that I gained, will stay with me and help to make even better environments in the future.
Thank you all for reading and keep making stuff !
link to the original project: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/VdB5Rb