It’s not often that you come across projects as massive and as ambitious as Warrior’s Pilgrimage. It’s a huge undertaking, created by Arif Pribadi and Audrey Wong. Arif is a seasoned developer and 3d artist, who worked on a number of big hits for Gameloft, and also contributed to Fabric Engine and Tinker Games‘ Legrand Legacy. His new project is a step in a new direction. In our interview we discuss the production of Warrior’s Pilgrimage, discuss the production of materials, assets and world-building practices. Check it out!

Introduction

My name is Arif Pribadi, I have been working on several Gameloft Projects for 6 years and 8 month. The projects I worked on include hit mobile game titles such as Asphalt , Modern Combat and Siegefall. And I have been working on Modern Combat series since the first Modern Combat , including the first proposal pitch art.

After more than 6 years and 8 months in Gameloft, I finally departed in order to get my Degree (just for 7 months),which is I think still quite useful for Visa and other paperwork nowadays.

During the downtime, (between the time I left and the time I started the course) , I did some freelance work such as teaching and doing various 3d work, from doing 3d Creature for Fabric Engine : Kraken to Gamedev technical mentoring for Tinker Games latest project’s: Legrand Legacy (Indonesian indiedev). With this title I really want to challenge myself to a bigger project. It is called Warrior’s Pilgrimage. It is a project I did with my only teammate Audrey Wong.

Check out the presentation video:

Some of the screenshots

Warrior’s Journey

The Infinite Canvas

The main idea is to create a large playable art.

At first, it might sound ambitious, but I would rather have expandable concept and ideas than make “safe ideas” with the  small area of art and technical exploration that often regret me later.

The first time I learnt about Infinite Canvas was when I had short Cgsociety online course  with David Baldwin. But the way I interpet it might be a bit different (originally proposed by Scott McCloud).

Instead of going into “safe direction” during the pre-production, I will create something really big, something quite impossible to finish, but quite satisfying to write and develop.

Weeks later after I went into several research and discussions, I started to trim and modify the draft into achievable plan within 6-7 month deadlines. But nonetheless the core ideas and concepts are still expandable and fun to revisit.

Goals

The main goal of course is just to create playable art or portfolio at the moment. This project is to test our limitation of what we can do within small team.

As for me, even though I still sell myself as professional 3d Environment Artist, I also since long time ago, really wanted to learn to be self sufficient, not necessarily to start indie game business, but I just want to execute the idea and story without depending on large team.

And that’s why I decided to use my time in University of Hertfordshire term time to improve my Unreal 4 game design skill as much as possible, not just art , but also blueprint and animation in order to create fully playable piece of art.

I’m not alone in my endeavour. Audrey Wong is part of the team. She wants to learn to become better sufficient environment and prop artist and improve the ability to work on the core environment team . I think as my only teammate, she got really good foundation in unique and hero assets, that is why she is an essential partner.

I always love to focus on big picture, and gradually polish the assets and add some more details. The way I do usually is to focus on first area where the player spawn, and using landmark and subtle art direction guide the player to the goal.

The beginning

This sketch and blockmesh with blob trees is not really an appealing material  for common audience, but I do it for quick plan of the composition and the walkthrough.

Production Process

It begins with the early concept and blocking out.  The view intended from the beginning to be look really open yet very linear, you may walk around the designated path but you cannot go beyond it. I am responsible for world building, while Audrey Wong is responsible for most of the details in architectural and village hard surface props.

The type of cliff and landscape I choose is based on the stereotypical Chinese yellow mountain landscape painting.  Kind of exaggerated, but hey, it is a fantasy game. (As long as we got the foundation right  of course).

While we tried our best to make it look as massive as possible, it’s not as big as you think.

I always make sure, everywhere the player goes, he can find a large open area. The user should feel, as if he is able to go to that far mountain.

It is not really quite a new technique. Back when I was working on Modern Combat 2 for iOS , most of mobile FPS  games were set in enclosed area. Same thing is true about Wolfenstein. It is understandable because of limited hardware and manpower.

However our Modern Combat team wanted the game to look less claustrophobic. The most effective method to fight with this is to draw vista background. It doesn’t need to be physically correct or hi-poly , it just needs to be there for the player to see. This background also has a lot of functions and could be used for game design and storytelling.

The list here shows the importance of Vista in games:

• It helps player’s orientation. You can easily navigate the game without a map.
• It gives information of  geographic and climate condition, so  we can work on consistent  natural elements and architecture texturing  there.
• On top of that, I usually shape the landscape before adding buildings. Imagining how the castle, town or village could be built upon such landscape.
• Draw some subtle road path so we know how they transport to the outside world.
• It creates an illusion that the game is bigger than it is supposed to be, this is great tool for storytelling and expansion plan either it happen or not , because many audience love to have untold story instead of have everything explained..

The map below shows the scope of the game.

However the concept above  shows what player is expected to see. It’s a view that I always love. Of course nowadays this point of view is quite common.

There are many terrain tricks out there. I prefer to make far mountain with traditional modeling, and fill the top part with foliage.

Our technique is similar to classic Walt Disney animation approach as seen on “4 artist paint 1 tree”.

While not always the case, but this is the graphic explanation for our pipeline 

Sculptures

We  both are  experienced with Zbrush Sculpting , but having to sculpt many ornament is quite a new experience.  Of course the first progress starts slow, we spend our time getting the right and consistent technique. The most important part of ornamental sculpting is getting the right and consistent reference library. Our current theme is really challenging. It’s based on Indian, Cambodian, and Balinese culture and ornaments.

Now to get things fast, we build some z-tool library. Then shared in Dropbox and Mega, instead of exclusive ownership for every ornamental sculpt,  we shared elements and subtools we did in Zbrush.

Sometimes we use MRGBZgrabber to grab finished sculpture heightma , and use it somewhere else.

After quite some time, our library just became big enough to work faster and more consistent.

Iteration is quite important, especially in main areas.

This is the early temple area iteration

And this is the temple now 

As you’ve noticed, I totally reworked the structure (this outdoor temple is fully my responsibility), but kept the main silhouette.

In the earlier design , there was an experiment whether I can get away with fully procedural brick from Substance Designer or not, apparently the method wouldn’t work well in a large temple where  the architecture should look uneven and fragile.

The main temple is dominated by unique large bricks and elements. Then in the middle part I use tiling textures.

Since our team and resources are really limited, we rely on automation to get things done.

For environment texturing (and hipoly modeling), we split up the job:

Mostly the hard surface and environment asset including  hi-poly modeling/retopo  is done by Audrey Wong, except for all  the nature part and outdoor  main temple. Once she finishes baking normal map and diffuse mask, I start generating automation for diffuse with Substance Designer.

Audrey is also responsible for village area polishing, collision placement, and triggers  in Unreal Engine 4 (and also main area assembly, where the statues are placed) .

We started from greyscaled object with normal map, instead of color diffuse everything before the asset is polished, because we need to focus on shapes, silhouette and detail frequency first.

Color is just a distraction in early 3d  production, because most artists tend to do too much iteration on color. We all have different taste of color, even if we’re working on our own, we can change our mind about the hues and tinges.

That is why we avoided setting up color during the early production.

As usual I do blockmesh, mesh integration, and make sure all objects are ready to be polished and are still in place when exported back.

Audrey Wong did hipoly and Zbrush polishing, meanwhile, I worked on nature parts, splines, and foliage. I had to make sure non-hero elements are highly reusable.

Once it is done and baked she gave the assets it back to me. We temporarily worked on separate unreal level streaming, so we can work in “parallel”.

This is the greyscaled result with baked normal map.

All the small village props are done by her (except the lamp, ground, and platform). Once the normal map is finished, I start finishing the texture map using Substance Designer.

Working in 16 bit map

The huge advantage of using Substance Designer is that you can fully work with 16-bit map,

This allows me to adjust much larger range of RGB or black and white without significantly  destroying the range of the value (because of limited 0-255 value in 8 bit images). Always work on 16 bit and make 8 bit output as Targa file (targa file will always use 8 bit anyway).

At this step I gather all the baked map and lowpoly Audrey has produced.

In fact Substance Designer plays a really big role in speeding up our pipeline, any iteration and reproduction for different assets can be set quickly once I finished the “master” texture generator as displayed above (wood, door, concrete, loam, etc) .

I just need to connect different Raw/baked texture, and then new consistent texture will be be generated. Doesn’t matter if the Raw is tiling texture or unique texture, the method mostly works.

Although you see many outputs here, most of it is just for Substance preview, the only map I export is Diffuse , roughness, and SRT. This way you can reduce the map file amount and memory use.

Finished look combined with platform, terrains, and other natural elements.

Part 2: Materials

Now for another fun part,  let’s talk about materials in Unreal Engine.

My landscape will automatically grow some grass and occasional small rock everytime I paint grass texture on my landscape.

You can do this  with the material tool called Grass Tool  (it can be found in material editor).

It should be connected to grass type.

Result :

With grass tool:

Without  grass tool

This is how my moss shading setup looks like.

I use pixel normal (blue channel mask) so the fresnel and the moss only appear mostly on the top.

As you can see, I use material function (nothing really magical here except material function allows me to group messy nodes into function group) and moss with fresnel, usually moss has shiny green highlight when we see it from side.

Moss shader in action. The moss will be always appear on the top of the rock regardless of their orientation.

In Cave area, I  also added alpha Rubble using POM (parallax occlusion map) to give small transition between ruins and the ground. Unfortunately I added this feature after I released the first trailer on Youtube, so you won’t see it in the first trailer, maybe I will show it on the game demo video next time.

And this is the result of parallax occlusion map, very effective and low poly!

This method is pretty much inspired by one of Epic Games podcast showcases.

Lighting

I was always fascinated by Kite Demo partial light and Uncharted 4 lighting, it seem to have become a trend in the current gen to have gobo cloud shadow (image based shadow)  from the directional light. So I tried to  reproduce it in Warrior’s Pilgrimage.

In Unreal Engine 4 we use Light function material in order to create image based shadow, and plug it on directional light.

It is also good for faking large mountain shadow, where it should be smooth and gradually disappear on the tip of the other mountain.

It might not physically correct of course, but I am quite satisfied with the result.

Light function material

For Interior Light , traditional lightmap baking does the job, we just need to  distribute few key point light and spotlight here and there, and  some static blue lights for extra ambient feel, static light is good to make additional light without sacrificing the performance.

On this particular scene, I got help from Audrey Wong for early  light placement because I was busy working on outdoor Temple  area. Once the light is adjusted, I baked it for the final look.

Character Animation

The fluidity is coming from 3 things: using mocap animation, cloth simulation to get additional cloth animation and using the combination of Blueprint and BlendSpace to get the blending between Idle , Walk, and Run.

Even when you suddenly stop the player from running there is some little bit blend in it.

Now I am not  animation expert,  I wish I could add MGS style wind movement on his jacket but  I didn’t have enough time to figure it out, but I managed to add very subtle wavy animation on his jacket-fur using material world position offset ( same technique I did for foliage  animation).

It might be just a cherry on the cake, but I always love to add small details.

The character animation is built using mocap from motcap.com. It’s a free mocap website.

At that time I thought it was good shortcut since animation is not my expertise. However in the end I had to clean up the animation quite a lot.

Some simpler movement such as idle animation is hand animated.

But  as I mentiond there is transition between Idle, Walk and Run.   This feature is not enabled in default Unreal mannequin animation.

All I needed was to work on the blendSpace1D parameter and some blueprint works, it is a bit overkill but at least I am kinda satisfied with the result.

Of course it was daunting task to learn in the beginning because I was completely unfamiliar with Unreal animation pipeline back then.

I started with week and days  of frustration but I just kept working until it worked.

In the end I started to memorize the animation pipeline. And a lot of blueprint functions, the learning process really paid off.

Using Unreal Engine

Of course the production of raw asset is done with art tools such as 3ds Max, Substance Designer, NGplant, Zbrush, Photoshop, etc.

The good news is Unreal Engine gives all I need, there is almost  zero need to download additional plugin in order to achieve the graphic quality and features I wanted.

Also as an artist who doesn’t have experience with C++ , built-in Visual programming  such a blueprint  helps me a lot to accomplish many things including creating gameplay for my project.

Even though there is no “real gameplay” here, a lot of art features rely on blueprint.

Some of the art features such as grass movement collision are done using blueprint (that detects characters location) – connected to the grass “rotate about axis function” in grass material.

If you come across a daunting technical obstacle, always do simple debug in every step, it’s a common practice in programming, regardless what programming language you use.

For example, in blueprint you need to test whether your game is really saved or not, you can use “print string”  node, to make sure once the game is saved , there will be “game saved” text on the screen , otherwise it will say nothing.

An example of flow debugging in Unreal Blueprint   

I connected the return value to branch then it connected to “Game Saved” print string node, supposed that the Save Game to Slot node fails to execute, I won’t see “Game Saved” during the gameplay, at that time I will realize that there is something wrong.

Same step  when you work on materials in Unreal.

This is an example of material debugging : I just want to make sure that the grass detect the character position, red color indicate the mesh is being affected by the character.

Challenges

First biggest challenge was the technical aspect of this project, risking my  time to learn new technique is an inevitable gamble.
The possibilities of failure for not delivering on time is always there.

I was comfortable with 3d modeling, Unreal shaders, static environment art, and basic blueprint . However I had to learn much more blueprint to get the game functional. And also learn to integrate character in Unreal and make it playable!

Other minor blueprint task also could take time just because I was unfamiliar with the step.  Such as having working checkpoints, and calling events.

Gladly as I mentioned before, always tackle one problem  at a time,  take a note, watch tutorial and bookmark any useful article you find.

And again, always do debugging!

Soon without realizing it, you’ll be memorizing a lot of technical issues and will learn how to solve these problems quickly.

Teamwork is really important here, regardless of how small or big your team is. Make  the team work effectively. With only 2 person team, we must be more than just specialists.

Arif Pribadi, 3d Environment Artist

INTERESTING LINKS

UNREAL ENGINE 4: UNCHARTED 3 INSPIRED DESERT SCENE

STUDENT SPOTLIGHT: JOSE F. MUNDO MENDOZA

IZABELA ZELMANSKA & HER CHARACTER THEATER

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Post tags: 3DS Max, animation, Epic Games, game development, gamedev, indiedev, Lighting, materials, NGplant, Photoshop, Substance Designer, Textures, UE4, Unreal Engine 4, ZBrush

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French 3d artist Koola has recently published a short video of his upcoming game tentatively named “HK project”. The short video is intended is a visual test of the indie title, which features a brave cat in an impressive futuristic 3d world.

“HK project” is created with the help of Koola’s friend Viv. The game is being built with Unreal Engine 4 and Substance tools. Koola is known for his unique take on post processing and lighting. Over the last couple of years he created some absolutely amazing 3d projects.

However, now his tiny team is building a unique indie project, which will most likely become the next big thing in the game development world. No idea when it will be released, but we’re all very excited to see this game in action.

Interesting Links

Interview with Koola.

Source: hk-devblog.com

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Post tags: 3d, 3dart, Allegorithmic, cats, cats in games, design, gamedev, Games, indiedev, Lighting, materials, production, Substance Designer, Textures, UE4, Unreal Engine, Unreal Engine 4, Videogames

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This Unreal Engine 4 environment is based on the Ice Station map from the TimeSplitters 2  FPS video game by Free Radical Design. It was created by YouTube user ZoyncTV as a part of his 3rd year of study at Sheffield Hallam University.

© ZoyncTV, 2016 YouTube Link

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Post tags: Epic Games, Technology, Unreal Engine 4, video

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3d artist Timothy Dries talked about the way you can play with lighting and architecture in UE4 to create picturesque ruins. Textured with Substance Painter.

Forest Ruins

The start of this scene was supposed to be a pedestal to display a character on, but as you can see I took the focus more to the environment itself, but it can still serve as a pedestal to show of any character. Also this was my first time building a full scene using Maya as I knew that my internship at frontier would be fully in maya.

Inspiration

I started off looking at old churches and I kept coming over the same couple off images of abandoned Russian churches. I was interested by seeing such beautiful architecture in the middle of the woods. After looking around at these churches I searched for Tver Oblast, and apparently this area has a lot of churches that are abandoned and broken down. After defining the different pieces of the structure itself I began building a base block out in Maya.

Substance Painter

After I had the block out done I started on detailing the meshes in Zbrush, I added a lot of bricks and sculpted broken down pieces. But this was later replaced by substance painter just by adding a brick texture using Tri-planar mapping, this fought heavily with the normal map I spent so much time on creating, except for the broken down ends. So I decided to undo all the detail that I had sculpted and replace it with the substance painter texture.

So yeah, I could have saved myself a lot of time by first testing this in Substance before moving on to detailing in Zbrush. So think before you act.

Lighting

The lighting in this scene is actually really simple, it uses only one directional light and another point light to fill the pedestal itself with some light. There is also a little bit of fog in this scene but this is only visible in the This puts an extra emphasis on the character that is put inside if there is one, together with the lighting we have all of these lines that point towards the middle of the ruin.

The thing to keep in mind with these large amounts of foliage is that the build times are long, especially when you need a bigger light map on the foliage itself to have a better definition of the shadows actually shadowing other parts of the foliage as well, as seen in the screenshot at the beginning, the screenshot above is without any lighting build and you can see that there is a major difference between the shadows on the grass itself.

Foliage

The grass used in this scene was created from a stock photo from CGtextures.com I used a picture that had already cropped grass blades, I separated one of them and copy pasted it to make some actual grass. This is a simple technique and can result into some easy results but is not the best way to do this if I had to do it again. Once you have done this import the textures and set up the shader, there is a special option for foliage in the shader.

Using the foliage tab in the top left of the screen in Unreal gives you the option to drag and drop assets to then use as foliage to paint on top of the landscape. You then have the option to tweak all of the options that can do all things like increase the density of the meshes you paint, the radius of the brush and so fort.

Use the foliage brush for other stuff

Doing this with the grass at first I decided to make a couple of bricks that I can then use again with the foliage tool to easily populate the scene with bricks. This creates the feeling that the ruins are actually still in decay. The really handy trick using the foliage tool is that is also paints on any other mesh you have in the scene.

The trees in this scene are not made by myself, these are standard assets that come with Speedtree, I had to use these because I was in a little time constraint.

The thing I have learned with making foliage is that I need to find a way to make more dense foliage so I can pull down the amount of meshes I actually need to fill the ground with grass, this scene is currently using about 4k planes for all the grass currently in scene. So when approaching foliage in one of the next scenes I am going to make, I might try some other ways to approach this, maybe using Fibermesh or sculpt them in Zbrush.

Post Processing

A nice finishing touch to every scene is using a “post-process volume” this can really make or break your scene in the end. So be subtle about it. I’m going to share a couple of tips that I used in this scene.

First off, you don’t need to expand the volume all the way so that it encapsulates all of your scene, there is just a little button for that, pressing the “Unbound” button changes the volume so that it doesn’t keep the borders in check. This makes the “Enabled” button really handy to easily switch between post-processing “on” and “off”.

LUT

To start with these cool post processing trick you need to download the base LUT strip as seen above, then take a screenshot of the scene you currently have. Then move on to Photoshop, drag your screenshot and your LUT in there, then add as much adjustment layers as you want to get a good result. When you are done with this export the little strip with all the adjustment layers on top as a separate strip again without the screenshot or anything.

Let’s head back to Unreal engine and import your newly created LUT. Open it up, set the mip gen settings to NoMipMaps and then set the texture group to “Color Lookup Table”. Then you can drag it into the post processing volume under the Scene color -> color grading tab.

Tadaa, you got your adjustment layers from photoshop in Unreal with this handy trick.

There are a lot of cool things to adjust in the Post Process volume. The things I adjusted together with the LUT technique are Ambient Occlusion, Misc -> AA method, Turned the auto exposure to 1 to disable the eye adaptation and a little bit of bloom and some scene color. There are a lot of options here, so give them all a try.

Recommendations

A couple of things I can recommend to other artists is to look at real life, be inspired by things around you. Go for real life reference instead of concept art or other games, this helps you in adding believability to the level you are making. Also if you are new to this, try not to make a full environment at first, start by focussing on a single aspect. Instead of tackling a giant environment on your own. And last but not least, if you are doing a full environment, do some planning first ( I must admit I could do some more work on this too ) this does help you greatly in tackling the environment and share the stuff you make to the online community to get some awesome feedback.

Timothy Dries, Graduate Environment Artist

INTERESTING LINKS

TAKING ENVIRONMENT ART TO THE NEXT LEVEL

BATTLEFIELD ENVIRONMENT ARTIST ON CREATING NATURE IN UE4

SUBSTANCE DESIGNER USAGE IN ENVIRONMENT DESIGN

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Post tags: Allegorithmic, environment art, Epic Games, Game Design, game development, game industry, gamedev, level art, Lighting, materials, Maya, SpeedTree, Substance, Substance Painter, UE4, Unreal Engine, Unreal Engine 4, ZBrush

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At Google I/O developer conference, Google’s head of VR Clay Bavor announced that the latest version of Android will be getting a VR mode. Google calls this step “Daydream”.

This step mainly concerns future VR ready smartphones. Google states that these devices will have to be ‘Daydream Ready’, which means displays as responsive and latency-free as possible, and optimising Android N to help apps run faster. Big companies like, Huawei, HTC and, Samsung are said to be already developing smartphones for Daydream.

There’s also a new controller described as “super flexible”.  Daydream controller will feature some of buttons and motion input. No release dates or price details are given.

Daydream Home will feature the store for software. Users will find there games from developers like Climax Studios and Resolution Games, as well as Google’s own new content, including Google Play Movies. YouTube has also been recreated for this specific purpose.

What is more, Epic Games announced that Unreal Engine 4 supports Daydream!

One way we help VR developers is through releasing internal projects like Couch Knights, Showdown and the VR Editor for free.

We also continue to optimize and show our Bullet Train demo, which is known for its polished execution of motion control gameplay.

Natural input that is made for VR is hugely important in making you believe you really have been transported to another place, and nothing beats the immersive qualities of incorporating motion controls into a VR experience.

Epic Games

Below you can find a small-scope dungeon RPG built for Daydream in a couple of weeks using Unreal Engine 4 Blueprint visual scripting and simple fantasy-themed assets.

Daydream integration is available now on GitHub (login required), and it’s coming to the binary tools in the full Unreal Engine 4.12 launch, which is on track for release on June 1, 2016.

At Epic our mission is to give developers the very best tools for building immersive and visually impressive experiences with great performance on every platform we support. We have been creating VR experiences for many years now that not only push visual fidelity but what’s possible in terms of input, interaction, characters and gameplay mechanics

Every project we work on extends the capabilities of Unreal Engine, and we pass these improvements to developers on a daily basis. Today we’re proud to be part of this new chapter in VR history.

Kim Libreri, Epic Games CTO 

Inventory UI and interaction in our Daydream dungeon VR project

Make sure to check Epic Games’ documentation, and visit the Google VR hub to learn how to set up a Daydream development kit.

Daydream is set to be released this Fall

Source: Epic Games

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Post tags: Android, Epic Games, game development, gamedev, Google, indiedev, UE4, Unreal Engine 4, VR

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3d artist Vistorovschi Victor talked about the production of his great UE4 scenes. He talked about the composition, materials, lighting and other little details.

Introduction

Hi, my name is Vistorovschi Victor and I’m an aspiring 3d artist with my main focus being on hard surface modelling and I am currently working as a QA Tester over at Electronic Arts. So far I’ve only been working on personal projects and my portfolio.

The Production of UE4 Scenes

The first thing I do is to try and find reference images relating to the environment I’m building to nail down the general mood. The next thing is doing a rough version of the scene and get the general composition and lighting. Once that is done, it’s time to start making a list with every model, textures, particles, effects I need to make for the scene. I normally use Trello since it’s easy to use when it comes to organising my work. It really creates a real sense of progression by having a clear overview of the project you’re working on. After I finish doing all the models and textures and adding them in the environment, I’ll make some last minute tweaks and fiddle with the post processing to nail down the final look of the scene.

Building the General Composition

I always try to have a rough version up and running as early as possible and start to iterate on it until I have something close to what I want the scene to look like. When I start set dressing the scene, I always try to make it look believable like there’s some kind of history behind it.

Assets

I have a pretty straightforward asset production pipeline. I do my high and low poly models and baking in 3D Studio Max and for texturing I’m using Photoshop along with Quixel Suite 2. The models I make vary depending on what I’m working on. If it’s for a static scene I don’t really worry about the poly count or how optimized the model is, the only thing that matters is the end result, but if it’s for a game environment then I have to take in consideration how big the model will be, how close will the player get to the model, LODs, the poly count, etc. And it also depends what platform you’re developing for in case you’re doing assets for a game.

Materials

Quixel Suite really helped me speed up material production. It’s an awesome tool and I really like how it’s integrated directly with Photoshop.

As for setting up the materials, it can vary depending on the production pipeline. Either by making unique textures for each model or using master materials along with texture masks. For example on the galley environment I only used one master material for most of the models and only changing the normal and AO maps. It all boils down to what is your preferred pipeline.

Lighting

The lighting is done by using static and stationary lights and only using dynamic lights to add some highlights or light up darken areas in the scene. Also I start adding in lights early on to get a general look and feel and figure out in what areas of the scene should I focus on adding more details.

Keeping the Artificiality Away

There are a lot of factors that contribute to making a scene look more natural. How the lighting is set up in order to achieve a more natural look, how the materials are done and look under different lighting conditions, how the effects are used, the post processing etc. It’s a combination of all these elements that, if done right, can make a scene stand out.

Vistorovschi Victor, 3d artist

Interesting links

LIGHTING COMPARISON IN UE4 AND CRYENGINE

STUDYING LIGHTING & MATERIALS IN UNREAL ENGINE 4

LIGHTING SCENES: REALISTIC LIGHTING FOR AUTODESK MAYA AND MODO

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Post tags: 3DS Max, Adobe Photoshop, EA, Epic Games, game development, gamedev, Games, mgae industry, Quixel Suite, Trello, UE4, Unreal Engine 4

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We were lucky enough to chat with Cliff Schonewill – an amazing artist, who currently works with Sony Santa Monica. Cliff is an amazing sculptor and environment artist. Over the years he did amazing stuff for a bunch of big games, including Batman Arkham Origins: Blackgate and Injustice: Gods Among. In this interview he shared some advice about design and creation of in-game content: environments and character. Check it out, there’s a ton of great advice inside!

Introduction

My name is Cliff Schonewill, and I am currently pleased to be a staff senior environment artist at the terrific Sony Santa Monica Studio. I graduated from Ringling College of Art and Design’s computer animation program. As a person and especially as an artist, I believe that education and study is a never ending cumulative journey fueled by a chemistry of interest, curiosity, drive, needs, desires, and other such things, and so I wouldn’t say college is where I “got” my education, but rather where I started down this road I am now on.

Regarding my line of work in 3D, I am proud to say I work in the industry I think has really many of the best artists in the world from my perspective; the gaming industry. Put another way, the creators of real time experience-able interactive immersive artificial worlds that have so many things that need to blend together in concert, all within limitations that are a fast moving target. Like all forms of art, gaming hosts a particularly huge range of flavors. If you look behind the doors of anywhere at the leading edge of what they are doing in this industry you’ll find talented, hard working people, arms linked, wading through chest high molasses while balancing eggs on their foreheads, but wearing smiles. That’s a great place to be and just recently, for the first time related fully to my job, I truly feel that way.

My time in this industry is somewhat short so far, and I honestly feel I am only really just beginning, especially in light of what I just said above. I began as the only character artist at Armature Studio in Austin where I worked on an unannounced project that was shelved, followed by Batman Arkham Origins: Blackgate and then Injustice: Gods Among us for Vita in a minor way. I took some time away to live abroad for nearly a year in my wife’s hometown in South Korea, and then found Illfonic in Denver when I came home and worked there for a few years, primarily on their unique early development of their own IP – Revival, which is where much of my recent portfolio pieces are from.

Sculpting is obviously a huge part of your production process. How do you approach sculpture in 3d? Could you talk in general about your production process with Zbrush? How does the sculpting of living creatures and architectural elements differ?

Sculpting really gets me going, and is arguably my favorite process in the various steps it takes to get from nothing to something resembling usable/final. I actually often refer to myself as a sculptor to people who don’t know much of anything about my industry, as I find it a more accurate way for them to understand what I do than calling myself a 3D artist or specifying character or environment art as most jobs often do. In fact, I regard the whole modeling process as sculpting, not just the use of something like Zbrush (though again, that is my favorite bit!)

It is highly difficult to answer the second question there regarding how I approach sculpture and specifically in the digital 3D medium in a specific way. The reason I say that is that I find the approach is different in small or large ways for each thing I end up creating. In an attempt to be concise and answer this generally, I will say that my approach is typically a salad made out of at least some quantity of the following ingredients tossed together, not always in the same order; exploration, problem solving, encouraging and following happy accidents, transmuting things into other things, continual and somewhat constant design adjustments, planning and just going with it when things go off the plan, and taking a step back to consider and re-consider how something ultimately fits into a whole. I highly value being organized, but I place more value on being a mad scientist and allowing opportunities for something I am making to be improved upon, even late in its process, which often creates a bit of a mess. I just embrace the mess… sometimes the most delicious meals create a respectable heap of soiled dishes in the process, right?

I honestly think each strength has an accompanying weakness, and my process has a ton of room for improvement in quite a few areas. The more things I do though, the more I learn that I have to embrace the types of things that are imbued in my process as a simple extension of how I think and who I am – to recognize where those things make me strong, and where they leave me lacking. It took me time to realize that, and is a constant struggle to remember in the fast paced river of new tools, techniques, and processes we adapt to in the gaming industry.

As for differences between creating living beings and settings or architectural elements, well… I think these two disciplines really have a huge majority of things in common with each other, but those things are applied differently and have flavor and nuance to them as well as differing areas of knowledge and practice that make creating them possible. It takes a lot of time and focus in just one of these areas to really excel at it, and so artists can tend to take one road or the other and stay on it.

To get closer to an answer to your question, having done both character and environment art in some capacity in my few short years, I would so far say the primary difference is actually more of a technical one. Environment artists are to some degree always striving to get the most effect out of the fewest things – deconstructing an entire setting into what versatile re-usable pieces and textures they can make and assemble together in intelligent ways that allow them to create the large amount of content they need to while still being both feasible to make and sensible to run in real time. In line with that, environment artists have to predominantly consider the use and creation of tiling/seamless textures. This is also important in high fidelity character texturing pipelines these days but primarily to add fine or even micro details inexpensively on top of unique textures, rather than how ubiquitous it is in environments. Essentially, being an environment artist is like a lego lover’s dream and nightmare – you get to make your own legos, but you have to make everything with only, we’ll say, 15 different lego pieces. When you think about it, puzzling these things out isn’t easy and I’m really learning a lot by doing it, as I consider myself very new to environment art.

There is a large range of considerations and technical limbo acts that character artists need to navigate as well while they create, but they are generally more contained considerations. One of the things that I love about doing character art is that it allows me to really focus on one asset and get into the nitty gritty of everything – being a detail oriented person, that’s a real joy for me. I keep learning the hard way that I have to reality check myself often in this area when doing environment art, and reorient my mind to thinking about the single thing I am making at the moment’s context in the lego set I mentioned. One final difference I’ll note so I don’t run on for far too much longer, is that typically a character is meant to stand out, while often in an environment it is necessary and often desired to make things deliberately not stand out. It’s about more than just making everything look amazing, there is much more to consider there.

Both of these disciplines however are all about giving personality, readability, clarity, authenticity, and so much more to their creations within the greater context of the overall experience and the host of limitations involved in realtime 3D art, and that is not an easy thing to balance out.

Could you give us your step by step approach to environment design? What do you usually start with? What are the biggest steps during your environment production?

I sort of fell into doing environment art as a result of coming to Illfonic, and just having to design and figure things out was a great way to learn how to approach environment art. It was also probably a way to develop some bad habits, but also a way to begin to wrap my mind around what sorts of things I had to do not by being shown how, but by having to figure it out. This is not really the quickest way to learn, but it is one of the most effective paths to truly understanding not just how but why to do something a certain way – so I am grateful.

Being one of only three artists on that particular project with a highly limited budget we didn’t have concept art really, or art direction like you would normally think of it, and so we really had an unprecedented amount of freedom, which was quite fun for me as I like not only to make, but to design. Doing both at the same time while also knowing next to nothing about doing environment art was an interesting challenge. I believe what I have learned from that will allow me to create things far far better from now on, and I already know that to be true.

I’ll let you know some of the things I think about when approaching and making an environment and lessons I learned the hard way, but again I am rather new and certainly no authority on these things.

• First and foremost, to the best of my ability I try to envision/create/or come to understand what the sense of space will be – the personality/sensation/mood/purpose/etc. If you have concept art, great! If not, become your own concept artist, in your mind if not on paper. This is key in the beginning, but it is also something that I think you have to allow to evolve, change, and improve through the process. Checking back though to make sure if you wander from the path you are making it better and not worse is important, it is very easy to fall off of a vision when you are working on individual pieces and it takes such a long time to begin to see it come about. What should it feel like and evoke in someone as they enter and move through this space? Does that evolve from one place to another? Ultimately what is the purpose of this place in the context of how it will be used or in the case of games how a player will use it? Having at least a rough idea of this is key to getting a good start.
• At least in the case of the player housing I was making, which is all the environment art I have to show, it was of the utmost importance that everything be exceptionally modular, allowing a tremendous amount of variations and layouts to be created from a few pieces. This was something I approached in a very amateurish and slow way with the first set I made, but with each of the few sets I created, I started to get the hang of how to extend the usability of things and get variation from fewer and fewer pieces, which brings me to probably the second most important thing after the sense of space and aesthetic: boil it down to its essential, its minimum. The detail-loving character artist in me struggles against this, which slowed me down with these first environments. Now however I am beginning to force the habit of grasping the sense of space I’d like to create, and from there beginning to identify the essential pieces that compose it. Big picture first – always.
• Along those lines, something I’ve learned as well is to force yourself to stay zoomed out in the beginning and not to just dive into the fun process of making pieces. Like I mentioned, I want to get into Zbrush and get sculpting, so this goes along with lessons learned about being fast and loose with the big stuff until you have a concrete plan in place that has identified the few most vital parts. Even when you do have something concrete, take some time before you start committing efforts to realizing it to layering and exploring on top of it to expand your ideas. You might just come across something you like a lot better that could never have occurred to you without having gone through some process, and at this stage you can easily adjust your plan. You aren’t throwing away much work, which I find no artist wants to do which undoubtedly holds things back from what they sometimes could be, to say nothing of resources wasted in a production environment.
• With your sense of space always in mind and your key pieces identified, it’s time to play with shape language to facilitate and accentuate a sensation, concept, or even polygon budget. This can certainly happen before what I mentioned above this, however having a conception of the key pieces first also allows you to apply experimentation or ideas to those things right away, rather than getting caught on details when you should not be. If you have a defined piece of concept art or something to work from then this may have already been worked out for you. As I said before, until now I haven’t been in that position, which is good as it has firmly rooted these sorts of thought processes in my mind. Along the lines of shape language, while you are thinking about silhouettes and such, give consideration to materials – how things are made. What everything is made of is important and really informs a lot of decisions at this point. Its great to have a visual idea that might be neat, but if it doesn’t work physically then that is a problem you need to solve. This will also being to provide you with ideas.
• From here what I am always thinking about is very easy – 1,2,3. Primary, secondary, tertiary. Do your big forms read and give clarity to the sense of space and add to rather than detract from what you were going for? If so, good – now it is time to consider ways to unify these and make sure they collectively perform their jobs without being too basic or too interesting. Look for ways to ground things, and for opportunities for each thing (unless it’s not appropriate) to have a breakdown of primary, secondary, and tertiary. I’ve found three is really a pretty magical number aesthetically in most situations, but use your discretion – that’s part of being an artist, this is just a thing to think about and utilize like any tool. To illustrate the concept a little, I’ve made a simple GIF, and the image of the sculpt below it also demonstrates some of these things. The textured result had a lot of contrast and little details making it muddy because of the way I aged it, but I think things are still clear and come through well because of the approach depicted here.

To continue breaking things down this way would risk being overly long winded, which I may already have been. In short – get an idea, boil it down to its essence, be loose fast and experimental to block things in, find something you are happy with then break it and bend it and stretch it a few ways to see if you find something you like even better, start from the essentials, ask yourself what things are made of and how they will facilitate bringing a physically believable sensation to your artificial setting, consider how shapes, materials, ideas, etc break down from primary to secondary, and from secondary to tertiary, then get to making it and looking at things in rough as early and often as possible in their actual context, and course correct as you need!

How do you work on the assets for your scenes? There’s always so much decor there. Is that all sculpted as well? Do you create unique assets each time or do you maybe use some modular structures, that allow to build spaces much faster?

Not only do I create some modular structures, virtually everything is a modular structure, in reference to the environment art. Characters naturally are a different approach. I originally, being new to it, approached things with more of a unique pieces mindset, but like I said – that was sort of an area setting me up to learn from mistakes, but was also sort of a consequence of us lacking a plan of how to approach what we were building. The wooden hallway set, which is the first environment art I did, ended up being composed of a reasonable amount of pieces considering its flexibility when you strip out duplicate pieces with different materials for variation, but a bare bones modular set wasn’t my initial aim. I’m proud of all the things the set could do, which unfortunately weren’t truly tapped into outside of my test scenes. The test scenes are what all of the screenshots are from regarding environment art in Revival, so the lighting and propping of a real level could surely much improve them. Having a place like this where I spend time doing some basic temporary lighting helps be a reality check against the sense of space I mentioned earlier. Contrasting that set is the last set I made. We needed an underground set for an estate and we needed it done very, very quickly. For speed I decided to utilize a ceiling set I made for the great hall and build off of that. The entire subterranean set consisted of I think 8 or 9 pieces and came together in just a few days. I realized then that I had started to become an environment artist as well.

In short – not only did I use modularity as a way to build things faster, it is an absolute must for how you build these types of things, even if it not for a real time medium. As to your question about sculpting and decor – I sculpt where it’s needed/wanted (and maybe sometimes where it’s not just because I love it so much). It all comes down to that case by case basis though, time is important and in the industry you can’t endlessly work on a single thing.

How do you work with the materials? What software do you use for painting? How would you advise to address material production with environments?

The materials and how they interact with lighting are key to the success of the sense of space. It is important to have areas of rest for your eyes, and so when approaching materials you don’t just want insane detail everywhere. This is yet another reason for the primary/secondary/tertiary approach to thinking about things – using detail intelligently and in the right areas is important. I think about what areas can re-use a material first and foremost so I have an idea of what will be similar. I look for areas to have material breaks for contrast, so long as it is not creating business or noisiness, and would generally say that this is also part of the early stages of planning. While establishing shape language, primary forms, and construction materials you might think be thinking about if you are going to have too much of a certain type of material or not, how you can start to add things that break that up, etc.

I adopted a Substance Painter workflow which I quite enjoy, though lately due to some different workflows I find that I am unable to use that to its potential and am using it more for a specific output. It is important to adopt a mentality of result first, not approach first as different places have different systems and it is easy to become used to a workflow then feel very naked when entering something new. Realize that whatever the interface, buttons, and techniques – it’s all in service of creating great things, ideally as fast as you can. I have used various workflows and softwares. They are great, but I want to use this as an opportunity to tell possibly some aspiring artists to focus less on the tool, and more on the artistic eye that will guide you to great results in any tool.

My advice for material production in environments would consist of things I said earlier – start with the basics, check on it in context early, don’t get married to a result and build on top of it without introducing clutter. Try to give yourself control of all kinds of results down the line so it’s not difficult to make a change if you want more or less of certain things in your textures. Remember to zoom out your perspective and consider the whole, hard as it is when you are forced to create things up close and personal.

How do you use the lighting in your scenes? What functions does the lighting serve usually in environment design? What kind of lighting do you usually use? Do you try to bake the lighting all the time or do you play with dynamic lighting as well?

First, I have to put up a disclaimer that I am not a lighting artist and while I enjoy lighting, I am no expert at it in real time game engines. As a second part of that disclaimer, as I mentioned earlier all my screenshots are from my test levels where lighting was done quickly and roughly to help illustrate to others a sense of space I was shooting for. I wish I could say it was all a great fancy light setup, but in reality it was done in a way that would not really be done in a game just by moving dynamic point lights around. It was hacky, but it worked quickly for my purposes. Revival was a game with a goal to have virtually everything be dynamic which didn’t allow for any baked lighting – though our lighting was never worked out, so we just used basic lights in Unreal.

Lighting is of paramount importance, really with most all 3D art. Good lighting can make or break things in ways. It is crucial to make something that works no matter what the lighting circumstances might be in cases where you are building something for a dynamic world that won’t just be theatrically lit once and kept that way. In the case of what I was doing, I return again to the concept of sense of space. I think it is important to consider a player’s traversal through a space and to try and create opportunities for them to go through zones of light and shadow as that feels satisfying and helps create a sense of atmosphere and volume outside of the typical tricks we use. I try to define a definite area of direct light but include sources of contributing ambience so that if you fill things up with a bit more light it at least seems to make relative sense. Try not to be precious with showing certain things you made, lighting can bring the environment together as a whole and cement the sense of space and that is paramount to just showing every nook and cranny, no matter how long you slaved over that one thing. Let there be darks and things that fade away.

Could you talk about your modular approach to environment design? How do you manage to build such modules that allow to create such grandeur? Most modular environments are usually pretty bleak and not that versatile. Yours are on the contrary – epic, chic and full of beauty.

Like I’ve said, those several sets were a learning ground for me and so not everything I’ve said through this interview was really applied well across all of them, but they were avenues through which I have learned some of the things I have been putting in my answers. Above I have given an overview of how I have so far started to understand modular design as a process, and I don’t know if there is a secret sauce outside of just the way I made decisions through that process. I feel if I were to re-create these now after having learned the lessons I did, since they were my first, they would be far, far better.

Bleakness can often result from modularity, but it doesn’t necessarily have to. I simply wanted to build pieces that would allow themselves to be combined in more than just a few ways which when experimented with could generate a surprising number of results. The first modular set I made, the wooden hallway set, was originally started with the goal of simply simply being a long rectangular contained room useable in any of the estates, a sort of dining hall or something similar. Once I had the basic set required to build it, I wanted to break up large areas of walls and the result ended up expanding the aesthetic and flexibility of the room into a crazy customizable hallway set that had a lot of different possible things going on with it. It wasn’t the original goal, but it went there.. When you make a piece, always be thinking if it serves only that one purpose, and force yourself to take time to just experiment with different ways to combine it with what you already have. You’ll find you start seeing things you didn’t before, and it starts to become somewhat obvious what you need to do to bring that into the set, allowing it to be more than just a set of things that bends around to fit various layout needs.

Would you suggest using architectural elements in your scenes? Do they help to build better environments? Do you think these elements might be used in games? Do they influence the performance?

Maybe, maybe, yes, and yes. The pieces you have pointed out are all real time game art for Revival as I have mentioned. As for whether I would suggest using architectural elements and if they help build better environments… that is somewhat of an unanswerable question. As always, it all comes down to what you are trying to make and what is needed to do that. In a huge set of cases architectural elements don’t make any sense. Naturally for these player houses we were making for Revival they did.

The types of thought processes I illustrated earlier are really applicable to just about anything. I think being an artist in this industry has a lot to do with simply honing what we call your artistic eye, expanding your mind, having some courage, and with that finding creative ways to realize particular goals within the constraints and tools you have.

Art shouldn’t have rules, but creativity is often most abundant where there are limitations to work within, rather than total freedom – which may seem counter intuitive. It’s somewhat like being in a pool – if you are floating freely you can go in any direction you choose, but if you are doing laps you have a destination in mind and a wall to kick off of, you have a start. If you can only start, you’ll be amazed at what can happen when you use your mind and problem solve your way to the other end of the pool. I like a saying, though I am not sure where it is from, “The hardest step in any journey is the first one.” I find that is true because we hesitate at the thresholds of things, and starting something new is a threshold. I would encourage anyone in any walk of life when it comes to a creative endeavor, just take that first step. Trust yourself a bit and don’t easily give up.

Make sure to check out artist’s Facebook and Artstation pages. With Facebook’s page artist plans to share small tidbits and deliver various tutorials.

Cliff Schonewill, Environment Artist

INTERESTING LINKS

TAKING ENVIRONMENT ART TO THE NEXT LEVEL

BATTLEFIELD ENVIRONMENT ARTIST ON CREATING NATURE IN UE4

SUBSTANCE DESIGNER USAGE IN ENVIRONMENT DESIGN

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Post tags: Allegorithmic, Artist, artstation, environment design, envrionment art, Epic Games, game development, gamedev, Lighting, Substance, Substance Painter, Unreal Engine, Unreal Engine 4, ZBrush

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VigorRoads looks absolutely amazing. We’ve talked a little bit about the development team and found out what tools do they use and how do they aim to make their game more interesting to the community.

Introduction

We are a young game development studio, consisting of experienced developers from all over the world gathered together to create our own games. Our employees participate in a variety of projects of varying complexity.

The first big project of the studio is a MMORPG Project Genom, which successfully passed GreenLight and is currently in the active development phase. This project has already managed to unite the team and provide a unique experience, thanks to a few talented developers joining us this year, and working together on the common project VigorRoads.

VigorRoads

World leaders watched helplessly as war between two alien races unfolded in our galaxy and enveloped the Earth. The result of the war was not only the death of the two alien races, but also the almost-complete destruction of the Earth. Lives were saved only in certain areas, many infested by what was left of the alien creatures – Crawlers, that exist across the territories where the last remnants of humanity fight for life and a unique mineral – Vigor.

Production

Out team already knew the Unreal Engine. We know how to work with it and what to expect. Apart from U4, we’ve also used a great amount of other tools, including 3DS Max, Maya, Zbrush, Substance Painter, World Machine.

Management of the team is carried out by means of Redmine and Trello.

Vehicles

Transport in VigorRoads is based on a number of archetypes, which depend on the type of chassis each player uses for their car. Players can install car bodies on any chassis, that are specifically unique for that chassis. Each car body has its own kit, with its own advantages and disadvantages, so players can create a car that suits their style of play. Each chassis also has its own complex progression tree, so even different starter combinations of chassis and car body will still be viable after extensive playtime.

Mechanics are a no less important part of the game as are the vehicles themselves. Your choice of Mechanic and their ongoing progression impacts on your overall vehicle efficiency. In the game your character has his own unique features and is constantly evolving, developing  skills and improving  service. Elaborate customisation allows you to create a unique image of your Mechanic.

As you level up and gain money you can unlock upgrades for your vehicles and Mechanics. Here are a few types of upgrades:

• Bodies – the basic carcass of your car, defining its starter parameters, outlook and amount of slots for car kit elements and weapons.
• Spare parts – the heart of your car. Upgrades for engine, suspension, wheels and other parts will allow you to boost overall driving performance. Parameters, such as speed, boost, adherence with different types of terrain, all directly depend on spare parts.
• Weapons - vast amount of weapon types, from light and heavy machine-guns or rocket launchers to unusual devices such as the harpoon, which will allow players to solve any in-game task. In their turn, Mechanics can use various types of personal weapons and special devices, for instance, the “ferro-nade”, that marks the enemy with odoriferous marker, so all Crawlers in the area will hunt them down.
• Defence - outboard additional armor will help your vehicles to survive longer, and will protect your Mechanic. Players can install active defenses on their car such as smoke and stun grenades, deployable spike strips or even AA guns. Mechanics can also use their own body armors.
• Tuning - the visual aspect of the game is incredibly important as well. Players can paint car bodies, place decals on vehicles, install various bumpers, headlights, side panels and accessories for the dashboard and other elements of the car. There are also plans to implement an extensive character creation editor to customize your Mechanic’s features.

Challenges

We are creating an ambitious project, which aims to fill a fairly-vacant niche of online combat car games. Kickstarter will help us to finish the project on the “base” level. This version will be available for players for testing and evaluation. Our team really want all of the patrons that participate in the development of the game to join our discussions on the official forums, interact in polls, offer ideas and assist with testing at various stages of development.

Kickstarter provides a unique opportunity not only to help in the development of the game, but to take part in the development of the project.

Stanislav Pleshchev, VigorRoads

INTERESTING LINKS

SIMPLE AND RICH LANDSCAPE BUILDING IN UE4

MOODY SCI-FI ENVIRONMENT CREATION

BE VISIBLE: HOW TO GET A JOB IN GAME INDUSTRY?

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Post tags: 3DS Max, car game, design, game development, game production, gamedev, indie title, indiedev, Kickstarter, Maya, Substance Painter, UE4, Unreal Engine 4, Unreal Engine 43DS Max, World Machine, ZBrush

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Epic Games released a fully meshed Deathmatch level called Underland with the new Unreal Tournament build. This level is designed for 6 to 8 players who fight across a hidden outpost, once lost for a thousand years, that guards the entrance to the massive Underland caverns.

To learn the difference between the prototype shell and the final meshed level, look at these the before and after screenshots.

Also in the new build there are 8 new Blue Star offline challenges, four in Underland and four in Chill.

You can also check out all of the release notes for the new build here.

Source: Epic Games

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Post tags: Epic Games, game development, game industry, gamedev, indiedev, UE4, Unreal Engine 4, Unreal Tournament

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This is an Unreal Engine 4 project created by YouTube user Jason Lewis along with some other developers. It is an environment based on the Mos Eisley Space Port from the Star Wars series. The footage shows a mostly completed project except from a few assets that need texturing.

© Jason Lewis, 2016 YouTube Link

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Post tags: Epic Games, Star Wars, Technology, Unreal Engine 4, video

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This is a footage of an Unreal Engine 4 project by Enrique Gándara based on the Lut Gholein city from Blizzard Entertainment’s Diablo 2 RPG.

© Enrique Gándara, 2016 YouTube Link

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Post tags: Diablo, Epic Games, Technology, Unreal Engine 4, video

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This is a reel of the latest projects by Digital Design student Miriam Stastna based in Zlin city, Czech Republic. They were created using Unreal Engine 4.

© Miriam, 2016 Vimeo Link

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Post tags: Epic Games, Software, Technology, Unreal Engine 4, video

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Ultra Ultra is focused on creating game experiences meant to transport the player into the far reaches of imagination. The developers are trying to approach this medium with originality and curiosity, awe and wonder. The debut trailer of their game ECHO certainly evokes similar emotions.

ECHO is a Third-Person Science Fiction Adventure for PC, which is created with the help of Unreal Engine 4. The whole game starts as a character driven journey of discovery. Gameplay mechanics are mostly connected with stealth and action. It’s not against the rules to defend yourself, but your actions might have some consequences. It’s important to be flexible and open, trying to find various solutions to different problems. Whatever your strategy, one thing is certain: you must keep your wits about you if you are to survive.

Source: echo-game.com

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Post tags: design, gamedev, indiedev, indiegame, indiegames, production, UE4, UE4study, Unreal Engine 4

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DevolverDigital & Sloclap have announced a new online game ABSOLVER, which will make you fight each other without guns.

Sloclap is an independent French studio founded in 2015 by gamedev veterans, who worked on Watch Dogs and the Ghost Recon series. Although this is their debut project, we may be sure that they will deliver something extraordinary. The team has actually been working on since May 2015, so the game has a lot to show.

According to the official description, in ABSOLVER players will act as a part of the elite corps of combatants fighting to maintain stability in the world. Gamers will learn new combat styles and attacks, and acquire better weapons, powers and armor. Battles are fully real-time. Action is very versatile. There are different types of attacks, dodges, feints and counters. Combat styles, weapons and even individual attack sequences are fully customisable. There are (PvE) and (PvP) modes.

The coolest thing about ABSOLVER is its amazing visual design. The characters look sort of like the models from Dishonored. Everyone is wearing cool masks and the environments looks absolutely gorgeous. Check out those amazing screenshots for inspiration.

Source: absolvergame.com

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Post tags: ABSOLVER, action, design, DevolverDigital, gamedev, indiedev, online, production, Sloclap, UE4, Unreal Engine 4

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Aspiring environment artist Dominic Shaw gave a detailed explanation of how he managed to build the amazing project “American Diner”. It’s a great example of how you can use Unreal Engine 4 to build complex interactive environments with very complex lighting setups. Plus Dominic also talks about his experience with Substance Painter.

Introduction

I’m an environment artist from the UK currently graduating from the Game Art Design Course at De Montfort University in Leicester. I originally studied a game design course at college before going on to study a more art specific course at University. Throughout the past few years, I spent my time mainly drawing and focusing on concept design, I have only just recently started to focus more on 3D environments and I have learnt all that I know from the tutors and fellow students on my course. Some of the past projects that I have worked on is a group project of four where we recreated the Andy’s room from the film ‘Toy Story’ and a New York rooftop game level.

Final Major Project

Currently, I have been working on my final major project of University, this is a long project where we get to write our own brief to suit our specialities and interests, in which I focused on environments. I decided to make an American diner in two different points of time where my main goal was to test different lighting scenarios and to show how the same diner building can be set dressed to suit different time periods and themes. The two time periods that I focused on was a 1950’s diner and a modern day diner, I wanted to gain has much variation as possible between the two game levels so I decided to make the 1950’s diner colourful, brand new and in a day lighting scenario whilst in the modern day diner I made it into a horror crime scene so that I could mess the place up in a night time lighting scenario.

The biggest challenge that I faced in this project, was making the 1950’s diner, this is because there was a lot of different design decisions that I had to make to build the original level, such as the layout of the level, the style, the assets and many more. Whilst in my second level, I already had a solid base to work from, I knew my composition, I knew the level layout and overall there was just a lot less decisions that I had to make at this point of the level. All I was doing is making assets more modern, changing the lighting, textures and adding new assets to suit the theme. The reason that the 1950’s diner was such a challenge is because this level was the foundry of the entire project, if I didn’t get this level right, the horror level wouldn’t be right either, so there was a  lot of pressure on the making of the 1950’s diner.

Composition

Due to me having two separate levels, I knew that I needed to present each level in the same way so that you would have a good comparison to look at, I did this by using the same camera angle and position in the engine. I wanted to take this opportunity to show to you how I decided what area of my level I was going to focus on for the final renders and the design process that I used.

I started out at the beginning of this project by making a lot of blueprint variations so that I could come up with an interesting player route and game level. I then used this blueprint to create a basic block out using BSP in the Unreal Engine. I always like to start out using BSP for the basic layout and then once I am happy with the scale of the level, I go back in and change everything to static meshes.

I then did some drawings over my 3D base model so that I could get an idea of what the level was going to look like which helped me gain a better understanding of the assets that I needed to make.

Once I made all of my 1950’s game level, I had a lot of different areas and compositions that I could focus on, I decided to focus on the area that you see in my final renders because it had a really interesting base to work from with nice perspective. I took a print screen of the level, took it into Photoshop and used the rule of thirds to place my assets. At this point I open up an new viewport in the engine and set it to my camera viewport, I then place this on my right monitor and work on my engine file on my left monitor, allowing me to place assets in to the scene and instantly see what the final result will look like.

This is a great method to work out composition in an image, I started out with a simple rule of thirds represented by the blue lines, and I then broke this down further by splitting each half of the image into another rule of thirds represented by the green lines. As you can see each of assets are placed where the lines cross each other and I went onto place my focal points which are circled in red. Three is the magic number when it comes to composition, it’s good to have three focal point whilst also having a good foreground, middle ground and background.

The next version of the level that I made entirely for this one render rather than making an entire level and I also had a good starting base. I made a copy of the 1950’s level and deleted all of my assets out and removed all the textures, this allowed me to keep the exact same camera angle and meant that I didn’t have to start the level from scratch again. Therefore, I spent a lot longer focusing on this one area unlike I did in the 1950’s level when I was focusing on an entire level. I yet again used the same rule of thirds method which you can see in the images below. If you would like to see more of how I made this part of the level, check out the blog on my portfolio linked at the end.

Asset Production

When it comes to my asset production I always like to model in 3ds Max, Zbrush for sculpting more complicated assets and details, then I use Substance Painter or Bitmap2Material for texturing. Asset production was a very important part of this project and I had to make sure that each of my assets suited the correct time period that I was working on. When I am designing a level, I always do a lot of research on each asset that I am going to create, this way I can really understand the object and gain good modelling and texturing reference. As this is a very time consuming stage of any project, it is important to work a quickly and efficiently as possible, in my case I like to keep everything in separate stages and complete each stage at a time. This means that I will model every asset, then I will unwrap every asset and then finally texture asset, I find that this way really helps me speed up my workflow and it makes it easier for me to sort what assets are going to be placed onto the same texture sheets. Another aspect that was important in my asset production is excel spreadsheets, for any project that I work on, I always make a list of all of my assets and prioritise them into how important they are in my scene. I always start with my hero assets and work from there, I will then mark down in different colours when the asset has passed each stage in the asset creation from modelling to texturing. This can sound a bit dull and pointless, however it really helps to make sure that you don’t forget about any asset and it shows you what work that you still have left to do on each asset. You can see a few examples of my assets below.

In my opinion the perfect way to build assets for a project such as this one is to always start out with research and reference into each specific asset making sure that they fit the time period. It is also important to make sure that each asset has the right amount of weathering, for example in my 1950’s diner, everything was nice a brand new so there was not much dirt, however in my modern diner, some of the assets has been there throughout several years so it was important that these assets had the right amount of ware and dirt.

Visual Style

At the start of any project that I work on, I always do a lot of research and create several mood boards that I can refer back too, I do this so that I am able to gain some ideas of what visual style I am aiming for. I knew that I wanted these levels to be as realistic suitable for Triple-A games, one game that I was looking at for reference throughout the project was ‘The Last of Us Remastered’ as this does a great job at gaining realism and material definition. I found that I did a better job at creating a realistic level on my horror diner due to improvement over the project and the fact that for this part of the project I only focused on the area of the camera rather than an entire level.

Throughout this project I created several mood boards to help me, I started out by making a mood board that focused on diners in general to give me ideas of what a diner actually looks like. I then made a mood board of just specific 1950’s diner reference and then I made a mood board that focused on modern bars and restaurants and another one for the crime elements of my horror scene.  Whilst doing this I was also looking at a lot of reference to help me with each asset and lighting scenarios, you can see the mood boards I created below.

All of the images above really helped me with developing the visual style for the level and they helped me decide on the colours that I was going to use.

In my levels, it was very important that there was as much variation as possible and colour was one of great ways to do this. To work out the colour on my 1950’s diner I did some really quick colour comps to figure this out.

I always find that when it comes to texturing an interior, it’s best to get the walls, floor and roof figured out, it already feels like 70 percent of the level is textured and it makes it a lot easier to figure out what colour the assets in the room should be.  In my horror level, I knew that I wanted brick and wooden panels for the walls with laminate flooring so once I had they textured it became a lot easier to figure out what colours to use for each asset. If you have done your research on each asset you will already know what colours are used in real life for each asset so this makes it a lot easier.

Materials

When it comes to texturing your 3d assets, the materials are what can make and break them, they are what make the assets more believable to the viewers and makes your piece a lot more realistic. I find that using Substance Painter is a great way to gain realistic and believable textures.

My workflow for texturing is to first figure out what assets are going to be on the same texture sheet as it is important to save as much texture space, I normally put assets with the same material definition on to the same texture sheet or just assets that group together such as all the furniture in the level like chairs and tables. I will unwrap all of my assets separately in their own file without packing them, I will use excel again to work out what assets are going to be on the same texture sheet and use that as a guide.

Furthermore, I will create a new 3ds Max file and import each asset that will be going on to the same texture sheet into one file and then texture pack all of them on the same texture sheet, this is pretty standard workflow. I then go onto assign each asset a different material ID and export the file and bring it into substance painter, by doing this you can hide each asset in substance and they all get their own folder to work on and I will assign objects with the same texture to the same material ID to make this faster. The only problem with this workflow is that when you come to export your textures it will export each asset to their own texture sheet, so if you have five assets in one substance file you will get five separate textures. You can avoid this happening by not giving them separate material ID but this mean that you won’t have separate folders to work on in Substance Painter and they will all export as one texture at the end to save compositing. This is a faster workflow but for me personally I like to be able to focus on each separate asset at a time and having separate folders really help for this. Once I am happy with how each textured asset look in the engine I will go into Photoshop and composite the textures so that you only have one texture sheet, this process can take a while but I have not yet found a way to composite the textures straight from Substance.  An easy way to composite textures is to render a UVW template for each of separate asset from the file you used to pack that the texture and then in Photoshop you can use masks for each asset area, you can see this process in the photos below.

Texture pack in one file.

Give each object a separate material ID and export and import into Substance Painter. Notice that on the left you can see the title of each asset, I did this by naming the material ID in 3ds Max, this is also the name that your textures will have so it is important that you keep this tidy. When I come to export these textures from Substance, I make sure that to select the setting that exports the files for UE4.

I then import them into engine and keep a folder for each texture sheet so that it is easier to find each texture. Once I am happy with how this turned out, I will go into Photoshop and make a new folder for each asset on the texture sheet. I tend to normally only use an albedo, normal, roughness, metallic and emissive maps. In each asset folder, I will create a sub folder for each of these maps and then place the correct textures exported from substance into the right folder in Photoshop.

I render a UVW template for each object from the 3ds Max file shown above and use this as a mask for the bag folder in Photoshop.

I made the majority of my materials this way, other textures I made are all tile-able in which I have two different workflows for this. The first workflow is to take the texture into bitmap2material where you can gain some good results and you can make the tile-able quite easy. The main workflow that I want to show you though is how I made my tile-able brick texture in my horror diner.

I started out by making tiling bricks in 3ds Max, these are really quick and easy just to get the right size. Once I happy I took this into Zbrush to sculpt the brick details and damage. I exported this back into 3ds Max and changed each brick to have a different colour materials and added a skylight. I then baked down onto a plane a normal, height, diffuse and lighting map. I then brought the plane that I baked the models down on to in to substance painter and used the masks that I got from the diffuse map by changing each brick to a different colour to texture each brick.

In the image below you can see how I made the material, I created a simple UV tiling so that I could make a material instance and change the brick size and I inserted a bump offset to get the depth of the bricks.

Lighting

I always love this part of the level as I love to see the difference that adding light and shadows does to your level, it’s amazing how much more realistic this makes the level.  The way that I worked out of what type of lighting I needed to use in my two levels for day and night scenes was simply through a lot of research and collecting lighting reference. I found the lighting was a bit more simple in my 1950’s because once I added the directional and skylight into the level and gained so interesting shadow shapes, it was simply a case of adding low intensity spotlights for the lights inside, whilst in my horror level it was really hard to keep the level dark and on a few occasions I had to lower the intensity of my lights and delete a few out as the level became too bright.

When it comes to lighting my scenes, I have a process that I follow and it’s work quite well for me so far, they may be some better and more efficient ways out there for this but at the moment I am happy with this workflow that I will show to you.

I start out by working in unlit mode in the engine throughout the entire modelling stage and unwrapping stage, I will then quickly place lights within the level so that I am able to see what my textures will look like and I start to work in the lit mode. When I am happy with the placement of all my assets and everything is unwrapped and textured, I make a copy of the level just to be safe. The reason that I make a copy at this stage is because it allows me to reload the level at this stage and light the level in different lighting scenarios and it’s always good to back up your work!

I now have everything ready to start the actually lighting stage of the project, I open up the new copy of the level and start out by deleting every light in the scene including the directional and skylight and then rebuild the lighting. At this point everything in the level will be black and this is simply like a blank canvas to work on, where you go from this point depends on what time of the day you are aiming for. Yet again at this point it is great to research some more reference and really look at what time of the day you are aiming for, by using some reference you can see how the shadows react and it gives you a good idea of what the colour of the directional light will be.

In my levels, I was aiming for a nice morning scene with long shadows and sun beaming in, I changed the directional light to be a bit more yellow and I was going for an overall yellow/ blue colour pallet. In my horror diner I didn’t include an directional light as it was night and the directional light normally represents the sun, I did originally place one in to get some nice moonlight coming through the windows but I just didn’t like the shadows that I was gaining from it so I decided not to keep it. It is always good to get some good light and shadows as this really makes the level look interesting and realistic, at this point I am constantly rebuilding lighting and comparing the before and after by taking print screens and placing them into Photoshop.  I will also place a skylight in which will make the level a bit lighter.

The next aspect that I add into the level is an exponential height fog and change the colour of this to match the colour of the directional light, it just gives you that extra bit of realism and mood. Lighting plays a big part of the mood of your level so yet again it important to research what type of mood you are aiming for, looking at film screen caps is a great way to do this. The next stage is adding spot lights and directional lights making sure that they are set to static and I place them at where the correct positions of where the lights are. I also play around with IES profiles of lights which you can download for free offline here and they allow you to change the way the light scatters so that you can gain more realistic lights, to use these simply import them into your level and change your light to moveable then drop them into the material spot in the light settings.

Once I am happy with the colour and intensity of each of my lights and I am happy with the way that look when the lighting is built, I move on to add low intensity spotlights around the emissive parts of my level, this is because emissive do not affect the light in any way and make sure to change the colour of each light to match the colour of the emissive, you can see how I have used this method on my exit sign below.

It is important to make sure that you have a light importance volume in your level that so that covers the entire level so that the engine can focus on what areas of the light which should make the lighting build faster.  Another thing that I add into my levels are sphere reflection captures which allows you to gain some really nice reflections on your materials adding another level of realism. I then add a post processing volume and play around with post processing settings making sure that it is set to unbound so that it covers your entire level. The setting that I use for this change depending on what type of level that I am working on but some settings that I often use are bloom which just makes the lights a bit softer and gives it a Gaussian blur.  Depending of what scene I am working on I add a vignette which makes edges of the camera render darker allowing more of a focus to the centre of your image. I also add some slight depth of field using a Gaussian depth of field, it is important not to go too overboard with this has it can ruin your level if it’s not used properly. Furthermore, I add some ambient occlusion into the level which makes the shadows a bit darker and more realistic.

At this point I am practically done with the level, I sometimes take a render of the level and place it into Photoshop then use the colour look up table to do some slight colour grading, however I have found that this doesn’t always work for the best and you can gain a good level without in my opinion, but if you want to do some slight colour tweaks this is a great way to do it.

That’s the full process of my lighting that I use for each level, the settings will always change depending on what the level and the lighting scenario that I am going for, I have included a few images below that shows you the lights in my levels.

Gameplay

I started this project by making a fully playable game level for the 1950’s diner to show my environment art skills, I managed to achieve this goal and I have included a few more shots of the level below. I had around 6-7 weeks to make each level which broke down into two weeks modelling, one week unwrapping, two weeks texturing and one week lighting. I found that in my levels I wanted to go for more quality rather than quantity, so in my horror diner I decided to only focus on the area of the camera render rather than the entire level. I had enough time to make two entirely playable levels but they would only be two average levels for the time that I had, so I wanted to really show off my skills in asset creation and texturing and by focusing in on one area I had the time to do this. Even though the horror level was only for the render, I used the exact same technique as I would to make a playable level. Most of my assets are very modular so I could easily turn this horror level to match the full 1950’s level, but I would have to change the layout of some of the crime assets in the Horror level so that you would be able to walk around the level smoothly.

Advice

Advice that I would give to people trying to make 3D scenes like these ones would be to make sure that they start out by doing the research into the environments and assets that they are making and then doing the right amount of project management. What has helped me improve so much over this project is by setting myself goals for each stage such as finish all unwrapping in a week and by doing this you get used to working to deadlines and you will become a lot faster at working. When working on big environment projects, it is so easy to forget about an asset and to lose track of the work you was doing as there is so much to do, so I would definitely recommend using to do lists and creating asset lists and texture lists. It’s important that you work on your assets in order of importance to your level because there is no point in spending a lot of time working on one asset that is a very small part of your level, so work from big assets to small.

I also recommend doing a lot of sketching and paint overs of your level, yes you might be making a 3D level but 2D is a great and fast way to get your ideas down and to problem solve, I always do this on any project I work on and it is has helped me to make some of the major design decisions in my level.

When it comes to the creation of your levels, I recommend starting with the layout of your level, build a basic block out to scale and come up with an interesting route that your player can take before adding any assets. Then start out with the big and modular assets and work from there, do several design passes you model smaller and smaller assets each time. In my project, I started out with a block out in BSP in the engine, changed all the walls and everything to static meshes and then started with the big assets such as tables, bars and booths and then did several design passes of smaller and smaller assets, an example of one of my design passes was creating all of the assets you would find on a table at once. This way you just get more of an order to your modelling process and you can decide on your compositions early on. The final advice that I will give you is to make sure you focus a lot on your material definition of each individual assets, you can worry about the placements of them in your level later, and it’s the material definition that will really make your level look interesting and realistic.

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Post tags: 3DS Max, Adobe Photoshop, Allegorithmic, Epic Games, game development, game industry, gamedev, indiedev, Photoshop, Substance, substance b2m, Substance Painter, UE4, Unreal Engine 4, ZBrush

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We’ve talked with Kimmo Kaunela about his amazing new Unreal Engine 4 environment, inspired by the amazing work of Naughty Dog. Kimmo is a master of PBR workflow and he showed incredible quality of materials (Substance Designer) and amazing lighting. This is an amazing example of high-quality environment design.

UE4 Project

I like to learn new things and after my personal environment projects I wanted to make something small and useful. This time that meant studying different ways to make textures. I love Naughty Dog´s style to do textures so that was something I tried aiming for. I wanted to put those textures in use so I decided to finally get UE4 and start learning. I also had pretty good idea what kind of environment I wanted to build.  I wanted to mix indoor/outdoor areas and buildings with overgrown foliage. First it started like a fast test but it ended up being a huge project taking almost a year.

Using UE4

For the last 4 years I have been using Unity at work for mobile games. I’m a person with no experience about programming so I feel kind of lost with Unity. If I need to make cool looking shader then I need to know how to write one or if I want to create a door that opens when I press a key then I need to write a code for that. I´m happy to be part of a team that has awesome coders that knows these things but I still want to be able to make cool and functional art by my own. UE4 is perfect solution for this.

First time when I opened UE4 I felt like I was in the candy shop. Features that I wanted Unity to have were there plus many more and the UI felt easy to use. This is the thing I love about UE4. Tools that help artist to get his/her idea up and running with node based editors. It´s a very powerful feeling when you have a vision and a tool to make it happen. It’s amazing to see all those amazing projects that people are doing with Unreal Engine 4 and really shows that Epic made a right choice for making it free and full of visual tools to work with.

Right now I have a pretty good overall picture about the graphics side of things but I really would like to learn more about the blueprint system. I have been testing it for different small things and  I really like it. It´s very well integrated into the engine and blueprints works similar how prefabs in Unity.

Another nice thing about UE4 is the fact that it’s getting better and better with every update. I also like how Epic shares their assets that they use for different demos. A good example is the Kite demo or different shaders that they used for Paragon and now people can use them and learn more.

Production Process

When I start any project I want to make some sort of story and blockout first. This project was no different. It’s a good idea to test ideas on paper first because then it´s easy to see problems and plan things to avoid most of the issues later on. This time I made a fast top down sketch to see how things would look like and to get a rough idea about the scale. Once that was done I converted it into 3d with 3ds max and put everything into right scale. One thing that I did a lot was exporting the scene into UE4 and test it with fps controller to see how it felt. This way I was making sure that the blockout was going to right direction.

Then I  started to separate that blockout into smaller layers. Like with my previous projects I used the three layer system with “Structure, Medium and Prop” layers. I also organized them into three bigger groups like “Diner, Shop and Outdoor” Then I also wanted to make sure that my 8 years old pc could handle all of this so I broke things into smaller scenes. I could also use these layers for naming like “Diner_Strucure_Roof_Panel”.

Then I started collecting reference/inspiration shots from web and set up different boards with RefBoards. One big inspiration source was ghost town Pripyat. It was very interesting to use Google Maps and travel there to see how buildings behave when nature is overgrowing. Perfect way to get the right mood going. Then it was just modeling the final models and replacing placeholder meshes.

Next part was the lighting. It was the hardest part because it´s a little different than what I was used to play with in Unity. Also UE4 has a lot of settings that makes it possible to create different looking setups and make beginners feels confused. Luckily Epic has awesome documentation and forums so I was able to get it looking right. I ended up using baked lighting for indoor areas and dynamic lighting for rest of the environment. I added light portals for windows and tweaked a lot of Lightmass settings to get the indirect lighting looking right. Kite demo had a pretty good light blueprint that was perfect for my needs. Then I rotated the sun light to get interesting looking shadows and added hdr texture to the skylight for better ambient lighting. My system was too old to use any DX11 features like distance fields ambient occlusion, LVP etc… One thing that I want to point out  when you are working with the lighting is that make sure your post process volume do not affect the lighting at that moment. When you have the lighting working then you can start playing with different post process effects.

Once the lighting looked good and the structure models were in then it was time to start set dressing. I modeled huge set of different props and elements that was easy drag & drop and create things look more believable.

Interior

Diner was the first place that I made to its final look. It was my second attempt to create a diner scene. Last time I made one in Unity 3.5. This time I wanted to make it feel like a real american diner that was abandoned some time ago and now things are starting to break. I tried to find the most interesting looking diner reference shots and combined them into one.

For me environments are like characters. They can have stories and especially abandoned places can hold a lot of mysteries. This was something I wanted to add in the diner. There are different posters on the wall that are showing how things looked before it was abandoned. Broken glass and coffee cups are telling that something was definitely happened there and now someone had even put the old jukebox back in action with a car battery.

Contrast Between the Interior and the Open Environment

The transition between interior parts and outdoor environment is very noticeable. It was coincidence at first but then I started to like it because it create this nice mood change from bright outdoor to dark and dusty looking indoor.. Whole scene is using the same post process volume but interior places are using baked lighting and that makes this contrast.

Assets

Modeling was pretty basic. Example for cars I first made the hi poly with sub-d modeling and quad chamfer with smoothing group as a mask in 3ds max. Then I used ZBrush for breaking things like adding dents and scratches. Low poly was done using 3ds max graphite tools. Last thing before texturing was to make uvs and bake maps. I used xNormal and Substance Designer for this.

For texturing I used Substance Designer because I knew that the scene needed more cars so I could use the same graph for all of them. I really like using Substance Designer because it’s very modular tool and flexible. That’s why I fully used it to make tree trunks and asphalts because then I could create variation easily just by tweaking the starting values to get interesting height information and software did the rest.

Vegetation

From the start I knew that there would be a lot of foliage modeling. I took some time to find out how other artists are handling that and then tried to find optimal way. I ended up modeling everything and then baking down maps like normal, base colors, ao and sss masks.

I found a pretty fast way to texture hi-poly versions of the foliage. 3ds Max has different noise maps and when combining those with basic UVs I got pretty good results fast. Cool thing about them is that they all fully editable in max so I could create different maps easily just by changing colors. I did all the modeling in 3ds max and used Mental Ray for rendering final textures.

That was the first step and then I needed to model low-poly cards/planes. I tried to cut all the useless transparent areas off to keep it more optimized and avoiding unnecessary overdrawing in engine. Then I made different sets of them. I added interesting looking grass cards together and made around 8 different sets that I then exported into UE4. I also did ivy and beard moss this way.

Then I started adding them into the scene. UE4 has very nice foliage painting tool that helped to paint grass and flowers. For the ivy and beard moss this was not the optimal way so I just simply modeled and placed them by hand in 3ds max. Trees were also added with foliage painting tool.

Building Materials

No matter how old you are, it’s always nice to break things. It´s actually not that trivial to do that in virtual space because you have to think about different forces, materials and how everything affects the end results.

Then I started to think how different materials behave. Metals would rust or become oxidized. Tiles and similar parts could fall down and break. Fabric materials would collect moisture and become heavy and fall down. Sunlight is making things to get really dry, damage different surfaces and desaturate some colors. Rain water would find it’s way into tight spaces and causes different effects depending on the material like rust and moss. I also found out that one key aspect was that outside things are usually more contact with water and other nature forces. Interior parts on the other hand have a lot of dirt and sand because wind is moving dry ground and usually it gets inside the buildings if the windows and doors are open. This was my base idea what I wanted to achieve with UE4 materials and my textures.

For texturing I used Substance Designer a lot. I also tried to re-use the same graph and it was pretty easy to do so thanks to material ID map. I used Photoshop for basic models because it’s fast and I have a lot of experience with it. With every tool I wanted to keep the PBR workflow clean and didn’t want to add too much damage details like moss because my UE4 materials could handle that. I also made few generic looping textures that I could use with different masks and to make generic materials.

I ended up making few master materials that had everything I wanted for that specific material. I also tried to think my materials with same way like I organized the level so there is structure, medium and prop materials. All of them had some parts common like the different texture inputs: base color, normal and metallic, ao, roughness that I packed into different RGB channels. I also added a lot of switches because not every material instance needed all of the features.

For  foliage and fabric materials I used the UE4 “two sided foliage” shading model. Then I wanted to have a control how thick the material is so the subsurface scattering effect would look good. I created SSS mask texture for controlling this effect. I want to give a big shout-out to Simon Barle for sharing his awesome Huangshan Mountain foliage shader in his Polycount thread because that helped a lot! I also wanted for my trees to have small color variations depending on the position and did that with “Object Position” node so it will break the repetition a bit. Last thing I needed was a simple vertex offset animation that I could tweak with vertex colors.

Structure master material was the most used one since it was able to add damage material on top of the base one. I ended up using the “world_aligned_blend” node and then I basically chose between dirt, rust or moss depending where the object was. I could rotate models and the dirt would stay on top of them. I also used detail maps that made things look better when camera gets close. Generic textures are really handy for this detail level. Structure material had three different layers so I added different tweakable tiling parameters for all of them.

Soil master material was the heaviest one because it was able to blend three different materials + water with fresnel reflections. This was used for floors and ground surfaces. Blending was controlled with vertex colors and height maps helped to make transitions look more natural. My 8 years old system didn’t handle DX11 so it was a big no for tessellation. Since I already had height maps for the different materials I decided to add parallax mapping for all of them.

I also had master material for glass, decals and particles but those were very basic ones.

Post-production and Skyboxes

Last thing I wanted to tweak was the atmosphere. This consist of different fogs, post process effects etc.. I added “AtmosphericFog” that helped to add more depth for things that were far away and “ExpotentialHeightFog” for overall fog. It felt still a little too flat so I decided to model few planes and made a material that used “CameraDepthFade” node to hide/show simple smoke texture depending how close the camera is. These were awesome for turning the scene look more abandoned and contaminated. Not very optimized because the huge overdrawn but really makes a huge difference. I also used that same material for faking the god ray effect coming from windows inside the buildings. Simple panner node made it possible to animate this smoke texture so it looked like the polluted air was moving there. God ray effect also needed a simple particle system with bright dots to illustrate the flowing dust particles.

I didn’t want to go too crazy with post processing effects. Most important one was chromatic aberration and small tweaks to color grading. Instead of adding strong values in post process volume I tried to play with light colors and angles to create the mood that I wanted.

Project is still work in progress and I´m going to post the final shots to my ArtStation page.

INTERESTING LINKS

TAKING ENVIRONMENT ART TO THE NEXT LEVEL

BATTLEFIELD ENVIRONMENT ARTIST ON CREATING NATURE IN UE4

SUBSTANCE DESIGNER USAGE IN ENVIRONMENT DESIGN

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Post tags: Allegorithmic, Epic Games, Game Design, game development, game engine, gamedev, indiedev, Substance, UE4, Unity, Unreal Engine 4, xNormal, ZBrush

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We were happy to talk to Alex Haddow-Mendes about his most recent game “Come In, Over“. It’s a beautiful experiment, which shows, how you can build an entire project in one level. Alex talked about his approach to the production, described the main difficulties of the production and discussed the functions of the environment in his game.

Introduction

My name’s Alex Haddow-Mendes, I’m a Level, Technical and Games Designer from Devon in the UK. I’m a recent graduate of the University of Central Lancashire, studying Games Design. I’ve yet to fully start my career within the games industry, but I’ve been part of the community for quite some time. I used to create mods for the Source Engine while learning how to code in C#. Since the release of the Unreal Engine, I’ve been using its Blueprint system – which is a very accessible and powerful tool. It’s allowed me to create multiple small projects, including “Come In, Over”.

Come In, Over

I am a Level Designer, but for Come In, Over I wished to explore a new genre and test my skills for my final year’s project. I would have loved to incorporate my knowledge of Level Design, however this project required very little of the aspect. I plan to develop this project further as I believe it has astounding potential, but for the time being it will remain a portfolio piece; showcasing my Technical and Games design skills.

Production Process

I designed the environment around a single point in the world; the player’s camera. As the player cannot move and explore the environment, they may only rotate and view it from their chair. The office is fully interactive, making for a more immersive experience as well as keeping the player busy. You have objects irrelevant to the player and while others integral. You can check the player’s tasks in the Memo or take a sip from your coffee. Over time, I plan to mix the unimportant with the important. So maybe you need to finish your coffee as there a useful message hidden at the bottom of the cup. Every item I place in the world, I have a plan for, to integrate the environment with the gameplay rather than it remaining a background.

Visual Aesthetics

The general theme of the project was supposed to impose the affect you have on the world. A constant reminder of the number of casualties will be given and that will directly affect the environment through its Post-Processing. I’m by no means an artist, but I attempted to reach an effect similar to 50s/60s advertising posters. These advertising posters have a whitewashed look, hand drawn and eerily happy theme. To achieve this I desaturated the scene, added a sharpening filter and used very subtly textured objects so they appear more to be block colours.

I was looking through a lot of reference images to figure out a way in which I could organise the scene and camera placement. I used “Dear Leader” (A product of Double Fine’s Amnesia Fortnight) as a reference point, it has a similar theme to the one I was trying to achieve.

Lighting

The Office consists of 3 elements, the Desk, Map and Entrance.

The desk is where the player will generally spend most of their time, it holds the radio and other sources of information. Your desk has multiple objects to aid you. You will gather information each day from the; Newspaper, Memorandum, Frequency List, Manual and other notes unique to that day. You can keep notes in your notepad, tearing out pages and pinning them to the wall. You can drag and arrange your desk in any way that you desire – allowing the player to increase their own productivity.

The Map will be used to get a general overview of the world, holding information like locations and unit positions. You can add pins with notes attached to the map, allowing you to keep track of unit’s movements. None of it is automated, the player has to keep track and set units locations as with the theme I wanted to keep.

While the entrance is to make sure no one is overwatching your work, at any point your employer may enter your office and oversee you, reporting any suspicious activity. You can only view one area of your office at a time, meaning if the player is not alert, they could be compromised.

Game Engine

I created Come In, Over in the Unreal Engine 4 – using its Blueprint system. I’m not a programmer, by any means so using UE4’s visual scripting I created and designed every bit of gameplay without a single line of code. However, there are drawbacks to the system, such as the use of some of data variable and tables.

Alex Haddow-Mendes, Level Designer, Technical Designer and Games Designer

INTERESTING LINKS

SIMPLE AND RICH LANDSCAPE BUILDING IN UE4

MOODY SCI-FI ENVIRONMENT CREATION

BE VISIBLE: HOW TO GET A JOB IN GAME INDUSTRY

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Post tags: environemnt design, Epic Games, Game Design, game development, game industry, gamedev, Games, Lighting, UE4, Unreal Engine, Unreal Engine 4

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Substance Painter and Unreal Engine 4 have been improved with newest updates, while gamers around the world fell in love with Blood and Wine. Huh? What else has happened? Check out our weekly column to find the answer!

SUBSTANCE PAINTER 2.1 RELEASED

Substance Painter 2 has a major big update: Linux availability, 8K map exports, support for 4K monitors, UDIM workflow management. Read more here.

UNREAL ENGINE 4.12 RELEASED

The newest version of Unreal Engine features a whole bunch of new cool features, including Sequencer, VR Editor, Daydream VR-support, planar reflections and OSVR support. More here.

Kickstarter: $500 Million Pledged to Games

Kickstarter reached a huge milestone: $500 million pledged to games. That’s half a billion dollars pledged to mobile games, party games, artsy games, silly games, FPSes, and MMORPGs. It also stated that the total number of projects backed equals 4,474 titles!

STARBREEZE ACQUIRES THE FULL RIGHTS TO THE PAYDAY CONFIRMING THE THIRD INSTALLMENT

Starbreeze AB announced its agreement with 505 Games to acquire the full rights to the PAYDAY-franchise. The company also confirmed that the third installment is in the works. More details on the agreement here.

New Game from the developers of The Order 1886 revealed

This above is brand new game from Ready at Dawn, the developers of The Order 1886. Surprising, huh?

Blood and Wine Released

The last part of Geralt’s adventures for the Witcher 3 has been released. It is the perfect conclusion to the beloved series. So, what are you waiting for? Check this launch trailer and go play the materpiece!

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Post tags: Allegorithmic, Blood and Wine, Epic Games, game development, gamedev, Games, games industry, indiedev, PAYDAY, PS4, Ready at Dawn, Starbreeze, Substance, Substance Painter, UE4, Unreal Engine 4, Witcher 3

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Zachary Soares talked about his work with voxels. He discussed the production process, the way you can most effectively spend your time with this technology and how you can use it in VR.

Introduction

Hey! My name is Zachary Soares, I’m a 23 y/o French Canadian who’s studied in the field of Urban planning/Design. I had to mention my degree since that’s where it all started…for games, that is. I started in the summer of 2013, right before Cube World had released its Alpha build. Previously i was already looking into game development as a hobby since i found it to be fun, and had future plans to build city simulations. My first involvement in the field was the 2013 Global Game Jam, where I made some horrible pixelart for an excruciatingly hard platformer. We were all rookie devs, but it was a blast to be a part of it. I knew pixelart wasn’t much for me since i had already learned 3d art through my degree, designing buildings and city scapes…so I tried looking for that happy medium, Voxels: 3d pixelart.

Voxels

I choose voxels because of it’s initial low barrier to entry. As I mentioned, I started my involvement with voxels through Cube World. I made over 500 mods since the summer of its initial release. This was a good way for me to practice my skill and adapt to a common style. I did try voxels with unity and other engines but found it to be futile since, at the time, voxels were very intensive on game engines. The only way I could develop for games was through voxel engines, which were scarce. I chose this technology because it was different and fun. Like any art form, I figured there’d be a future at some point. Minecraft having released and Cube World gaining hype, I was sure an upsurge in voxel development was gonna occur in the near future, so I capitalized on the skill. What’s great about voxels is that it produces 0 textures on assets and are actually very lightweight when using the right engine. You can produce elegant vector-like 3d assets or even pixel-like 3d objects, though the latter produces high poly counts. The range in which voxels can be used is huge and most of its usability is still unexplored. The extent to which traditional 3d engines use voxels is via particle systems, which sadly can’t be used too heavily yet.

Time Cost

In actuality Voxel art takes less time to produce, with the obvious factor depending on the size/scale of the assets. Depending on the creators approach to creating, a simple table can take from 5 minutes to 2 hours to make (content ready) whereas 3d models generally require more time since they require steps like UV mapping and texturing. Vector colored Low poly assets do take less time generally but, as mentioned a moment ago, this is all relative to scale. For me, nowadays, it takes roughly 1-2 hours to design a full new character model with a unique style, and once Ive established teh style it takes less time to make subsequent assets because I use the initial model as a base.

Production Process

Many things are different but much of it is the same as well. A scene can be setup in the tools I use, either in Qubicle or through Maya. If I plan on designing everything to a grid I can setup entire game scenes and assets in Qubicle. I keep all assets separate in matrices that way I can avoid editing massive segments. Splitting up the assets also makes it easier to create optimized assets. Once the assets are complete I can send them directly to Unity or Unreal (or whichever random engine the developer uses) for implementation and usability. If the assets require animation I pass them through Maya16, setup a rig and then export the rig with animation, no different from traditional 3d modeling. The only major difference is whether or not I plan on doing skin rigs or non-skinned rigs. With voxels you can do rigid body rigging between an object and the joint as to avoid complicating your work, and with enough of this you can make interesting/slick animations. This is how most voxel games are animated, like Trove. The skinning (with weight painting) can be applied but it generally isn’t necessary if you have enough joints for animating.

Lighting systems are no different from traditional 3D if you use a basic engine but if you plan on using voxel engines you often need to program your own lighting system, either as regular light systems or make those which base themselves off a grid…it’s odd to explain….requires openGL experience and so on.

Useful Software

All my stuff is created in a tool called Qubicle by Minddesk.com. I generally create all my assets there and then transfer them to Maya16 for animating. I also use MagicaVoxel Viewer for rendering my scenes if I want to make nice poster content or portfolio images. Magica has little use to me on an editing side of things.

Voxels and VR

Voxels do indeed work for VR though there’re 2 avenues to that. Either you build your own voxel engine with a raytracing system so you can make flat shaded voxel scenes or just have high poly voxel assets run smoothly. Or you can do what I do normally, use a traditional voxel engine but limit your voxel designs to minimal bends. With every bend in an asset, you risk increasing the poly count exponentially. Remember, every voxel face is = to 2 polygons. This limitation applies not only to VR but to all games you create with voxels. You can do high poly, curved assets but you’ll need a hell of an optimization method or a voxel engine. Many voxel devs at the moment use their own custom engine. I hope at one point one of them happily provides their engine to the public because right now people are heavily limited to hardware specs, something voxels use a lot of.

Animation Process

Thr animation process is rather simple and straightforward, I’d say. You export from Qubicle the assets you’d like animated. Often exported as an fbx asset, then dragged into Maya. Once that’s brought in I go ahead and setup teh skeleton rig on teh asset. The sad part is, all voxel animations require custom rigs. I don’t recommend using provided rigs since those are generally designed to work with traditional 3d models. You locate the bones to the points of origin on each asset then do rigid body rigging on each joint/object. Once you’ve linked it you’re then ready to animate.

Every Tool used is different. Often most voxel engines have their own tools so i’m left with learning how to animate with almost each game i make. If you plan on doing framed based animations, akin to pixelart then all that’s required is to export separate matrices of assets and doing a mesh swap per frame, like pixelart but 3d.

Color

Put simply, voxels are volumetric pixels so they hold the same exact property as pixels, in the way that 1 pixel holds 1 color. In this case, 1 voxel holds 1 color, so games which texture 1 cube wouldn’t exactly be considered voxel art (minecraft) since the voxel loses its use once you apply a texture. To do so you need to turn that cube into a polygon and boom, no longer a voxel. Anyways, back to the point. A voxel holds 1 color so when designing assets or scens you need to take into account that all edges/corners will be the 1 color you apply. So converting a pixelart piece to voxels isn’t so direct, especially when taking perspective into account.

I’ve made tutorials on youtube outlining how to convert pixel assets to voxels, it’s pretty handy since most people will start doing voxel art in that exact way, from pixels.

 Zachary Soares, Artist

interesting links

QUBICLE – PROFESSIONAL VOXEL EDITOR RELEASED ON STEAM

SIR CARMA: “MAGICA VOXEL WAS LIKE HAVING INFINITE LEGOS IN MY COMPUTER”

LEMMA INTERVIEW: VOXELS FOR RUNNING GAMES

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Post tags: 3d art, art, Epic Games, game development, gamedev, indiedev, Maya, pixel, Qubicle, UE4, Unity, Unreal, Unreal Engine 4, vox, voxel, voxels

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The developers of Hellblade have shared a new video diary, where they talk about the creation of combat system in UE4.

The creation of the interesting and fun to use combat system is an incredibly complicated task. To achieve the desired goal developers had to work on various aspects of the project, including visual design, movement, animation, physical systems and sound.

Over the past six weeks or so our small team of 16 people has been focused on taking some big strides forward with the look, feel and sound of Hellblade’s combat gameplay. This has included painstaking work from our combat designer to iterate over and over on the feel of Senua’s moves in battle, the blending of motion-captured stunts with hand-animation to bring through both character and realism in Senua’s movement, and the building of an environment in which to demo Senua’s new skills.

Dominic Matthews – Product Development Ninja, Ninja Theory

The video provided above gives a little glimpse on how great combat mechanics are made and what are the details that really define a good battling mechanism. Since the main character is much weaker than all the vikings, she has to rely a lot on speed and technical abilities. This is directly manifested in gameplay with the help of clever moves and glorious animations. The development team has set up hundreds of parameters, talking care of the smallest details in the character’s behaviour. They also did a lot of mo-cap to make every movement as smooth as possible. Game areas were also specifically crafted to the requirements of the battle system. And the final result looks absolutely amazing.

Source: blog.us.playstation.com

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Post tags: 3d, combat, combat system, design, development diary, game development, gamedev, hellblade, indiedev, production, UE4, Unreal Engine, Unreal Engine 4

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