Discovery: Making Hard-Surface and Organic Assets for an Environment

Jean Negreiros talked about his UE4 project Discovery: creating two hard-surface hero props, working on vegetation from scratch, setting up lighting, and more.

Introduction

Hello, my name is Jean Negreiros. Currently, I work as a Senior 3D Artist at Imersys, a Brazilian company of Virtual Reality, and I also do some freelance as Environment Artist.

I started studying Computer Graphics on my own in 2010, and in 2011 I took a 2-year technical course on the same subject. During that time, I learned the basics of various things in CG such as digital painting, image and video editing, 3D modeling. In 2012, I entered the CG market.

From 2012 to 2016 I worked as a freelance 3D Artist Generalist. I worked for Architecture, Engineering, and Advertising, rendering static images and animations, using software like 3ds Max and V-Ray.

From the middle of 2016, I migrated to Games and Virtual Reality, so I started to study these topics. At the end of 2017, I joined Imersys and I've been working there for 3 years already. In addition, I always get freelance gigs and I also graduated as an Audiovisual Producer in-between the jobs.

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Discovery: Project Idea

The start of the project was unpretentious: I wanted to do an Environment project to apply what I learned in the last few years and also create something for my portfolio as it felt kind of stuck.

So I researched for some references on the internet and found Edward Delandre's concept art that I thought was very beautiful. I decided to use it as the initial reference for my idea. In addition, I searched for references for each object I had in mind. This is my general reference board for the project:

Making the Van

The van was the first Hero asset in the scene. I wanted to model a vehicle for some time, and I thought it would look cool inside the scene, so I started researching some vehicles and found the Volkswagen Syncro T3. As it is an old car, I thought it matched the scenery. This is the car's reference board:

To help with the modeling process, I imported a blueprint of the car in the Blender viewport:

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Then, I started modeling the external body poly-by-poly. I made one half of the model and created the support to be able to subdivide the mesh, then used the Mirror modifier to mirror the other side Then I applied the modifier Multiress which allows for a non-destructive sculpting process, keeping the base model intact. I made some dents with the Blender Sculpt tool with the help of some brushes from Andrey Feoktistov's pack.

Then, using the same poly-by-poly modeling process I made the glass, some external accessories, such as headlamps, rearview mirrors, and door handles, then modeled the wheels and tires:

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Following the same process, I made the interior of the car. I started with the internal body, then added a panel with a steering wheel, gearbox, and some props on the mirror. The ribbons were made in Marvelous Designer.

This is the final high poly version of the model:

After that, I duplicated the model, deleted the subdivision modifiers and some edges that were unnecessary, and made the low poly version. Then I unwrapped the objects and divided everything into 5 texture sets.

In Marmoset Toolbag, I did some bakes transferring information from the high to the low poly model. Finally, I took the model to Substance Painter to do the texturing.

The first texture set was the external body.

The second texture set included the objects on the outside.

The third texture set has the wheels and tires, and the fourth – the seats.

The stickers on the car glass were taken from a sticker pack created by Cypubog. The graffiti scattered around the car body is from Geoffrey Soudant's pack.

Creating the Environment

I started making the initial blockout within Unreal to get a sense of what the main objects would look like:

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After I finished blocking, the scene started to take shape, so I began refining the objects.

The first thing I worked on was the ground. I created some materials in Substance Designer which would be the layers of my Landscape Material inside Unreal:

This is the material of the terrain. I created 3 variations for it to be able to paint inside Unreal. Then I moved to Unreal and created my Landscape Material:

Within the Landscape Material there were 5 layers for painting terrain variation as you can see in this gif:

Vegetation was the stage where I learned the most in this project. Initially, my idea was to make a single texture, a "Mother Atlas", for all the vegetation, so I blocked it from this form:

First, I worked on the pines:

I modeled the needles, and cones, then made branches and finally transform this into a texture and added to the "Mother Atlas" of vegetation. The last step would be to make a well-optimized 3D model with the texture from the Mother Atlas applied.

In SpeedTree, I created the tree procedurally. At the base, I used branches with more polycount, and from the middle upwards I placed lighter versions of the branches and leaves since those parts will always be seen at a long distance.

After creating the first tree, I randomized some parameters generating a total of 4 versions.

The rest of vegetation followed a very similar process:

This is the final version of the “Mother Atlas”. All vegetation in the scene was within it and everything was created from scratch, I did not use any ready-made maps.

In addition to the trees and plants, I also worked on some organic assets for the composition such as stones, roots, branches, and trunks, which were made using the Blender Sculpt tool:

Making the Drone

The drone was the main Hero asset in this project, the whole story revolves around it. During the production, I was taking the Hard Surface Rigging course, and one of the exercises was to rig a drone, so it motivated me to create one for my project. To get inspired, I looked for some references:

The references helped establish how the drone worked and how to rig it. For the shapes and overall look, I tested various options until I found one that I liked. This is the final high poly model:

Taking advantage of the detailed high poly model, I made its low poly version by simplifying some parts, reducing the general polycount, and separating only those parts that would be animated. Then I did the mapping and divided all the parts into 2 texture sets, took both models to Marmoset Toolbag, and generated additional map bakes that helped me during the texturing stage:

After that, the model was textured with Substance Painter:

For the rigging stage, I started creating the armor and bones, setting the constraints and the controllers:

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The next step was making the animations and exporting them to Unreal. In total, there were 4 animations used in the video:

I also added animation for the material inside Unreal. In the Material Master of the Drone, I create some Material Parameter Collections to vary the color and intensity of the flickering, which I later animated in Sequencer:

In the end, I made a teaser showing the drone and all its functions as well as making an introduction to the story I would like to tell.

Composition

First of all, my goal was to make the scene complete and very humanized and then try to take advantage of the whole composition to get some still shots and takes for the cinematic, always trying to focus the attention on the Hero assets – the car and the drone.

At each camera angle, I used cinematographic techniques to create the compositions:

I used a lot of natural frames and lines, objects on different planes, even the light as a perspective.

To help add a human factor to the scene, in addition to the vegetation and organic assets that I mentioned earlier, I created debris, garbage, and other objects to create an “abandoned place” atmosphere:

Most of the objects were scattered either manually or with the Unreal Foliage tool:

Some details came from the material itself, such as for the bridge:

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Lighting

The lighting I used was totally dynamic, nothing was baked, and I didn't use ray-tracing.

I used a Skylight with an HDRI to control the areas of indirect lighting. Together with Ambient Occlusion, it created a Fake GI. With directional lighting, I wanted to bring in shadows and more light to some areas, so I used a few lights to fill in the space.

In the night scene, the process was the same, but with other light sources such as bridge lights and headlights:

Within the Post Process Volume, I adjusted a few parameters, such as auto exposure, ambient occlusion, bloom, flare, and white balance. Then, the screenshots were taken to Affinity Photo where I made further tweaks with Affinity's Adjustment Layers. I copied these layers to a standard Unreal LUT texture, applied the same effects to it, and configured it as Color Lookup Table. This allowed me to achieve the result from Affinity within Unreal:

You can learn more about the use of LUTs in Unreal here.

Creating the Video

For the video, I created a Master Sequence with 6 Level Sequences inside it, and in each Level Sequence I used the camera animations that I had already thought of when I created the script:

In each Level Sequence, I had an animation with different camera movements, different drone actions, and animated parameters like lights.

Self-Reflection

Everything in this project was a great challenge, each object, each texture. I faced difficulties during many stages, and I stopped to look for solutions to the problems as they appeared. I had never done all the vegetation from scratch, I had little experience in rigging and animation; the rubble, vehicle, drone, and all the compositional assets required a lot of work because they were complex objects. I greatly improved my skills with Unreal shaders as well.

From start to finish, the project took 6 months, but I worked on it in my spare time; sometimes I set it aside for a while and I also had a vacation in the middle of that production. So without breaks, I think it would have taken me about 3 months.

The result is far from perfect, but I was very happy with what I got. I learned to believe more in myself, not to be afraid of the problems, and to solve them patiently. I'm excited about the perspective of working on other projects like this.

Jean Negreiros, Senior 3D Artist at Imersys

Interview conducted by Arti Sergeev

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Discovery: Making Hard-Surface and Organic Assets for an Environment

Introduction

Discovery: Project Idea

Making the Van

Creating the Environment

Making the Drone

Composition

Lighting

Creating the Video

Self-Reflection

Jean Negreiros, Senior 3D Artist at Imersys

Interview conducted by Arti Sergeev

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