LogInSandra Lassagne shares her process for texturing an ambient scene inspired by a real-world French architectural style, using the trim sheets technique and a modular approach. She also explains how to enhance the atmosphere through lighting and effects.
Introduction
Hello! My name is Sandra, and I'm a French 3D Prop/Environment Artist. I've always been interested in the 3D process in general, but I really started to be interested in 3D video game environments five years ago. During this period, I created three short video games with my classmates at Brassart School. Here, I started to love creating specific ambiances through my props and my environments.
At this time, I'm following the Artside Online School courses to enrich my skills and focus on the creation of environments. It was the best alternative for me to complete my knowledge and be surrounded by professionals for useful feedback.
About the Old French Building Project
This project was originally a course at Artside under the supervision of Sacha Veyrier. He taught us a lot of new techniques and very useful optimization tips for the video game industry, so a huge thanks to him for all of that.
I had to choose a building reference and recreate it as closely as possible; the goal was to experiment with the modular workflow and discover the use of trim sheets. I had five weeks to work on this project and some additional days to do my renders and work on the post-production.
I fell in love with the Swatch megastore located in Paris, in the famous Champs Elysées, and I wanted to give myself a little challenge due to all the ornaments I needed to sculpt and the new techniques to assimilate!
To start the project, there was a process of reference research to find which materials I needed to create and to fit as much as possible to real visuals. I also cut my original reference into different parts to determine what parts could be reusable and what parts needed a special and unique focus. This step helped me a lot to gain some time later on in the creation process.
To set up all the things I had in my head, I did a blockout in 3ds Max and integrated it directly in Unreal with a clean naming convention, which allowed me to replace the blockout meshes with the final meshes easily. I also did a first lighting pass (originally, I wanted to do a "day" lighting).
Textures & Tools
The next step was to create my trim sheets. As this was my first experience with this technique, it was really difficult to determine how to start the process, but I took each part of my reference to recreate them. I decided to go with two trim sheets, one specifically for all my architectural parts and the second one for little props in the scene, such as balconies or shutters.
One of the big things I've learned while backing trim sheets is the importance of creating bevels to detach shapes. When using 90° angles, the normal map baking will struggle to get the information of depth, so making sure any depth change in my shapes has a bevel will help in the baking progress and provide a better result.
Next, I had to create my tileable textures, the stone tiles, and the roof tiles in Substance 3D Designer. For these textures, I followed a couple of tutorials on YouTube and mixed all the tips I could learn to finally have a result that could possibly fit my needs.
Here are some links that can be helpful:
Roof tiles: Creating a slate roof material using Substance 3D Designer - Part1, Creating a slate roof material using Substance 3D Designer - Part2, and Stylized Slate Roof - Substance Designer 3D.
Stone: Substance Designer Tutorial Vol:1 | Plaster and Substance Designer Tutorial Vol:1 | Stone Tiles.
I needed to create two variants of my textures to give some life to the aspect of my props in-game by using the vertex paint method.
For this technique, it's important to have a lot of subdivisions (a reasonable amount) on your mesh to paint more precisely and with a certain amount of control. In my case, I decided to chunk the number of subdivisions on the pillars because they needed the most attention; for the other parts, it was not that much.
Sacha taught us how to create our own master material with additional functions, such as the possibility to twitch the offset of the texture, the roughness, saturation, et cetera.
For my master material, I also managed to twitch the size and offset and adapted it to the world position. This was a really useful setup because my texture was mostly bricks, which needed to follow a certain axis. The same is true for the roof. I wanted my texture to be aligned with my world, so I did the same process. I also did the same thing for my dirt decals.
Then, I needed to rework my base meshes for the global architecture of my scene. I still used 3ds Max and started with my blockout meshes to give them a little upgrade. I added some polys and bevels to try to give them a more realistic shape and erase the "3D aspect" as much as possible.
I used the array on 3ds Max to shape my meshes in a circle while duplicating them to create a coherent assembly. When I unwrapped my meshes, I straightened my UVs as much as possible to avoid aliasing mistakes and to make them easier to fit on my trim sheets.
Concerning the sculpted elements, a base mesh was created in 3d Max (later used for the low-poly mesh). Then, I sculpted all my details in ZBrush, and here I have my high-poly mesh. Then, I needed to bake all of my ornaments set in Substance 3D Painter to texture them.
All of these steps were used to create this modular set with all of my architectural and small additional parts. Modular is pretty good to use, especially for big scenes like this, where we have to reuse a special part multiple times. It's a big time saver.
Lighting & Effects
The main light: I put a directional spot to create my main light to have the first atmosphere of my scene. As I wanted night lighting, I started with a low intensity with a high-temperature value. For realistic lighting, I prefer temperature tints over color tints to get closer to real "outside" lights. I also added some more indirect lighting intensity to enlighten all my shadows and avoid the "very dark" results of night lighting.
Additional lights: These are essentially spots, and they're pretty low-intensity, too. I decided to go with low-temperature values to give this contrast of shades.
Background lights: Still spots, but this time, with a big intensity and a high Volumetric Scattering Intensity.
Effects: To give a little step up to my composition, I added an exponential Height Fog with high density.
I activated the Volumetric Fog and changed the color a bit. In reinforcement, I also added some local Height Fog in the background to give more importance to my lights and their Volumetric Scattering Intensity. It gives the background a really mystic ambiance.
The Curtains: To add some life to my scene, I added some curtains, which are just a plane with a bake of curtains; then, in Substance 3D Painter, I added an emissive on it and adjusted the intensity directly in Unreal. Details like these can add variations to your scene, especially when all the shapes look similar.
Summary
To conclude, this project was very fun for me to try all the new things I've learned at Artside. Everything is not perfect, but with some steps back, I can see my mistakes and they allow me to improve myself really fast.
This project also represented a big challenge for me concerning the time and optimization constraints. I needed to organize myself properly, and it was such a good improvement for my next projects. The use of new tools and techniques is always a challenge, but it is always good practice to use them on a fun project that makes you comfortable. So experiment and have fun!
Some parts were harder than others, and sometimes, my vision on some creation aspects was blurry. I think this is a common problem for beginners like me, but I can say don't be afraid to look up tutorials on how to do specific things and surround yourself with professionals who can give you some useful advice. It's always good for personal enrichment.
Finally, I wanted to thank all my friends, family, and mentors for their feedback and support during this project. And a huge thanks to 80 Level for giving me this opportunity to show and explain my work! Hope this article will be helpful! Cheers ;)