LogInChristian Mayer has shared the modeling and texturing workflows behind the Courtyard Riot scene, talked about setting up lighting in Unreal Engine 5, and talked about studying at Vertex School.
Introduction
Hi, my name is Christian Mayer and I am currently a student in the Game Artist Program at Vertex School. Before transitioning into 3D environment art, I worked as a Concept Artist in the game industry and have some freelance and in-house experience.
In general, you could say that 3D quickly became an important design tool in most of my concept art workflows from pretty early on. Quick and dirty blockouts in Blender or some basic sculpting in 3DCoat to later be painted over in Photoshop were part of the daily business. I liked exploring any tools that would help me communicate my ideas in a better or more efficient way.
Now I am shifting to environment art as I wanted to work closer to the product and be part of the immediate player experience. But the same philosophy still stays true for me in creating actual game environments. Getting the idea and story across within the environment is still the main priority to me. And having an eye for composition and style from my design background helps with that. Even though there are undeniable differences that give the created assets a wider range of purposes than just looking good from one specific angle. There are gameplay aspects to deal with, performance, considering different viewing angles, fitting into varying environments. And of course, creating clean geometry, UVs, and textures.
Joining Vertex School
In the beginning, I thought I could just go the same route as I did with learning design and drawing. By binging tons of video tutorials and building a foundation by practicing a lot to gain mileage. However, this style of learning didn’t feel sustainable for the course of a longer time period. Finding the balance between assembling a lesson plan for yourself, tutorials, managing your time while trying to stay motivated, staying objective, and continuously making progress was challenging. So I looked for a solution that takes over the organizational part and gives me room to focus on learning. Something that also provides me with all the input I need to stay on course and spend my time efficiently. With Vertex School, I found the right answer to those obstacles.
In the program, students are encouraged to set their own individual goals and explore their ambitions. Yet at the same time, everyone who begins in term 1 starts with learning the same foundation that is necessary for most 3D workflows. When you start studying in terms 2 and 3, students not only choose character or environment art but also decide on what they want to focus on within those fields. With the help of a personal mentor, you have the chance to tailor your portfolio projects towards tech art, material creation, lighting, or anything else that is part of a 3D game pipeline.
There is also another quality of Ryan and the Vertex team, specifically as educators, I would like to call attention to, as it boosted my confidence in the decision for Vertex: The emphasis to focus on substance first and technique second. In my opinion, it is difficult to develop your artistic eye by simply following tutorials about workflows and techniques. Consequently, you could miss out on vital aspects that make up good quality assets. Probably everything you produce serves a purpose within a bigger picture. Accurately curating your decisions to fit the frame of that picture often yields more authentic and holistic results. In my experience, this is also true for a lot of other disciplines.
The Courtyard Riot Project
A few weeks earlier I was replaying Dishonored 2 which has been a long time coming. I always loved the stylized proportions of the architecture and gritty narrative elements in the game. Therefore, I was inspired to create my own environment within a similar theme and world, including a timeless narrative about ongoing class conflicts and the dark places they can take a society to. So, I started with a simple style guide for my goals in the project and kicked off the research.
While researching I assembled references in a PureRef document, sketched over photos, and created some rough concepts of the ideas in my head, before eventually starting the blockout in Blender. During the blockout phase, I constantly took screenshots, painted over them, or bashed in some photos to get a better grasp on how it should look later on.
Additionally, I needed to find out what kind of pieces I needed to create for the architecture. I ended up going back to the drawing board several times, iterating on important elements during the production later on. Choosing this approach for a portfolio piece with a tight time schedule does of course come with its drawbacks. If you invest too much time in the ideation phase you may find yourself missing out on showcasing other qualities of your environment. For example, some high fidelity materials and sculpts or smart technical systems you came up with.
The Landscape
I created a general layout and the main parts of the architecture in Blender. It was very helpful to create notes and scribbles right on top of the geometry with Blender's Grease Pencil tool. This way I was able to create markers for level design ideas or storytelling elements that are important for the overall narrative right inside the viewport.
After nailing down most of the main shapes and elements in the scene I imported the white boxing into Unreal Engine to replace the pieces one after the other with a modular kit later on.
As the main portion of the level is made out of architectural elements, I focused on adding pieces that allow for variety and can help to prevent too much repetition within the facades of the buildings. The resulting collection of shutters and metal applications also adds more character to the overall look of the scene.
The Statue
The statue was part of the focus areas I wanted to reflect certain emotions and hints towards the underlying narrative of the area. Some propaganda posters that got ripped off in frustration, paint tracks of someone climbing the statue to write messages of defiance or photos of lost loved ones calling attention to the cost of conflict. For this reason, I mainly created 3D assets and decals to serve this purpose.
For the statue, I used a basic character made with the ZBuilder plugin. To find a natural pose I imported the character into Adobe Mixamo. Then I re-imported the geometry back into ZBrush to stylize the shapes a bit and remove the head, making it look like it was vandalized. The rest of the level is mainly filled with assets expressing the functionality of the courtyard and bank which were put into disarray. Benches, lamps, looted locker boxes, etc.
Texturing
For the modular architecture kit, I built a material setup that my Vertex mentor, Stefan Oprisan, suggested to me. This material combines the efficiency of tileable textures with the fidelity of detail masks and vertex painting. It makes use of material variations I created in Substance 3D Designer that blend into each other, a simple stone wall as a base, and then variations with stains or moss, for example. The architecture from the industrial age (the time period I used as reference) was exposed to a lot of pollution. Especially the cavities and convexities were probably filled with soot and other residues. To achieve that look I baked RGB information masks in Substance 3D Painter with variations of ambient occlusion, edge highlights, and gradients to be directly used in the Unreal material.
Hero assets, like the statue and everything else that is not ground or architecture, were textured uniquely in Substance 3D Painter or got a very simple tiled texture. Generally, I tried to re-use a lot of smart materials in SP to control the material variation. This prevents the level from becoming visually too noisy and keeps everything a bit more grounded and unified within one space.
Assembling the Scene
Everything was assembled in Unreal Engine 5 and the blocking was iterated on by gradually adding asset sets. Not having a fixed concept also came with the benefit of learning to be flexible in decision-making and open to changes. For example, after establishing the architecture I noticed that the buildings still looked a bit too repetitive even though I already created a set of detail assets. So I made a few of the assets broken or bend to block lights with more interesting silhouettes.
Due to time restrictions, only the flying sparks and paper effects were made from scratch with the Niagara System of Unreal. Other effects like the smoke were based 90% on the Unreal Example Assets, Epic provides in their preview levels.
Lighting in Unreal Engine 5
The lighting technology in UE5 is really powerful and easy to iterate with, therefore I decided to go with a combination of dynamic real-time lights and post-processing. In the beginning, I used Skylight as the fill light in order to fill in the shadows and determine the bottom range for the darkest darks in the scene. Following up with the Directional Light as the key light of the scene, which also generates leading lines with the direction of the resulting shadows. In the next step, the Sky Atmosphere and Height Fog push the mood and realism of the lighting. This also mutes the brightest lights of the scene, generates room in the upper range of the values as well as softens visual edges.
With this more mellow value composition, there is more control to accentuate areas with spotlights and carve out specific shapes. Finally, I used the Post-Processing Volume to achieve a warmer tonality and bring everything together. For this, I graded the scene in Photoshop and brought the LUT back to Unreal. This also helps greatly with the readability of the scene.
Conclusion
Designing in parallel to the production was challenging but fun. Nevertheless, the shift from dynamic iterating to efficient planning during this first, bigger environment art project of mine, helped to deliver a fleshed-out result in the end while also meeting the deadline of term 2.
In general, I’m really happy with the overall outcome and am looking forward to term 3 at Vertex School.