Afterfall

Goals

When I started to think about this project I had a few goals. Mainly focused on stylized art, I wanted to change things a little bit and showcase my skills in realistic environments.

• Showcase realistic environment art skills.
• Use as many scanned assets as possible.
• Create a high-quality portfolio piece.
• Do as much experimenting as possible.

Software

My software of choice stayed similar to what I usually use.

• Maya
• Substance Painter
• Photoshop
• Unreal Engine 5
• Quixel Megascans

Reference

My main inspiration for this project was a concept by Adrian Rodriguez.

Although at the beginning of the project I wanted to stay true to the concept, I usually never follow through because when I start working my creative juices keep coming and I begin to add or change up things constantly.

This time was no different while working on this piece, The Last of Us P1 got released and I was very inspired by the artworks that kept coming in, thus, I decided to implement the visual art style of The Last of Us, into this project.

I gathered quite a few references from the artstation and saved them in separate collections folders so that I could find them faster.
(And yes I have seen and gone through each and every single one).

I also made a rapid and rough mood board, since I wanted to experiment a lot, it ended up being very, very basic, showcasing just a lighting feel and overall art direction to get inspired by.

Blockout

To put into perspective the workflow that I had is basically the same as in the industry, but when it comes to my personal project I like to get free of those industry standards constraints and go wild, Thus in this case I ended up reusing ton of similar/same assets in a way that most industry standards wouldn’t accept. (but hey this is a personal project we can let go and relax)

So what happened is, I got some building modular kit assets from Quixel and I modified meshes using the Unreal modeling tool. On top of that, I created separate material where I vertex painted some additional details like moss on top of them to give more sense of wear and aging.

These are Quixel modular assets that I used, this is how they look after I modified some of them with the modelling tool. (Before texture and material changes).

Having a kit like this gives you a lot of flexibility to build all kinds of different setups.
But it wasn’t enough to build what I wanted, so I had to do some work in Maya and add some more pieces to have a baseline for what I wanted to do.

Having all of this allowed me to build up quite interesting shapes to use.

Here is the blockout stage.

(Very rough as you can see)

Here is a quick progression after I figured out the shapes and style I wanted to portray.

This is a good example of how a few detailed meshes can influence and change the look of your blockouts. Even though they repeat a lot you can still get the sense of detail and realism.

At this stage, I was feeling quite positive about the whole project, and my creative juices were kicking in, I knew that I had to add a bunch more detailing in there. So I started thinking about props & what could I add to fit best in this situation.

My mood board and concept came in handy a lot here as they gave me quite a few ideas for props.

Here are some quick props I gathered from Quixel and threw into Unreal to experiment and see what was working and what was not.

Props

I also decided to find some bigger assets that would break up the noisy detail and be more of a presence on the level.
So I found a scanned crashed car on SketchFab and thought it was a nice fit.

This is what the car asset looked like before I did any more changes to it.

Here are a few progress screenshots to show what the process looks like.

I often hear the saying “trust the process” and I have to say it is the most important thing when you’re working with art, it might look bad at times or it might not look right but as long as you keep working on it and do not give up, in the end, it turns out to be worth it. As you might have noticed, I had to make a few additional props nothing major.

But let’s talk about elephant in the room, which is ivy and grass.

As my environment drifted more into the look of the Last of Us look, I started working on vegetation, I had a few ideas in mind, but I knew I had to make a lot of ivy/leaves and grass.
Gladly I didn’t have to spend too much time on grass and flowers since Quixel had so many options already.

I downloaded a few grass and flower meshes from Quixel and edited them a bit to have variation in scale and color, which I started to populate early on as you can see. Laying grass correctly was a must in this case.

As you can see grass size increases the faster it is from the supposed walking path.
It is crucial for accenting a view, preserving realism and adding a more dynamic and directional feel to the overall shot.

Grass in combination with the “oldest trick in the book” path I made a few lighting passes where I could trick direct the viewer’s eye right where I wanted them to look the most, at the character and main attraction we have in the level (The wall).

Now! Let’s talk leaves. Who doesn’t like them? I sure like them and I’m sure you do too.
That is why A lot of experimentation had to take place to ensure that they looked good and up to par with the overall quality.

So I started experimenting with Maya.

Foliage

And a bunch more that went behind the scenes.

I felt a bit adventurous, I knew how to effectively do them in Maya and SpeedTree but I wanted to possibly find some other solution.
And behold! I found a free software from more than a decade ago that works wonders (which has its own downsides of course)

I found a software simply called “Ivy Generator” It’s very simple and easy to use when it doesn’t crash or come up with weird bugs, but when you get a hold of it, it really does magical things.

So for the Ivy generator to generate ivy it needs a mesh. After thinking a bit, I decided to come up with this monstrous construction.
It allowed me to create almost every kind of angle for leaves to grow on and the growing process had been started.

I experimented for about 2 days and in the end, ended up with 25 ivy chunks designed to fit almost every surface and be used repeatedly.

I also ended up creating a very simple leaf texture for ivy and a very simple material setup to make them sway in the wind just a bit and to add the ability to tweak the color and roughness on the go.

Moving to vertex painting subject briefly. It wasn’t anything complicated.

Very simple setup that was copied and pasted to every other material that I used to vertex paint. And a quick setup with color balance and scaling ensured that it looked consistent everywhere.

Here is an example of vertex painting material for one of the Quixel assets that I put together.

Character

From the point that I started on this project, I knew that I would have to use a character in the scene.
It wasn’t anything new for me but I wanted to make it extra good this time.

Thus not being a character artist, wanting to focus on the environment and being influenced by the Last of Us, I decided to search for some post-apocaliptic/survival character assets online.
I soon after found Ellie’s assets from the game so after a bit of hesitation, I decided to use that asset for my scene.
Of course, it wasn’t rigged and textures weren’t set up properly, but that is a part of the journey and I had to do those changes.

So after long and tedious hours of rigging and experimenting with posing her, I present to you, Ellie!

Yes! the terrified look on her face says it all.

But on a more serious note, I knew that it was not to showcase the character but more to showcase the feel and mood of the whole environment.
So what mattered the most was the view from the back. Which turned out to be great in the end.

Another very important part of this project was decals and debris. I downloaded some already-made ones from Quixel, like some leaves for covering the ground and a few leaks here and there.
But I had to also make some on my own and it’s always a very exciting process because decals add a lot of magic and livelihood into environments.

Decals & Cloth

Here are some decals that I made that proved to be very useful.
For the longest time in my career, I would do cloth assets by hand or use Marvelous Designer to make them efficiently.

This time I wanted to again as always change up some things, thus I decided to use Maya for simulating cloth for dedicated assets I had in the level. After a few days of experimenting and tweaking parameters back and forth, I got a hang of it and made some much-needed cloth meshes for the environment.

Lighting

I set up similar material for them as I did with leaves. They also sway in the wind a bit and have that lively feel to them.

And last but not least, let’s touch on the subject of lighting.
I strongly believe that lighting and environments are equally important in every work. You cant have a good environment without good lighting and vice versa.

Out of all the personal projects that I have done, I experimented with the lighting most on this one. I can’t even remember how many iterations I have done in that matter.

Here are some examples.

You can see it here.
Just by manipulating lighting and shadows I created a strong separation between foreground and background and also added an area limit where I want the viewer’s eyes to concentrate the most.

Here is the progress of the whole Project.

Conclusion

All in all, I am glad about how this project turned out. A massive thank you to Games Artist for giving me the opportunity to write this article and share my knowledge.

Also shoutout to my good friend Rene Gorecki for giving me his feedback along the way.

And most importantly NEVER GIVE UP!