Ancient Ruins

Project

Ancient Ruins was one of the biggest environments I made during a Masterclass at Artside with Lionel Cregut for around 6 weeks!
I wanted to dig deeper into my realistic skills so I decided to create everything by myself.

Using Substance Designer for every texture and SpeedTree for the foliage.
Even though we don’t see the foliage at a close range that much, I wanted to practice my foliage skills even more and really wanted to avoid having to put the Megascan tag on.

I sculpted every rock on ZBrush to get a specific normal and train my rock skills a bit more.
This project was inspired by the awesome concept of Ian_x. Please check his work out!

Software

• Blender
• WorldMachine
• ZBrush
• Substance Designer
• Substance Painter
• SpeedTree
• Unreal Engine
• Marmoset Toolbag
  

Goals

The main goal of this piece was to create a really epic image with a high production value and show some of the best of my skills using Unreal Engine 5 and Lumen.

References

Here are the references I used to create my environment. Real-life references are so useful in order to get a great idea for the base colors, roughness, or how the light reacts on the objects.

I came across Mad Max Fury Road on my TV and was really inspired by the way they managed their desert rocks so it was a great starting point in terms of shapes and textures.

Blockout

Here you can see a WIP of the whole piece that took around 6 weeks to create. The most important part in order to keep a quick and consistent workflow is to first blockout the modules and already place them with a proper pivot point.

So when your final mesh is done you can just replace the blockout and not worry about replacing it. It’s really a time saver.

Here you can see the modules I created to realize the whole environment. They look very raw here but you will see right after that there is a solid pass of vertex paint/decals and blending to break the 3D look.

Master Material 

I created a Master Material for the whole environment to be able to Vertex Paint two textures and a specific normal, blend the modules and meshes with the landscape (RVT), and have control over the Curvature and Ambient Occlusion thanks to a baked RGB Mask Map.

Keep in mind that my shader was not particularly thought of as game-ready but more as really complementary to get the environment set up as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Foliage 

This masterclass with Lionel came right after one we had with Arnaud Claudet, a Foliage Artist at Ubisoft Massive.

It was really fun to learn how to create foliage from start to finish fully procedurally with Designer and SpeedTree.
So for fun, I decided to create all of the foliage myself, from the grass to the palm trees and create all the texture on Designer.

Lighting

The lighting is pretty simple, it consists of just a Directional Light and a SkyLight to debunk shadows that are too dark. What is selling it is all the light blockers that I placed in the world so they can cast shadows and create a focus of light on the main subject.

One important thing to note with Lumen is that there is Global Illumination roughly everywhere when a material is above the 0.5 range of lightness.

This can result in unwanted bouncing on different objects and ruin the look you want to achieve.
To counter this effect, you can actually place some darker planes with the normal facing in the other direction that you are looking at to avoid seeing it. This way you can cancel the bouncing on a specified area.

The other way around you can actually create some lighter planes to generate bouncing in a desired area to create reflections.

Mountain Mesh and Atmospheric

The background mountain mesh was modeled and textured in Worldmachine to match the reference the best and have a little reminder on the masterclass we had on Terrain Art with Robert Farrand, the Technical/Terrain Artist at Ubisoft Québec.

One of the main challenges of this environment was the atmosphere, it’s a solid percentage of the image and it helps with the overall readability and epicness of the piece.

This scene would look completely different if I didn’t have some fog planes and Exponential Height Fog to create some depth and separate the layers.

The difference is day and night and it shows how strong of an impact these subtle changes can make on an environment.

I’d like to give a big thanks to William Faucher for his amazing EasyFog tool to quickly add fog cards and drastically change the look of the piece. I made some changes to his blueprint to have a slight deformation of the clouds over time so they wouldn’t stay static on video render.

Textures/Rocks

Every texture was created fully procedurally on Substance Designer. The palm leaves texture was created on SpeedTree to make an atlas so I can model the palm tree.

For the sculpts, I mainly used the TrimSmoothBorder with the square alpha and sometimes the AverkinRock_01 from Andrew Averkin brush Pack to create some surface grunge.

Then to get the little spot splatters I used the Jronn_Grunge01 from Jonas Ronnegard.

Decals

I created some decals as well to stick against the temple so I could quickly get those details with a lot of controls thanks to my Decal Material that I will share with you.

Concerning decals, I also benefited from normal edge decals to avoid having a sculpt pass on every prop since they’re seen from afar.

It can really help to give that sculpted feeling and break the edge silhouette to boost the production value of the overall image and make you gain a lot of time. Here is a comparison between without and with the decal applied.

I will also share with you my normal decal master material so you can try it by yourself.

Conclusion

To conclude, I would say that this project really gathered a lot of skills that I developed in the past months and I’m proud that I was able to combine them all in one piece. I learned so much in the process and will still be learning since I still have my final studies project incoming.

This was an awesome project that could never have happened without my awesome mentors for Foliage and Landscape Art, Arnaud Claudet and Robert Farrand respectively. And obviously Lionel Cregut for all the feedback and supervising!

If you have any questions, feel free to contact me on my social media, I will try my best to answer them!

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