Introduction
Hello, I’m Gia Bao Lam! I’m a rookie stylized Environment Artist living in Belgium.
While I was busy graduating this year and getting my first step into the game industry I wasn’t able to work on any personal projects for a long while.
Starting Phase
The first step in a project is to break down the process into multiple steps instead of diving right in. I collected references and asked myself questions in advance to have a better overview:
How am I going to tackle this piece? How can I make the asset-creation more efficient? What style am I going for?
The main focus of this project was to get out of my comfort zone and try out new stuff like trim textures, vegetation shaders, etc…I wanted to challenge myself technically as my last pieces were quite simple from the technical aspect.
The first pass is always a simple block-out existing out of cubes, the purpose of this step is to get the right FOV and proportions aligning with the concept art. As you can see my block-out is extremely plain.
Trim Texture workflow and modular pieces
Since the building exists out of 70% wood it only made sense to create a trim texture to speed up my workflow instead of sculpting every plank uniquely.
The trim texture is divided into multiple sizes so I can easily create bigger or smaller pillars.
I also left some space at the bottom of the trim sheet for more unique pieces like the top of a wooden chunk.
An easy tip to get a better result is to add a thick bevel, you can sculpt some nice edgewear on them which results in simple meshes looking more polished.
The corners will look more rounded off without using any extra tris!
Afterward, I baked the high poly on top of a plane in Substance Painter. To add a nice stylized pop I always add a generator-Ambient Occlusion and play a lot with the Curvature map, in this case, to strengthen the glossiness and color of the bevels.
I actually barely hand-painted anything for this project, I fully relied on the mentioned generators to do the work for me.
Next up is just unwrapping simple meshes aligning with the trims and with this, you create a quick modular pack!
Materials in Substance Designer and Unreal Engine
I made multiple SD materials for this project. I subscribed to 3dex on Patreon where they have a big and diverse collection of material-creation time-lapses.
It can be very intimidating to start out as a beginner, it’s a very complex node-based system so I definitely recommend looking up tutorials. I’m not confident enough to be giving any tips yet regarding SD, but maybe one day!
To paint the walls I would blend the Plaster and Brick material in Unreal Engine, using the Vertex Painting tool. The material is super easy to set up, it only takes five minutes.
The method is the HeightLerp: you plug the first texture in A, the second texture in B and Vertex Color in Transition Phase. This is the basic setup but to make it look even better you can use a Height Texture! For this I used the Height Texture I created for my Brick Material, this makes the transitioning between the textures more natural.
Lighting
The lighting is very reliant on the Directional Light + Skylight with a few extra lights to put more emphasis or color in the scene. Lighting up a scene well is one of the hardest steps for me because the first lighting iterations always make my assets look flat compared to the nice results in, for example, a Substance viewport.
Lighting always looks great on a gray block-out so once I start implementing the first color textures, it can be such a hurdle to blend them together in one big unity.
Lighting goes through so many passes and can be frustrating so take your time with it.
What also really helps is looking from time to time at the desaturated version of your scene, it’s really important that your environment is readable, whether it’s colored or not.
Tackling Grass
Aside from the building the scene really relies strongly on foliage like the grass fields, flowers and ivy. They add color accents and make the scene feel much more alive.
A lot of people loved the grass shader which I was able to achieve by following the tutorial of Andre Felipe.
The grass mesh is very straightforward, consisting of multiple quads rotated in different directions.
All of this was plugged into a Landscape Grass Type (found under Foliage), I referenced this in my Landscape material so it will automatically spawn on my landscape instead of Foliage Painting or placing them by hand. A tip for making the grass blend better is to turn off the Cast Dynamic Shadow option in the settings, shadows on all the Grass meshes could feel overwhelming.
Presentation
And the final pass, presentation! You’re close to the finish line but you still have to put in a lot of effort because you want to show off all your hard work in the best possible way.
A few tips I have for people who want to showcase their environments, definitely make videos too instead of only showing off screenshots. Seeing grass move slightly, clouds panning in the background, some leaves flying by.
Those subtle movements with a camera slightly zooming in/out add so much life to your scene so I recommend it 100%.
I also advise you on creating a fixed camera right from the start of your project so you can easily take screenshots from the same position. The process is just as important as the finished product so it’s always cool to let the viewers see your scene evolve, from block-out to end!
This is the first thing I do whenever I make a new level, just because it’s so satisfying to look back on.
Conclusion
I’m super grateful to receive the opportunity to write this article, my Environment Art knowledge isn’t very broad yet but hopefully, you were able to find any bits of wisdom that will help you out on your journey. Good luck!
