The Flying Outpost

Project and Goals

I joined the Artstation challenge ‘Untamed: When Animals Ruled the World’ in the Prop Art (rendered) category. It was my first time joining one of these. For my submission, I was tasked to make 3 props within this theme and within a timeframe of 7 weeks.

In this article, I’ll mainly be focussing on my approach for the Flying Outpost.

References

For this project, all 3 props are based on designs drawn by Alizé Giraud that were entered during the concept phase of the challenge. This is my main reference. I wanted to translate this stylized concept into a realistic artwork so I looked for extra reference images.
I ended up gathering close-ups from boats, hot air balloons, details that I wanted to incorporate…
Besides that, I also looked up material references. The concept provided an idea of what materials are used and where but it doesn’t show the fine details and definition a realistic material has. These references are crucial to create the material definition and realism during texturing.

Blockout & Modelling

I go phase by phase for all props, starting with the most difficult one: do all blockouts, then all the high poly, low poly … The reason I start with the most difficult one is to have an idea of time management. The Outpost has the same time cost, if not even more, as the Cage and Knife combined. This is because the Outpost features many more details and is a bigger asset in its entirety.

The first part of the blockout is done in Maya. Here I first follow the model sheet almost perfectly. This is just to get the shapes in. Organic elements are blocked out really basic. They will get a blockout sculpt pass in Zbrush.

After that, it’s important that the shapes and scale work in a realistic setting. This is where the model sheet is put aside and I look at the realistic references. I start tweaking the proportions manually until it feels good.
Finally, I put my mesh in Zbrush and start refining the shapes a little: smoothing edges, basic sculpting on organic parts and adding simple details to get a feeling for the entire asset.

Sculpting

When I’m happy with the blockout in Zbrush I get to sculpting. My approach is to go piece by piece, starting with big ones. I continue sculpting on the blockout. Elements are often brought back in Maya for quick remodelling. This gives me a better mesh to sculpt on.
I add medium and big details. These are e.g., wood cracks, damage, cloth folds … These will be baked into the texture maps and add localization and detail. The small details are best added during texturing. I found some free brushes online that proved very useful: a rope brush and set of cloth brushes. Besides those, I also used greyscale images for additional detail.

Rope brushes

Cloth brushes

When the sculpt is done, I look for ways to optimize the mesh so that the low poly creation and baking will go smoother. In my case there were 3 areas for optimization:
– The sculpt has multiple reoccurring elements. Duplicates can be removed and created axis-oriented meshes are added. E.g. The harpoons and net-ammo. This will speed up the low poly modelling.
– There were ropes in various angles and bends. A straight, axis-oriented rope is all that’s required. During the low poly, you can simply overlay the UVs on this.

– Finally, there were cloth bands around the cabin. These were single, continuous elements and would create baking issues. These are split in multiple parts. The seam is at the bottom where it’s covered by another mesh.

Low poly and UVs

The low poly is created in Maya. I went over each piece individually to create the most optimal low poly.
I sometimes start from the blockout piece. This works perfectly for hard surface elements when the sculpt doesn’t alter the shape too much. For the other elements, I do a manual retopology with Live Surface and Quad Draw.
There is a trick for unwrapping ropes I use all the time. It allows me to quickly stack and overlay my rope UVs.

A general tip I can give is to not optimize too much. Don’t be afraid to add edges where they are needed, especially on silhouettes. The trickiest part is to give the asset a uniform density with a clean wireframe.
Since this is quite a big prop, there have to be multiple UV sets. I try to make sense of the individual sets and divide the elements somewhat equally. Maya features an automatic packing tool for UVs but I always pack them manually for a better result. Originally, there were 3 sets but this did not give me an equal texel density. To improve this, I split the asset in 4 and made 1 of them a 2×1 UV set.

Baking

I bake the prop in Substance Painter with a cage. This gives more control and makes it easier to fix baking artefacts.
I bake 2 AO maps: the first one with soft shadows and the second one that takes all objects into consideration. I blend both maps with masks for a clean combination of both.

Materials/ Texturing

The texturing is also done in Substance Painter. The first step is to block out the materials. I apply basic materials and mask them out where they’re being used. Once that’s done, I have a clear overview on how the asset will look and I can tweak the material balance if needed. This proved useful to balance the overall brass/ metal to the rest of the asset.

After that, I start building the materials with detail and localization. The combined AO map is very useful for this. This is the stage where small details are added.
With the asset having 4 UV sets, the Substance Painter file became big and laggy quite quickly. Out of safety and for the ease of texturing I split it up in 4 separate files. There was a 5th one dedicated for previewing the asset. Once the textures were exported, I could import and swap them in this file. This is a relatively quickly approach to check how all parts work together and if it’s a coherent result. This is certainly not the most optimal method but it’s better than losing all your progress in a crash.

During texturing, I managed to save myself quite a lot of time. All 3 assets use similar materials. I converted my texturing in smart materials so that they could be used on the others as well. This gave them a very good base to start from. I did go through all the layers of the smart material to tweak them accordingly but it’s much faster this way than to build them up from scratch again. The assets will also match visually since they use basically the same materials.
This went back and forth. If I found a nice addition to the material, I made a smart material out of it and applied it on the other asset to see how I could implement it.

Lighting/ Rendering

The lighting and rendering are done in Blender with the Cycles renderer. The result I aimed for is a neutral setting that showcases all details.
First thing to set up is the background gradient. This is done with a colored fill light on a grey infinity curve. After that I set up the world light with an HDRI image, main lights, then fill lights and finally rim lights.
The go to light is a spotlight as this one is easiest to control. Certain areas are harder to light up with spots. This is where point lights are used.

Presentation

I enhance my render a little in Photoshop.
The contrast is pushed and a vignette is added. An easy way to see the values of your image is to have a black layer on top of your document on the ‘Color’ view mode. Finally, some extra details are added to finalize the presentation.

Conclusion

Creating props is a lot of fun and very rewarding but it can be daunting when there is a timeframe/ deadline involved. Break it up in pieces, make a plan and schedule. These deadlines are a great opportunity to push yourself to learn new things.
I’m grateful for Artstation to host this challenge. My submission received an Honorable Mention in the end. I would like to thank GamesArtist for the opportunity of letting me write this breakdown.
If you want to see more or contact me, you can find me on Artstation.