Introduction
Hi, I'm Gilad Baruch, I'm an Environment Art student from Israel. Currently, I’m studying environment art at ThinkTankOnline.
Before this project and my study at Think Tank, I was freelancing as a 3D generalist mostly for archviz and small indie projects.
After a while, I decided to change my direction to environment art so I signed up for ThinkTank. In this article, I’ll break down my intermediate-term final project.
Reference gathering
When I was asked to choose a concept for the project all I knew is that I want to make an abandoned place with a scary mood. After a lot of searching, I found Dr. Anna’s house location which was just perfect for this kind of project.
This location was very well documented by photographers and had a lot of photos and videos from different angles of the room which helped me a lot. After finding the photos I created a PureRef file containing most of them.
If you need references for abandoned places I recommend checking these sites, they have a lot of high-quality photos of different locations.
Blockout and modeling
To set up the room dimensions I had to figure out a scale reference from the image so I can estimate the room dimensions. I estimated the wall tiles were 16x16cm.
After that, I started to block out the walls. Then I blocked out the main assets, exported them to Unreal and made a first lighting pass
After blocking out the scene I made sure the dimensions of the door is playable and wont cause any problems with collisions and such. I also made sure all the modular assets works well and were ready to be used in the engine.
For most of the small assets, I didn’t have time the make a proper high poly bake so I used one segment bevels with harden normal to fake the high poly look. In my opinion this is a great way to save time for smaller assets when you’re in a rush.
The add-ons I used to boost my workflow in Blender are – HardOps/Boxcutter, Texel Density Checker, UvPacker and UvToolKit. I really recommend checking them out.
I did not use any ready models in the scene besides the ivy which is from Mega scans.
Texturing
To create the tiling textures I used Substance Designer.
In Designer, I used a lot of techniques including photos and importing sculpted mesh to Designer from ZBrush.
I also created some base materials in Designer to be later used in substance painter.
To achieve a more realistic and unique look, I created a damaged and clean version for the tileables to mix them later using vertex painting.
To texture the unique props I used substance painter. I noticed that the scene had a lot of rusty assets so I created a smart rust material using anchor points with blurs and slope blurs which came out pretty nice.
Shaders
After the texturing was done it was time to set up the shaders for the scene.
I created a few master materials and I also created some materials functions to integrate into the master materials. I also used static switch parameters to keep the shader optimized.
I created a Dust function that allows to quickly apply procedural dust effect around the scene. This helped me a lot in achieving the dusty look of the scene around the modular assets.
I recommend checking this video if you want to make a dust material in Unreal.
I also created a simple vertex painting function and a dirt function. This is where the damaged textures that I made earlier take place.
I used detail textures and masks to combine microtextures with macro textures. This workflow helped me to achieve high texel density while adding some unique features to the asset. Here’s a great video explaining more about detail normals.
After assigning the textures and creating the shaders it was time for a decal pass.
For the edge damage decal, I created an SD graph that generates a damaged decal from an alpha input.
I also created some dirt, leaks, and gradient decals to achieve the dirty looks of the scene.
Some of the dirt alphas are from megascans, but most of them made by me.
Lighting
For the lighting I started by placing a directional light, then I placed an HDRI sphere and a SkyLight actor. I also placed some spotlights and rect lights around the scene to light up some dark spots I wanted to show more.
Then I added an exponential height fog with volumetric fog in order to add the light shaft and some mood to the scene.
To create the light shaft I Placed a movable spotlight with very high volumetric value to create the effect. This video helped me a lot in setting up the lighting.
To bake the lighting I used the GPU Lightmass which is INSANE! The baking times were very short and provided very high-quality bakes that allowed me to change and tweak the lighting without previewing it on low quality.
This video helped me a lot with troubleshooting and understanding the GPU lightmass.
Here are my final settings for the GPU lightmass. I found these settings to provide the best result for my scene, but these settings would probably be different based on your scene.
Conclusion
This project was my first environment in unreal and it was very challenging to complete in such a short amount of time. This whole project took about one and a half months. I’m very happy with how this project came out and how I progressed during this term.
My advice for an aspiring artist who wants to create such a scene is to focus on the bigger and more important detail of the scene and try not to get stuck and waste time on small details that won’t be visible or far from the camera.
I’d just like to thank my term supervisor Sergei Panin who provided me with a lot of knowledge and help during this project and term.
