On that one I exposed a couple parameters to allow free rotation of each light along with color, intensity, fall off and a matching bounce light. With this list, students will then use both Maya and the Unreal Engine to create a fully realized environment … The light should always be part of your composition and should guide the player’s eye to interesting points in your scene. After finishing the terrain landscape, I would replace the previous blockout models of the primary and secondary modular objects in the scene such as the train platforms, trains, buildings, walls, and containers with the more detail models. Once the high poly model was ready I started the retopology process in 3ds Max. Then I placed all of these maps into Unreal to create the texture for my floors. Here is an example of the result with and without the Post Processing Volume (the gif gets a bit crunched, so seeing the jitter difference won’t be easy): The Post Processing Volume is very powerful, and it is pretty intuitive for anyone familiar with layer modes in Photoshop. Lighting is always a challenge for me and it varies from scene to scene. But I was pretty happy with the overall feel of the light from screen R. There is still plenty to tweak and adjust (other lights to activate screen L) but this moment was a big confidence booster. Hi, my name is Jason Cheung Yi Kai, I’m from Hong Kong. That all boiled down to repeated bakes and massaging of numbers till it looked “right”. When I saw this comparison, I felt pretty relieved that I was on the right track. It works very much like a real-world film camera and all the settings can be a bit intimidating at first, but there are some excellent videos put out by the Unreal Engine team that explain all the camera properties in detail. Modular Environments and the Grid. I can't disclose any information about this … It looks like you’re using ArtStation from Great Britain. Also, I used Quixel Suite to make a few wooden textures which helped to achieve realistic yet very quick result and Photoshop for decals and posters. Tram Depot is my latest work I developed during Clinton Crumpler’s course on CGMA. And some were created in Substance Designer. My main goal was to display an abandoned place, so I knew that I had to spend my time refining the overall look of the materials. I really wanted to come out of the class with a solid understanding of Trim Sheets and maintaining texel density. I wanted to achieve the warm dull lighting often seen in wartime films, with accents of color to emphasize certain spots. I was technically building a lego set that I would later assemble in UE4. Since the beginning of the course, I learned so many techniques, from modeling to lighting, and especially how to create efficient modular assets and add storytelling in an environment. I worked with the eye adaptation turned off and locked in at a neutral exposure. For more of my work, visit my portfolio on Artstation or my Facebook page to see what I am working on. I made one master material in UE4, and all materials with the exception of a few (water, terrain, fog, decals, etc.) The next steps are creating the various assets to decorate the scene and usually working on an environment level for AAA games will require a large number of assets in the asset library. I’m currently working on a VR dancing game titled Dance Collider at a studio named Emerge Worlds. Just like in real life, you don’t put furniture in before all the walls and ceiling are properly built. From these courses I learned the foundation about the environment pipeline to create high quality assets, and how to create materials and textures for video games in Unreal Engine 4. I was considering an RPG – (Rocket Propelled Grenade), but a helicopter this size would not cruise at an altitude that an RPG could reach. It all goes down to good using of color correction and “eye-balling” until the scene looks more pleasing. I know, you may be fed up with those cheesy lines that you hear a lot, but really, this is what it matters to make better predictions, better decisions. Here is a couple of screenshots from my new modular environment for UE4. Lookup table is an awesome feature that can help with this. To make them blend as much as I could, I used the graphs I have previously done in the first texture pass to create new destructed versions. So I decided to give a different theme color to each platform to make it unique, but not too different, so one color stands out too much. It contains the cable, the light housing, and the light itself. So, if you are an animator, give it the absolute highest priority and think of how you can add even more time to it. During July 2012, I went to Montreal, where I attended a class of meetings on “3D environments and resources for video games” for the creation of gaming environments with UDK3. The bad thing about personal projects is that you can have so much freedom that it’s easy to lose your direction. This has to be set individually for each light source. I started by gathering reference for the scene. Regarding the polygon density, all objects in the scene are either low poly (to which I applied normal maps derived from their high polys) or simple geometry pieces, with just the right amount of polygons to have a clean control with the vertex paint. It is really important to set your units accordingly and to always make objects snap to the grid, in my case, I converted the units to centimeters and I scale the grid to match those units. Hi! I imported a plane mesh and used the high poly to bake out normal, AO and ID map information. To add details to the walls and ceiling, I created a modular set of pipes and electrical boxes. I’m really proud of the work I was able to do during the class and the feedback and critique from everyone has been very encouraging. It is at a reasonable cost for the amount of content you get out of it and being around like-minded individuals is really inspiring! In Unreal, I enable baking the AO mask that I add into the shader to add dirt and grunge to the scene. Melody in the background for this particular scene is “Among Trees” made by – Krale. As for quality, I just wanted everything to look consistent. The entire environment level is also playable in a third-person controller. Reflections around the scene are not complicated but can get out of control when too many are placed in a scene. It's huge (in comparison with my previous attempts) and I can call it done. There is a difference in polycount but I think it’s worth it. © 2021 CGMA. I began his course with very little knowledge of environment building. Hi! The meshes and asset packs were determined by the aforementioned reference list. The issue was resolved when I assigned the decal material to a plane mesh. The final polycount for this asset was 72K triangles including the ammo belt. While this looks complex, it is actually pretty simple and based on the 4-material blend template in UE4 documentation. Each book in a group had some built in scale, position and rotational offset to make them look a bit more “messy” and realistic. It can be difficult to figure out exactly what trims you’ll need right at the beginning, so I started with a few that I knew for sure and left space to add more later. This is a big one. In my spare time, I’m constantly working on small personal projects and recently have begun delving into game dev as I feel it would be rewarding to be able to explore, bring life and interaction to the environments I’ve created. The particles weren’t created by me and were taken from the UE Elemental Demo scene. I studied architecture at the University of Belgrade. That’s one way to go about making your pieces, but hopefully, you’re in a scenario where you can use texel density as your guide. Then I added a lot of meshes from this list. This has actively become a must-learn part of texturing when making environments. (I wasn’t always successful here but some things are just fun to model and the time just slips away.) programmer23 polycounter lvl 6. The way I authored the shader requires a 3rd UV set to keep the texture tiling properly. In between, I started Clinton Crumpler‘s UE4 Modular Environments course where I had to choose an environment to do. The first stage was to make the modular cubes (walls) and to block out the scene. Now the final step for seamless sculpting is to turn the WrapMode to 1 by going under the brush tab and inside the curve section. My name is Daniel Cangini and I am an environmental artist who currently works as a graphic designer in Rome, Italy. polycounter lvl 6. It is a really inspiring and meticulously crafted game. It is also important to figure out what texel density the scene will have so that we know what resolution the textures will be. Only after my 3rd year of college did I discover the wonderful world of programs that make game production a reality. During this week, with the knowledge of the course, I started my scene in the most modular way possible, so that I could reuse some of the elements inside the scene and fasten up the process overall. This would help me get the trims right into my assets and prevent sharper edges for my geometry. Anytime that I got stuck during the course, the classmates and Clinton were willing to help in the Discord group which saves you a lot of time otherwise spent on figuring out solutions all by yourself. Overall, the class ran for 10 weeks. Pinterest has a vast resource library that allows for quick reference gathering. I hope it will be fixed in the future updates. The course ran for ten weeks in which our first week was spent gathering references and pinpointing a specific scene to work on. The main idea was to apply the concept “less is more” to the project. This layout would be used to create the final environment level in Unreal Engine later. Flickering lights? Check out Grigoriy Karmatskiy talk about the amazing things he learned about the production of game environments. I tried to avoid making my scene feel “blocky” by making it as interesting as I could with these simple pieces. I created a Terrain Landscape by sculpting and following the contour of the platforms. The main room was the key location in the scene so first I wanted to set up the direction and angle for the source light facing the windows. Here are the modular floors and walls I made. The funny thing about CGMA courses in my experience is that you enroll thinking you have a handle on things, and then an industry titan comes along and shows you a crazy array of tools and workflows you need to check out. I’d say this is another area where having that extra accountability of showing weekly progress to a mentor helped push myself to be more productive. When exporting my modular piece, I like to use the Game Exporter in Maya – remember to check Move To Origin and set up the export path. Most of my previous work was with unique baked 0-1 textures which are less useful in larger environments, so Clinton Crumpler’s CGMA course was very useful to me for learning about working efficiently with modular elements and tiling textures. Everything is based on the grid so they will snap one to another in the engine. Then, I started mapping my UVs into the trims I made in order to achieve the texel density that I previously established, I used a Blender addon called Texel Density checker, it is an awesome addon that you can grab for free (https://gumroad.com/l/CEIOR). You can visualize your scene’s roughness in the buffer visualization. I really came away from this project with a strong understanding of Trim Sheets, which I've been using in my work ever since. With that in mind, I needed to source for references. Since the whole project was kind of a playground to test different things, I tried “Light propagation volumes” or LPV. I used quite common in industry software: The scene started out in Maya: I created all the modular pieces and made sure they fit nicely inside there. And now I’m here to share my process. A lot of the textures used RMA texture packing, which made it easier to manage the scene in the engine and also allowed me to use less texture memory with one import, compared to using three. Using NDO, I created the normal, AO and roughness maps for each mask. I continued to detail the scene. I made two Master Materials, one for assets and one for tiling meshes. The whole project took me about two and a half months. With this method, I can still unwrap the 3D train model with unique UVs and apply the baking process to paint the texture with details in Substance Painter. As for the lighting rendering of the modular asset, I would set up the Lightmap Channel by adding a second UV channel for each object in 3Ds Max before exporting them. I brought in all the different assets I wanted to combine into 3ds Max. Also, it is a good opportunity to accept cool new ideas to spice up your scene. As I started building my blockout, I realized that if I needed new pieces, I would go back to Maya to create them immediately. The more effort you put into planning out your trim sheet for your environment the easier it will be later when you’re unwrapping your meshes and texturing them. As I mentioned my modeling was pretty straightforward in Maya and I used Substance for 99% of the textures. But most importantly I wanted to make a game ready scene that could be used in a game level and go through all of the production phases needed to achieve such a goal. UE4 Sci-Fi environment, Almost … FALL 2018. I decided to go with this technique for the sole purpose of having better control over the scene inside Unreal, instead of having to jump back and forth between different software solutions just to apply minor changes. Tutorial Includes: 9+ Hours of Tutorials; Learn to Create Modular Pipes (large, medium and small size) Complete Workflow, Step-by-Step Process; Choose Basic, Pro or Complete Package; 45 Videos ; 3 Workflow Videos; Project Files (includes 32 Static Meshes … I wanted to make it relatively bright to show most of the environment and keep depot mood at the same time. Before I put a lot of thought concerning the layout of the city, I began concentrating on the type of helicopter I would use for the crash. May 25, 2018 - Sergey Tyapkin shared his experience in creating an awesome Sci-Fi modular environment pack for UE4 Marketplace. The bookcase patterns themselves were then repeated throughout. It helped me not to drop things halfway and achieve the result I was aiming for. Hello everyone, my name is Tommaso Brambilla and I graduated from IED Milano (Istituto Europeo di Design). Assault Rifle Concept. Would you like to change the currency to Pounds (£)? Since then I worked as a 3D artist for a couple of other independent studios and contract projects and recently started to work at Art Bully studio here in Belgrade. I tried several different approaches for this, such as Screen space GI, Ray traced GI, and lightmass baked GI. It contributes to the mood and overall ambiance of a scene and goes a long way in telling a story. I try to watch all the tutorials I can and read all the articles I can. To get my base images, I created some simple shapes inside the Substance Designer and apply them to the graph. Most of these assets are modular and were modeled in Maya. World of Level Design ™ Tutorials to Becoming the Best Level Designer and Game Environment Artist (since 2008) LATEST TUTORIALS. With that in mind, I started gathering as many references as possible. To begin planning, I used a workflow similar to the planning of the modular pieces to figure out the parts that I would include in my trim sheet. The Post Processing Volume can get a bit heavy, so keep that in mind when utilizing it. For the rest of my assets, I used Substance Painter. It was very challenging for me. don’t have a unique texture and are built using trims only. I am incredibly grateful for the privilege to share my workflow on my latest environment piece made at CGMA. Being able to understand and use trim textures helped me to speed up the process of creating this scene, but it also allowed me to understand the workflow behind creating complex environments. When I had first seen the photos I responded to the cool shapes and architectural detail scattered throughout. I also increased the indirect lighting quality to have more accurate results. I started allocating space in a sheet for various patterns I wanted to capture. I then chose a time period that would be personally interesting to explore. FALL 2018. I used Megascans for all the foliage. I wanted to get a better grasp of how lightmass operated in UE4. The end goal was to break down the building with as few parts as possible, and all parts should have some reusable values. I also have an MMO mouse where I bind quite a few tools and custom pie menus. A few months ago, I was a student in Clinton Crumpler’s UE4 Modular Environments class at CGMA. Archives Search About Contact. I also paid attention to how to properly place the directional light to make the most of it and to get as many interesting shadows as I could. The lights were broken down into the following groups to ease the balancing and management based on their location within the scene. In case there is a bug, in the FlippedNormals – Sci-Fi Game Environment in Blender & UE4 folder you will find a file with a multitude of keygen, a crack and a patch update. The classroom itself was easy to divide into modules thanks to the elements it consists of. AREA 26 - UE4 Modular Sci-Fi Environment "One environment per day" challenge. Next was populating the scene with secondary and tertiary details. After the model was done, I decimated the parts, UV map them and join all the UV islands in a single material, before I baked them in Marmoset. Once I finished making the main props, I then moved on to all of those secondary objects that would add more realism and storytelling to the whole scene. I kept the lighting pretty simple. The Maya grid gives you a structure to stick to which allows you to build while staying within limitations that help you connect the pieces later on. Modular environment v3. ArtStation Challenge Environment Art Tutorial – Part 3 – Building Modular Environments in UE4. Environment decals are mostly based on natural phenomena such as the cracks, water stains and puddles on the floor. Aside from quality, this is what separates your environments from others. The opacity map was created by making the text white over a black background. For the scene lighting, I used dynamic lights to speed up the process (movable lights in UE4) so there wasn’t any light-bake involved. For adding scatter meshes such as debris, trash, etc. Privacy Policy and Term of I made a blockout mesh for almost everything in the scene except very small props and smaller debris. This phase will give you a better idea of the proportions of the scene, and of how the assets would be made along the process, it will also help you understand and plan your workflow. Substance Designer is a very powerful tool all environment artists should look into. Students will begin importing their initial blockout meshes into Unreal Engine. I modified them enough to suit my needs in terms of colors, scale, or how visible the wooden ring patterns were. I used directional sunlight + skylight as the main source with several artificial lamps to light up dark corners and highlight the tram. The contrast is a great way to have more control over the blending. I’m still not very good at that trick with camera distance or Vertex normals. To ensure this, the units and grid were set up correctly in 3ds Max to correspond with Unreal Engine units (1 unit = 1 cm) and all the pieces were built on the grid with a pivot location that allows them to be manipulated easily (usually in the bottom right corner). I am fairly new to level design and have just recently obtained UE4. Additionally, for high-level polish, you can add Post Processing Volume. However, learning to be an environment artist will definitely involve using more tileable techniques, such as the trim sheet. First, I wanted to create a Castle base assault (like in the intro of Wolfenstein: The New Order) in Wolfenstein setting, but for USSR faction. I used a similar technique for the floor material. This led me to enroll in the CGMA class UE4 Modular Environments with Clinton Crumpler. I used several point lights and spotlights to light up the several areas of the scene with the Cast Shadow option turned off for optimization. They said that they created a big kitbash for a modular environment and used it to build different generators and machines. Not only would it make the book placement more interesting and organical, but it gave me a chance to learn more about the Unreal’s Blueprints. Time was also a big constraint for me as I had a long commute on a bus to work and really only had weekends and some nights to work on the scene. Making art is an iterative process and you can only reach great results by hunkering down and keeping on working. I do hope that this article helped you. Since my scene is indoors, it needed a lot of indirect bounced lighting or global illumination (GI). The project initially started within the CGMA UE4 Modular Environments course. The final layout was a combination of the real Manchester library with the addition of some custom spaces from various inspirations. Assets such as barrel, box, sack, rubbish, crate, shelf, chair, table, cable, signpost, fuse box, and decals are used discretionary to decorate the scene, so it will look rich with realistic details from every corner. It teaches the basic workflow of modern 3D props, starting from a blockout to high poly, then baking to low poly. Students will also take note if any large-scale sculpting is needed from ZBrush. It opened to me the whole new world of Game Development and Environment Art in particular. This produced the cleanest and most accurate result of reflection without the distortion from the regular baking method. - Auto-activation of point/spotlights/advanced lights I then created the asphalt high poly in ZBrush and decimated it to make the low poly. I start with bigger scale assets with no light. The project took me around 6 months to complete, it was my first time attempting to create a true game environment where the player could walk around and feel immersed (at least I hope so!). One box reflection is used and smaller reflection spheres around the room provide accurate localized reflections. An indirect lighting intensity was also increased (sun – 2, skylight – 5, lamps – from 1 to 1.5). If you liked my work, please check out my Artstation and other socials linked below. I also created a simple tessellation material inside Unreal, so that the bones have more volume and depth. How to add secondary details to your scene, such as wires/cables,signs, small props, and storytelling: Students will also spend time focusing on development of the visual story elements within the scene. I didn’t want the space to feel empty when the project was complete but rather to feel like it had been lived in. At first, things will look bad and they might stay that way for a while, however, being persistent will reward you in the end. At that time I was still naive in regard to the industry’s entry standard and struggled to land a job after graduation. I can easily tweak all the textures at once, eg: throwing on some dirt & grime or giving it a certain appearance. It can be frustrating having to once again start an asset from scratch, but looking back, I’m glad I did. In UE, The original bookshelf mesh, the additional pieces and the two BPs placed in the level. With this list, students will then use both Maya and the Unreal Engine to create a fully realized environment with portfolio screenshots. I think that you can never stop learning more about the creation of 3D environments, so my main goal is to keep pushing my skills and knowledge (acquired during this course) to become a better artist.