Nicholas Hunter prepared a step-by-step breakdown of his inlaid Ornate AK-47 made with ZBrush, Photoshop, Substance Painter, and Toolbag.

Introduction

My name is Nicholas Hunter, and I am currently a 3D artist working in the training simulation industry.  I’ve been making 3D models since late 2014 when I took a class at the University of Central Florida, and realized how much I enjoy the work. Since then, I’ve recently gotten my Master’s Degree in Interactive Entertainment at the Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy, (FIEA) and found a job in my career field. My job isn’t much of a creative outlet, so my nights and weekends are spent on personal projects like this Ornate AK-47. I made a whole lot of mistakes along the way with this project, and I’ve learned a lot from them. I’ll go over a good number of them, and I hope you can learn some things to save yourself time and headache in the process.

Ornate AK-47

Selecting The Project

I want to make things that people enjoy looking at. To stand out from the rest, the project needs to be unique and well executed. I try to hold myself to these requirements when working on something for fun. A little over a year ago, I was working on an AKM rifle, and a Glock 17 pistol. There are literally hundreds of other artists out there with those on their portfolios, right? To stand out from them, I did a lot of research to find customized parts for each weapon, and spent a lot of time with ZBrush and its Live Boolean features – we are very close friends now.

I have a passion for meticulous detail. This has gotten me into some rough spots at school in the past, where I selected projects that are out of scope, and worked myself into exhaustion trying to meet the deadline… and then failing to do so. The AKM and Glock 17 are still unfinished; someday soon, they will get the bakes and texturing they deserve.

Why are they unfinished? Because I found something even more demanding of my time and sanity, Wesley Tippetts’ Ornate AK-47 concept art. After seeing this thing, how could I resist the temptation to model it?!

Reference

I looked through photos of ornate wheel lock guns for hours on Google and Pinterest, trying to find any that had elements used in Wesley’s concept. Eventually, I just asked him, and he led me to this decorated rifle. Later that day, I found this Heinrich Barella double barrel shotgun with a few other details on it as well. For the magazine and dog-spring cover, I searched through classic paintings of deer hunts and found works by Paul De Vos.

Workflow Considerations

With modern tools, there are many ways to get something done. Ornate details can be sculpted by hand, assisted by alphas and the deformation tab in ZBrush, boolean operations, and all of that can get baked down from a high poly. Or they could be stamped on in Substance Painter after making an alpha and then use anchor points to drive generators. Some of these options require UVing a base mesh for the high poly, others can be done with projection, and some can wait until texturing.  Selecting your approach depends on how much time you have, destructive vs non-destructive workflow, and what the end goal for your mesh is.

From the start, I knew this gun would be looked at from every angle. I would need interesting surface features where possible and as much topology as necessary to capture all the details. Because of this, I didn’t focus on dense topology in any specific area but rather made all the topology necessary to capture the silhouette of the weapon from all angles. Considering the curvature of this weapon and its number of parts, I knew the triangle count was going to be high – the final count was just over 40k.

Diving In Modeling

I am always intimidated by my projects. The most difficult part of any project for me is to actually get started – I overthink the process and get demoralized when things aren’t going as expected. But all of those feelings disappear when I start moving around verts and remind myself that control + z is always there. With little more than the concept art to work with, I opened Maya, imported Wesley’s art as an image plane, created a cube, and started working. Looking at the concept and having a bit of knowledge of how modern and antique guns are built, I broke down the rifle into its basic parts and modeled them individually. Making it even easier, complicated forms were broken down into their basic shapes, then booled and dynameshed together in ZBrush.

The final blockout ready for more complex boolean operations:

It’s much easier to model things like the front sights if you break them down into their base shapes and take advantage of booleans and dynameshing.

Most of the flash pan and wheel housing is symmetrical, but the screw tab on the left isn’t. Following the same concepts as I mentioned above, I just made a new mesh for the left screw tab and merged it with the rest of the wheel housing later.

With the AKM Rifle project I mentioned earlier, I not only had a good set of dimensions for the width and other proportions for this project, but I also had a couple of parts I could reuse. I decided the rear sight was too angular, so I made some curvy shapes and used them as tools to boolean out new cuts to the base of the sight.

After finalizing the proportions of the side plates and thinking about how all these parts would fit together in the real world, I booled out the depth and ejection port, then cleaned up the topology and creased the edges. This allowed me to make fine adjustments later on for how deep I wanted to sit the dog-arm, spring, and flash ZBrush for sculpting.

• Inlay

Early on, I worried a lot about how I was actually going to do the inlay. Should I paint the pieces on by hand in Substance Painter, or into the UVs with Photoshop? And then it hit me – booleans, duh. Using live surface and quad draw, I traced them out onto the stock, then extruded in and out. I creased the edges, smoothed the whole thing, and brought them into ZBrush to run a subtract and intersection boolean operation.  The stock you see here is the final result after cutting away all the parts for the side plates, upper receiver, trigger guard, and bolt carrier.

The concept image is an orthographic shot of the right side of the weapon, so I had to get creative with everything else. And, I couldn’t really make out all the fine details of the wheel housing, due to the resolution of the image. To get something nice looking without having to sculpt by hand, I chose to use an ornate insert mesh pack. I had to do some cleanup of the insert meshes so that they would close holes and dynamesh properly. But once I did, they were much more flexible in their application of subtractive booleans and easier to deform using the matchmaker brush, for the curved surface of the wheel housing and charging handle.

• Rail

To achieve the contiguous waves and ripples in the rail, I box modeled the base shape, smoothed it, and then laid out the UVs without splitting any of the edges. I then doodled a line pattern in Photoshop and used that as an alpha to project a mask in ZBrush. From there, it was a matter of using the inflate slider and some polishing.

• Mural

The mural was a challenge and would have been a serious pain if I didn’t have all the reference photos. On the real world gun, each side has subtle differences. Sure, each side has a deer and a dragon, but some plants have extra leaves, and shading might be different. To save myself time, I chose to just mirror the 3D version, apart from the eagle’s head and crown.

In the blockout phase, I made a rounded shape that would serve as the base for this part, while paying attention to the fact that I would need to eventually extrude and pull out some parts for the silver caps on either end. I then smoothed this shape and UVd it. I took those UVs into Photoshop and laid out the reference images. This is where things started to suck. I had to use a mix of puppet warp and content aware tools to straighten out and blend all of the reference photos so they appeared flat. I moved them into the UVs and began tracing the masks over them.

The first mask (in all black) was used to extract a shell in ZBrush from that base shape. And by some absolute miracle of Pixilogic’s genius, the UVs were preserved in this process! That meant that I could go back into photoshop and trace over the finer line detail, which resulted in the second mask (line drawings). I brought that into Zbrush, masked by alpha, then played with the inflate and surface noise tools until I got something I liked.

• Magazine

The magazine was a very inelegant process, that I had to brute force. First, I took the concept art, and with some filters and levels adjustments, I made a mask that I projected into the base shape of the magazine within ZBrush. I then, very lightly, used the inflate tool to get some shapes down. Once that was done, I used the 3-tone, hand-drawn alpha, as a height mask to offset the inaccuracies of the first image-based mask. From then on, it was a matter of hand sculpting everything, and breaking all the pieces apart so that they could be used for an ID map bake. That process is best demonstrated in Mike Pavlovich’s video, Chest Armor Breakup. The backgrounds were made in Maya with box modeling and creasing, to create that nice contour line and depth from the concept image.

Retopology

Because this weapon is so curvy, non-planar faces were a lot to clean up, as well as closing off edge loops for controlling polycount. Be sure to check your surfaces from extreme angles and manually split quads that are defaulting in the wrong direction. In my experience, they almost always default in the wrong way, so give it extra scrutiny. You don’t want your silhouette to be ruined.

It’s pretty embarrassing to show you my UVs, but I guess I may as well explain the logic behind them. Because this weapon isn’t symmetrical and I wanted to bake AO, none of my UVs are mirrored. On top of that, I wanted to create near-seamless wood grain. So, I chose to encapsulate as much of the stock and foregrip into a single contiguous mesh as possible. I tried breaking off the plates, barrel, tail cover, and emblems into their own submeshes, but their topology wasn’t looking good where they intersected with the wood. This approach also required a lot of topology for each emblem, so that I could capture the silhouette of the shape properly.

My final choice resulted in a large, odd-shaped UV shell for the stock. This UV shell set the texel density of the entire project, resulting in a lot of wasted space for the magazine and foregrip materials. I could have put the dog-arm, wheel housing, and other sub-meshes into the magazine UVs to fill space, but it wouldn’t have made a difference in texel density, because I chose to keep the stock and side plates together in a single mesh.

Baking

I pushed my highs and lows into Marmoset Toolbag 3, set everything to mikk/xnormal space, and built my baking groups. I really can’t give the team at Marmoset enough praise for this software. Being able to paint cage offsets and skewing is a huge help in the process. And with recent updates, now we can finally bring in our own cage? Fantastic.

Once all my bakes were done, I took them into photoshop to clean up any small errors. A great way to check for errors in your bakes is to plug them all (the bakes)  into your low poly mesh material in TB3, then crank the metallic to 1, and the roughness to 0.2ish. This will produce a cloudy-mirror finish to the surface. If you see any irregularities, it’s most likely one of a few possibilities:

• Make sure your high poly mesh has enough topology. Decimating it too much will cause artifacts.
• Make sure your high poly mesh has no normal map plugged in. Any normal map in its material will be transferred in a bake (crazy, right?)
• Some edges in the high poly may be hard/soft, and not playing well with the other surrounding edges. I normally harden all of the edges in Maya as an easy fix.
• Sometimes ZBrush decimation will fail to hold very sharp corners that are built with one edge. This typically comes from sharp corners of boolean operations. You can counter this by dynameshing / Zremshing the mesh, and projecting the sharp detail back in before you decimate.

The last error is what’s causing the chipped flakes in the render above. Because the inlay and wood have to be perfectly flush with each other, dynameshing and projecting resulted in obvious grooves between the 2 high poly meshes and running those operations at higher subdivisions and iterations were either crashing ZBrush or taking hours to complete. It was faster to just use the decimated ones, and fix the errors in photoshop with the spot healing brush.

Texturing in Substance Painter

Before this project, I knew a fair amount about Substance Painter, but I had never really taken a deep dive into building materials from the ground up. To prepare for this part, I purchased two tutorials: Chamfer Zone’s Ultimate Weapon Tutorial, and Simon Fuchs’ Handgun Tutorial.  In addition to that, I watched just about every video Allegorithmic has on youtube, since probably mid-2017. Yes, that took a lot of time. The wood I built is a blend between the two tutorials, and everything else is just attention to detail, and applying what I learned about the software. I will say, the difference between 4k and 8k textures is night and day, and exporting 3 materials at 8k is going to take you the better part of 2 hours, so find something else to do in that time.

Rendering

Beware of compression! My initial renders of this project had a solid black background and no alpha on the original. When I uploaded to Artstation, the compression made for some incredibly ugly pixelation where my mesh met the black background. I went back, changed some lighting, exported TGA with alpha, and created a background with a gradient and some lens dust noise. This helped conceal the compression and provided a less distracting contrast between the subject and the background.

Conclusion

This rifle represented everything I wanted in a personal project: hard surface, ornate details, sculpting, weapon/prop. I learn more with every project, and this one taught more than anything before. I got a chance to test baking methods, the limitations of UV islands and smoothing groups, where contiguous meshes work best in low poly modeling, and all the subtle nuances with tri-planar projection in Substance Painter. I’m stepping away from production modeling for my next few projects, and focusing on some 3D printing. It’s going to be so nice to not worry about retopo for a while!

Nicholas Hunter, 3D Artist

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Post tags: 3d art, 3D Modeling, booleans, gamedev, indiedev, prop art, Substance Painter, texturing, weapon, weapon art, ZBrush

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Bo Chicoine talked about the place of texturing in the modern pipelines, compared Substance Painter and Photoshop, and overviewed the advantages Game Art Institute provides its students with.

Introduction

My name is Bo Chicoine, I’m 34 and I’ve had a somewhat varied career so far working for Animation and Gaming companies on a range of projects from Indie Games to internationally-acclaimed 3D TV-shows. I’m currently a 3D Environment Artist at Black Shamrock, working on an unannounced AAA game for PC/Console in Dublin, Ireland.

I can trace my interest in 3D back to my childhood, as my family moved to the UK from the US before I was born, we lived in a remote part of the highlands in Scotland surrounded by mountains, forests, rivers…  I was lucky enough to have access to a Macintosh when I was a kid, so during the long summers, I would spend countless hours exploring outside and then playing games until my natural curiosity drove me to start digging through their code and graphics and just pulling them apart to find out how they were made. I think I was about ten when I discovered my first sprite-sheet. I began playing with level-editors for first-person shooters and getting inspired by the atmospheric nature of FPS games like Half-Life and Marathon. I loved the idea that players can have an amazing experience without leaving the comfort of their home. Shortly after I discovered Milkshape, it was a 3D program and I remember just being in awe of the possibilities, spending countless hours learning how to model, texture and even rig. It was the perfect introduction into the world of 3D, and I went on to study it more on a Computer Arts course in Abertay University, Dundee (The home of Rockstar games and the creator of Lemmings).

Around this time I made a DeviantArt account and began just posting things, from 3D props and sketches to fully rendered worlds, anything I could think of really. After graduating I started engaging with the community more and trying to build a following. I remember making friends with a big influencer on the site who regularly recommended artists to be featured, it was through them that I got my first recommendation and was featured in a “daily deviation”. Literally I went from having a few hundred views to thousands overnight, it was like having a big door open up in front of my eyes and as a result, I ended up getting freelance jobs which really launched my career. Needless to say, I’ve been chasing that feeling ever since, pushing myself to improve my skills and really get the images out of my head and onto the screen.

Discovering Game Art Institute

Barber Chair produced during Bootcamp at GAI

I first heard about the course through a friend of mine, he showed me some talks by Ryan Kingslien and I was instantly struck by how he spoke about art and motivation in a really inclusive and approachable way. At the time I had been struggling with pushing through a barrier in my skills, and the course seemed like a perfect opportunity to “level-up”, so in August 2018 I joined the Environment-Art Bootcamp in order to learn from the pros. The classes were great for keeping me focused and to just put in the hours needed, Ryan is an amazing motivator and really knows how to inspire people to do the best work they can, it’s like holding a light up in dark room, providing feedback and resources but also helping change the way you think about art and connecting it to your inner thoughts and feelings to really drive you. It’s a powerful course.

Especially today where we are often bombarded by the sheer volume of high-quality work on Instagram and ArtStation it’s easy to feel lost, so the course was great for drawing a line in the sand and getting a reality-check about your skills and where you stand as an artist. In particular, the weekly meetups were great as they push you to be accountable. Getting to ask mentors directly for feedback, tips, and tricks help a lot, even more so when it’s personalized to you and what you are working on. There is a lot of resources available as part of the course, many hours of knowledge and talks but being able to show people specifically what you are doing and ask for help directly is such a valuable benefit. It’s a community of artists all dedicated to improving and contributing that makes Game Art Institute such a powerful thing to be a part of. I really can’t recommend the course enough.

Importance of Textures Nowadays

I think textures really give substance to the world we live in, whereas in the past, a texture was just something that added color to objects (to stop it being grey and boring). Now they are much more integrated with the 3D model and lighting, the way lights react on the surface of an object is much more routed in Physics. I think this has caused a bit of a divide in artists who prefer hand-painting the specific locations of wear and tear, over others who cherish the randomness and “happy accidents”.

Personally, I believe the real world doesn’t appear the way we expect it to in our minds, have you ever looked closely at a photograph of nature? There are rule-breaking tangents and strange optical-illusions all over the place! As artists, we feel the need to control every aspect of this randomness but doing so often pushes things into hyper-realism which can look strange. Good procedural materials which harness the logic of nature are helping combat this more and more. Which ironically frees the artists up by giving them more time to make artistic decisions.

The use of scanning tech really depends on the project – if you have real-world examples readily available then it can save a lot of time to just scan them but most of the time you will still need time to process the scans and you lose the ability to tweak it for the needs of the project. I think it’s faster and cheaper to just develop a shader in Substance Designer (based off of strong reference) Artists such as Daniel Thiger are proving that you can get near-perfect (if not perfect!) results using purely Substance whilst still retaining the ability to tweak it easily. Not to mention being able to integrate materials with the meshes they’re put onto; meaning dirt into corners or scratches on exposed areas happen automatically.

In a production, environment time is a premium and being able to rapidly iterate and re-use materials across different assets can be a massive time-saver, not to mention the increasing use of Real-time Ray Tracing in games and film, pushing realism standards up and increasing demand for more realistic results.

Substance Painter or Photoshop?

I remember listening to a talk by Naughty Dog environment artist Jacob Norris (see the video below) and he said that studios the world-over are starting to adopt Substance Painter. But it’s not like it’s without reason: Photoshop (PS) and Painter share a lot of similar tools for painting using brush strokes, masking areas and using layers to build up a texture are also quite similar. It’s no secret that SP borrowed a lot of functionality from PS, turning on and off layers and creating custom brushes by tweaking the size, rotation stroke length, flow, etc. All of this is basic photo-editing stuff you would expect to see in a digital painting software solution, but where SP has the edge is in how it deals directly with 3D meshes.

Being able to bake maps, preview textures in the viewport, drag and drop materials, create smart materials, even painting over several layers at once in a single stroke – it’s this integration and understanding of how textures are used for games and film that make the difference. I still use Photoshop occasionally for very simple tasks like making alphas for ZBrush or logos, in terms of design it’s still pretty superior with its grid-based vector creation systems, post-work on renders like adding dust-particles is useful too, but otherwise, it doesn’t really compare.

If we’re talking about purely texturing a 3D model, then I go straight into SP without thinking twice. Once I’ve finished a model I import the low and high meshes into SP, bake out the mesh maps (AO, normal, IDs, etc.) then I can start applying different smart materials to see how it looks. Projecting textures in a 3D space using triplanar mapping and adding a buildup layer of dirt and scratches within seconds. It allows me to get a good sense of how well the textures will work on the mesh quickly, moving lights around and even adding some post-processing like Depth of Field or Ray Tracing without leaving the software are a massive bonus.

Recent Updates of SP

The biggest change recently was probably in the last update, they added proper displacement and tessellation into the mix, so not only can we change the silhouette of a model using materials but we can essentially “paint” forms, a bit like sculpting in ZBrush. I work a lot with tessellation and displacement, so being able to see them working in SP means I can go from authoring shaders to texturing without leaving the Allegorithmic toolset. This is also bridging the gap between modeling/sculpting and texturing which is handy for art directors or artists looking to make large changes or prototype quickly. Other tools in SP which are really handy are stamping of details like normal extrusions, nuts and bolts, panels, wires, etc. Previously you would have to model them and then bake it down in the normal map, now you can just stamp it directly on. They recently added dynamic stamping too, which is essentially like 2D projecting decals, it’s non-destructive so you can make changes to the geometry underneath without affecting the texturing too much. Painting and editing multiple texture-sets simultaneously is something we’ve been waiting a long time for, I think we’ll start to see some very beautiful and unique ideas appearing very soon as a result. This is mainly down to artists having less to worry about in terms of tech, so they can just focus more on the art side of things.

Overall, SP’s ability to set up an “environment” for texturing entire swatches of assets quickly while maintaining consistency is really its main strength. It’s probably best suited to hard-surface texturing because it really handles corners and cavities quite well. I recommend using lots of generators and masked layers to control the level of dirt/grim as well. It’s one of the most satisfying things you can do in SP, with very impressive results.

Texturing Barber Chair

I was lucky I found some really nice photographs of the actual chair from different angles so I was able to model it and check to make sure the proportions were correct. I ended up taking some of the photographs into Photoshop and actually painting over sections in bright colors to work out how to break the model apart into bite-sized chunks. It just makes it more approachable. I always start with a blockout of the basic forms as tweaking the proportions at this stage is much faster and less complicated. Once the base was done, and I was ready to start texturing, I brought the whole mesh into Substance Painter and did my baking there.

Photos:

The glossy wood was quite straightforward. I gathered some reference for it and then started layering up different base materials from Substance source. Tweaking the diffuse colors and then adding some dirt and dust was quite quick to do. Once I had something I was happy with, I started working on the metal buttons and leather materials in a similar way, just layering them up. I found tweaking one, meant the others had to also be tweaked, it’s rare that perfecting one material doesn’t have some kind of knock-on effect. And testing them all in different lighting conditions really helps to understand if they are working as intended. It can be quite striking to see the reflections of metal completely change (and the color too!) just by moving from a forest HRDI environment to, say, the inside of the house. Being flexible and testing different things is really important at this stage I’d say.

For the leather, I knew that the shapes of the folds and buttons would need to be consistent across the whole model, so I opted to do them all at once as a texture pass. I also knew that SP has many great ways of adding dirt and grime so I focused on researching how that type of leather is made and even tried making it in Marvellous Designer, by cutting out shapes, stitching them together, pulling them over a soft-body shape. I tried lots of different approaches to mimic the real-world process. But in the end, I went for a more methodical approach. The final leather material was done in Substance Designer, I spent some hours working out how to make that iconic triangular chesterfield “V” shape, with the right blend of nodes I was able to make it procedurally which felt really satisfying. Once I had that looking right, I focused on the smaller surface properties, again previewing them in different HDR lighting conditions really helped to cross-reference them with real-world scenarios to get the best overall look. I find it’s one of the biggest mistakes people can make in PBR – not testing in different lighting conditions- because the final result is just so much more realistic. That and asking others to look at it, especially if you have a large network like the game art institute, other artists looking critically at your work just helps so much in defeating tunnel-vision.

Adding Dirt & Other Touches in SP

I use a lot of masks that I get from baking the meshes to control the dirt of my textures in SP. Like cavity maps, ambient occlusion, position, thickness, and normal maps. The layer system in SP is just like using Photoshop but in 3D, these all work with the Smart materials in SP to control how much dirt appears and how far into the nooks and crannies it goes. It’s fully procedural too – which means you can tweak it to perfection if you want without having to rebake or spend time painting things by hand. You can still paint by hand if you want to, of course, and in fact that last final pass usually means doing this just to fix any small annoying things which just look “wrong” even if it’s technically correct. We’re still making artwork after all.

Gather as much reference as you can early on. All the tools in the world won’t make a well textured model work if the foundation isn’t solid, and with that in mind, I would expect to make lots of changes as you progress through it. Try to keep things as procedural as possible, for example – if you want a large scratch across the side of your model, setting up scratches using a generator and offsetting the tiling so that it appears where you want is better than hand-painting it as the end result will just look more realistic in the context of the whole asset. If you’re making a series of props that all need to look similar, then think about setting up a smart material that you can apply across them. This will save you time later in repeating work over and over.

If you’re working on a hard-surface sci-fi model, you can set up the primary, secondary and tertiary colors in your design using layer masks, meaning you can tweak them all at once and see the results instantly across the whole model. It’s a really clean way of working and will help you get to the final result quicker. So yeah, stick to good reference and check your work under different lighting conditions constantly – being able to sweep and rotate a model under a spotlight is really a very powerful way of measuring how well it’s reacting to light, but be prepared to tweak everything again because unless you’re rendering it entirely in Substance Painter, then it might look different again in a new environment.

Perfecting the Look of the Material

I usually start with a simple object like a Rounded Cylinder, Sphere or even a Plane and start building up the basic shapes and forms that make up the overall look of the material. The normal, height and ao are the first things I work on. Then afterward I do the roughness and Albedo last. I do this with a strong reference so that I can see at a glance if I’m on the right track and I aim to make things as procedural as possible, so – rather than importing a black and white map – I’ll use the shape node and vector warping to push it into the shape I want.

One of the important things to note about a procedural workflow is the random seed generators. It’s easy to trick ourselves into thinking its random when you might have just lucked out, and when it comes time to recompile or change the seed value, things can look way off. I often play with the seed values, scrubbing through seeds will give you a much better indication of what your material is really doing. Another important thing I pay attention to is the timings, how long it takes to compile your texture will not only speed up how long it takes to make it, but the end result will be more optimized too. This isn’t as essential if you’re baking the textures onto a mesh and exporting them, but it makes iterating faster and less troublesome if there are fewer steps between working and seeing the results. You’re better off spending a little more time at the start to set things up properly and then make that time back later with a hundred small adjustments to perfect it.

Working in a linear fashion in terms of layout is good too, I usually start with basic shapes at the on the left and then smaller details get added in as I move linearly towards the root nodes. This way of mapping out helps when you can group them into features like scratches, divots, cracks, etc. because you can see at a glance how the material works and it has the added benefit of separating everything into easily accessible masks, which are super useful when working on the color and roughness of specific features.

Overall I’d say the biggest pitfalls are when you’re first trying to work out how to set up a material, as different parts of a shader can become interwoven or break the time paradox. It’s very easy to do and can get very complicated and messy quickly. Sometimes I’ll have two or three attempts just messing around with different texture nodes in different ways until I settle on what works, then I’ll go back and create it again from scratch in the right way. It’s very satisfying to know that a material looks as good on the inside as it is on the outside, but sometimes if you need to get things done in a hurry, then it’s knowing when to spend that time, it doesn’t matter if you have a perfect material but the project doesn’t ship because it took too long to develop. So for personal work, it’s fine but there is a balance there.

Bo Chicoine, 3D Environment Artist at Black Shamrock

Interview conducted by Kirill Tokarev

© Daria for 80lvl, 2019. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 3d art, GAI, game art institute, gamedev, indiedev, materials, Photoshop, Substance Designer, Substance Painter, Textures, texturing

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Alessandra Astrino did a detailed breakdown of her stylized asset Forest Chest inspired by Heroes of the Storm.

Hello, everyone   My name is Alessandra Astrino, I’m 23 years old, and I am from Milan, Italy. I’m currently a second-year student at Event Horizon School.

I graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Brera, Milan, and that is where my approach to 3D art began 3 years ago when I took a Blender course. I fell in love with 3D after that course so I decided to focus my studies on it further.

Forest Chest

At first, I decided to model this concept because I really liked the idea of an owl’s shiny glowing eyes. My initial plan was just to do some practice and improve my sculpting skills, but when I was about to finish the high-poly version I was so happy about the results that I decided to do the low poly textured version, too.

When I start a new project I try to find as many references as possible to have a clear idea of what I’ll be working on. I have a folder full of references that I have collected over many years.

When I decide to create a stylized asset I usually start with a solid base made with Maya which is then exported it to ZBrush to start sculpting.

For this model though I worked only with ZBrush because it was a school assignment. It was quite challenging for me since I had to use a new workflow but it turned out very interesting.

Modeling

As soon as the shape satisfies me I start adding details to all the subtools gradually. I try to differentiate them by using different brushes. Claybuildup, Dam Standard, Trim dynamic and the brushes from the Orb Package (made by Michael Vincente) are the ones I use the most.

To make the wood grains I mostly used crackOrb and Dam Standard, then Orb Flatten Edge.

Owl

For the Stone Owl, I got inspired by Heroes of the Storm models. I tried to follow the way they make the cracks on their statues. To achieve this I used some OrbCrack brushes, then made the edges sharp with Orb Flatten Edge brush.

Then I used Clay brush with alpha to simulate erosion and age.

Silhouette

I think, that the silhouette is especially important for a stylized asset.

When I start modeling, I keep changing material to a flat black one to see the silhouette. If it’s recognizable in various viewports then it’s on the right track.

After modeling I exported the mesh to Maya to proceed with retopology and finally start working on texturing with Substance Painter.

Texturing

My workflow in Substance Painter starts with baking the mesh. Thanks to a good high-poly I usually manage to get very nice results immediately.

As soon as I am sure there are no artifacts in the bake I begin the first round of texture blocking, usually with smart materials such as Standard Bone Stylized.

As a starting point, I really on using 3dExtrude that can lead me to some very interesting initial results, especially with a very detailed high-poly.

For the wood grains, I tinkered with edge wear masks until I got an acceptable effect.

Then I added some light generators on the borders to make the “worn wood” effect.

As a finishing touch, I hand-painted some layers to improve the final look.

Lastly, to exalt the contrasts and make the texturing more interesting I used Curvature and Ambient Occlusion maps.

I made a simple fill layer with the Curvature map as a base color.

I changed the blending mode to Overlay and tweaked the opacity until I was satisfied.

Then goes the same thing for the AO map but with blending mode changed to Multiply instead.

For the Stone Owl, I followed the same steps as for the wood, using the generated maps from the bake.

For the shiny eyes, I used a slightly different workflow.

Emissives are always very fun to do even though you have to use them with caution since they can make very annoying and flat effects.

To avoid this I worked in different fill layers with just a base color and emissive.

I started with the darkest emissive orange light and then shaded with other color gradients: yellow and sparkling white.

Finally, I painted a fake light around the eyes to enhance those fantastic shiny gems.

Render & Lighting

For rendering, I used Marmoset Toolbag as my plan here was to make very captivating images.

I used two types of lights: key light and rim light.

The key light is the primary source of light in the scene, it’s the one that casts the shadows so it’s crucial to find the best direction to enhance the details of the model.

The rim light is important too because it takes care of the contrasts that we see on the asset borders.

There are also other support lights with low intensity to enhance the main lights.

Both the support rimlight and the spotlight are light blue. The model doesn’t have any blue hues, so I added this color in the lights.

The last step was composition in Photoshop with some contrast adjustments and a blueish background addition.

Links

• Artstation
• Instagram.

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Post tags: 3d art, 3d sculpting, gamedev, hand-sculpting, indiedev, marmoset toolbag, prop, prop art, prop design, Substance Painter, texturing, ZBrush

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Bart de Vries prepared a breakdown of his stylized scene Desecrated Temple: sculpting and texturing different parts of the temple, establishing color and working on the presentation. Read his previous article about a Wild West environment here.

Introduction

Hey! My name is Bart de Vries and I’m a 3D Artist at elite3d. Since the last interview where I mentioned that at work I was mainly doing realistic art (Blood & Truth has finally been released!), I’ve had the opportunity to switch to a stylized project! I’m quite happy with the change and I get a chance to explore character art as well as environment/props. This project has taught me a lot in terms of color shape and different workflows to approach asset creation which I definitely put to use in the Temple environment.

Desecrated Temple

Concept by Emilie V.F

Planning

The Temple itself was one of the most time-consuming pieces as it has a lot of different pieces. I broke it all down into its individual components in my blockout stage. I’ve tried to optimize these pieces while saving the most detailed and unique ones.

Here you can see some beautiful production art illustrating how many different pieces I had to make and how I organized them. This excel sheet got updated throughout the process and is nicely color-coded for easy viewing. (Not all of the comments on these assets turned out to be correct but I have not updated their descriptions).

 Production

All assets in pink are made and mapped from a horizontal tiling trim sheet. The yellow parts are uniquely unwrapped, share one texture and are mirrored/duplicated. The green pieces are individually textured assets and mirrored to the other side. The skull in the middle is only mirrored in its UVs (2:1 Texture) and shares its texture with the two swirly pieces in red. The red parts are uniquely textured assets with the doors being a special case. The left door is a half-mirrored right door. The top part of the left door shares its textures with the right door while the bottom part is unique to the left door.

Light blue assets are tiling textures and the floor is a combination of a tiling texture and modular piece. The first half-circle step is a unique asset but is duplicated and mirrored to create the second step. 

These secondary buildings received different treatment from the main piece as these were less important and the focus of the viewer shouldn’t be on them. They were mapped with three different tiling textures: Brick, Plaster, and Moss. Besides these, there were also the pieces in pink that share the same trim sheet as the main building but with a color variation. After they were mapped I added some extra geometry on the edges to break the silhouette a bit.

The red lines represent the mesh decals I used to get some definition on the edges. With these objects being further away from the camera I didn’t want to spend the time to sculpt the edges and used a common technique to roughen up the corners of the meshes. 

This texture was created by sculpting the edges of a cube and baking them on flattened out strips of geometry. I painted out the mask for the edges – then you can place this geometry slightly apart from the original building mesh.

The stairs themselves are built from only a few pieces: a high-res sculpt of 5 steps and two bricks for on the side. The baked low-poly you can see in the top right corner is duplicated a couple of times and deformed to form the stairs you can see in the bottom of the image. To make it less uniform in the final scene there is a bit of moss vertex painting going on together with rocks and ivy. (Don’t mind the stretching, it’s not visible in the in-engine screenshots.)

The patterns that I made for the various parts of the temple are all sculpted in ZBrush with a very simple workflow of a basic blockout and then trimming away the edges with some TrimDynamic and Orb_Flatten to make it crisper.

Some of the more ornate elements have their own unique geometry such as the corner pieces (Mustache Man).

The roots were placed using my blockout mesh as a live surface in Maya and utilizing curves and QuickPipe to create them. This was a tedious process and not very flexible. Something to look into for the future.

Colors & Presentation

For this project, I used a different approach in terms of asset production. I wanted to get the colors and lighting in its best position possible to absolutely sell the environment. In my previous projects, I always did the texturing in one go after the low-poly and bakes. I realized that I spend a lot of time having to redo the textures throughout the progress of the scenes because either the lighting or my goals changed over the course of the project.

This time I decided to finish all of the main assets during the baking stage before progressing to the textures and lighting. I felt comfortable that I could at least get through all of the high-res and low/bake stages without much difficulty for this project.

The majority of the time on this project was spent on getting everything ready to start the texturing process. I spent about 3.5 months outside of my full-time job getting all my assets to a low-poly baked stage and final 2 weeks to finish it all (including textures, lighting, and presentation).

This approach was both a timesaver and something that dragged me down. Staying focused on the project while not having a pretty image to work on for months did test my motivation at times.

Picking my colors was relatively easy as I was able to lean a lot on the amazing concept work while expanding in the areas that were less clear. My approach was to create some basic first pass textures on all the assets by using smart materials.

I managed to get this all done in a short weekend with clever use of these smart materials. Because I had been consistent with my sculpt, simple and not too detailed, my bakes were consistent too and I only needed to tweak the materials a little bit per asset to make them work.

When I finished the first pass of the textures I went to add some lighting to the scene so I had a clearer goal as to which colors needed some changes. The scene is completely dynamically lit and like last time (the Wild West scene) I used the Unreal Lighting Academy videos for reference.

Here you can see the first pass on the background and some more shadow volumes above the bottom part of the scene. I started to do some more texture passes here to make sure the colors were all working together.

In the bottom right you have some ferns and bushes that make use of a different color texture that is more blue/green than the other ferns and palm trees in the scene. The main ones are more saturated and yellow/green. Although this may not be the most efficient solution it did help bring the focus more towards the temple and lessen the amount of attention the foliage was taking.

Besides these things I also recreated the post-processing material made by Christoffer Radsby described here in his article for 80 Level.

This fog offset also made sure that the foreground objects were more readable than the background bringing the focus to the right place.

In short, to get all the colors to work well together there was a lot of trial and error. I had Substance Painter open on one screen where I made little tweaks and the Unreal scene open on the other screen to check if the new tweaks made more sense.

The whole scene was tied together with some post-processing using a ColorLookupTable (LUT). This helped me greatly in trying to sell the scene as a whole and making some final color changes.

For the god-rays in the back, I followed this tutorial by Dave Wilson:

Challenges

The biggest challenge for this project was by far the background. I was contemplating how to makes this from the start of the project. There were a few options that I considered such as:

• Painting the background and using a parallax-based workflow
• World Machine (or an equivalent) to create a terrain
• Use basic meshes and simplified foliage to fake trees

My painting skills need some serious work so I decided not to go with the first option. I also have limited knowledge of World Machine so that one was also not the best choice for a portfolio project. This meant that I decided to go with the last option with a lot of simplified foliage meshes and a lot of fog and blur. In the end, I think this is still the worst part of the environment and definitely something that I can improve upon.

Conclusion

This project was a lot of fun for me! I learned a lot of new things which I was instantly able to use in my professional work.

I tried to create a new habit for myself where I would work on the project for about two hours in the morning before going to work. I realized I had more motivation to do personal work before a full day at the office rather than after. So this project was made during these early morning hours except for some of the last weeks where I put almost all of my spare time into it. Having a clear goal and my excel sheet from the beginning helped a lot to keep me going. There was always something to do and I was never stuck in that phase of ‘What should I do next’ as I had already broken it down into smaller components at the start of the project. Having solid planning and working from a concept was great for me.
Don’t forget to check out Emilie V. F. ArtStation as well if you’re looking for some cool environment concepts! She was kind enough to let me work from her concept and gave some final pointers to the environment on how she intended some of the pieces to work.

Thank you for reading!

Bart de Vries, 3D Artist at elite3d

Interview conducted by Kirill Tokarev

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Post tags: 3d art, building, environments, gamedev, indiedev, structure, stylized, Substance Painter, temple, ZBrush

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Derek Kruk talked about taking CGMA course Organic World Building and broke down the scene created during his training.

Introduction

Hello, my name is Derek Kruk and I am currently working as a 3D Artist at Wayfair in Boston, MA. I originally come from Columbus, Ohio. I studied at Ohio University, in Game Development. During my time at university, I interned at The Mill, and Jaunt VR as a 3D Artist. From there, I worked at a small company called The Soap Collective, working on a VR experience called Beyond Tokyo. My journey into digital art started in high school, when I was making some short video productions, and then steered more toward digital art when I arrived at University. My love for 3D only started to grow more while I was there, and continued as I interned for The Mill and Jaunt VR.

Taking a CGMA Course

I decided to join this particular CGMA course because I wanted to learn how to create organic environments. Up until this class, I had worked on hard surface environments and props, but I wanted to learn more about industry standards and practices when it came to organic environments. My goals were definitely met after taking the class. The class instructor was Anthony Vaccaro, he shared and provided feedback during the class that allowed me to understand how to make interesting and believable organic environments.

Environment

The way I started planning my environment was by gathering reference. It started by deciding the place, time period, season, and scale. My decision to choose ancient Greece was inspired by Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, that had just been released before the class started. Due to that, I used a lot of reference from Odyssey and looked up many photos from rural Greece and ancient Greek architecture. The start of the layout was first done as a 2D overhead view to get the idea of where key points of interest would be placed.

Blockout

To start the block out phase it was starting with very basic shapes of different aspects of the scene in Maya. The idea was to first make sure that the scene layout would make sense to the player. It was important to make sure that the player would understand where to go within the scene, with so many different models and shapes it was important to make sure that the temple, and bridge, were key points of interest of the scene and you could lead the player’s eye to understand how to get there. In order to do this, the focus was on Primary, Secondary and Tertiary shapes within the scene. The blockout is extremely important when it comes to this scale of the scene. It was easy to get carried away in the block out phase without truly understanding the amount of work and time it would take as you grow in scale. With 10 weeks for the class, I only had so much time to get everything done and the blockout phase helped me understand the scale of the project. Ways to help with correcting the scale could be focusing on aspects of the scene that the player could relate to such as the bridge and temple. Considering those are the man-made objects, it gives the viewer the best sense of scale in the scene in relation to them.

Terrain

The main form of the terrain was created using UE4 terrain sculpting tools. They were a bit difficult to get used to as they don’t have the greatest amount of control and detail. From there it was utilizing Unreal Engine’s landscape material to blend between each material using their height maps. In order to get the mountains, I used ZBrush to sculpt the high poly mountains and then used marmoset toolbag in order to bake out the normal maps and height maps for the low poly. The rock textures were created using a mix of ZBrush and Substance Designer. Once those were done, it was placing them within the scene and forming the terrain around them in a way that felt natural. It was using the terrain tools to build up layered terrain that felt as if it had been eroded naturally.

Organic Elements

Reference, Reference, Reference. It was stressed so much by Anthony and there is a reason for it. It is so important to always be using the references for rocks that you had collected. The class helped you identify primary, secondary and tertiary shapes in rocks. It was something that I struggled with in the class, and after feedback and help from Anthony, allowed to better understand and create believable rocks. It is easy to get carried away in the details of the rocks, but really it’s the primary and secondary shapes that help get it across the finish line, and help it feel like a believable rock.

Approaching Modular Buildings

When it comes to creating modular buildings, the pre-planning is extremely important. If that part is not done properly everything starts to break down after that. Breaking down what needs to be separate pieces, the scale of those pieces and how they snap together is important for a modular piece to work. Breaking up the monotony of pieces are helped by variation in textures and if you can have variation in models that helps as well, but you have to weigh if it’s necessary to create a separate model, or if the variation can be achieved in the texture. To help with the modular environments in the scene is creating enough variation within each piece that they won’t be easy to identify as the same. Getting variation in silhouette from different angles can help with that a lot, as well as, utilizing blend materials to paint variation into each of the assets.

Materials

Most of the tileable materials were made using Substance Designer. I used Daniel Thiger’s material tutorials to help me create a lot of my materials within the scene, particularly for the terrain material blends. As for the texture on the temple, it consisted of a few tileable materials created in designer and a trim sheet that I created in ZBrush and then textured in Substance Painter. As for the gradients of the Temple stones, those were generated by blending between 2 variations of the stone material and vertex painting grunge on stones to help further break up the repetitiveness of it.

Lighting

The lighting of this scene went through a few iterations to get to the point it is in now. I wanted to aim for the scene to be a warm and inviting scene. Somewhere the player would be excited to explore. The biggest challenge was trying to strike a balance between light and shadow so that the details and forms are not lost. For these environments, utilizing a directional light and an HDRI were the main points of lighting for the scene. This scene mainly uses the directional light as the key light for the scene. It gives the main sense of mood and directionality for the scene. I also utilized a few other spotlights to highlight the rock shapes and forms around the waterfall, as well as the temple.

Conclusion

Overall, the course was very beneficial in helping me understand all of the different aspects that go into making an organic environment. Not only the technical side but also the design and layout of what makes an environment exciting for a player to want to explore. The biggest difficulties faced during this project was creating a scene that didn’t get too cluttered and overbearing. It was very easy to spend too much time on one aspect of the scene, as the rocks or foliage, while forgetting how they fit into the bigger picture. Making sure you stick to your references and your original breakdown of the primary, secondary and tertiary, is key. It is easy to make too much of the scene tertiary and secondary shapes and lose the primary shapes in the composition. Yes, I would love to take another CGMA class in the future. I am not sure which one yet, but Advanced Substance for Environment Art looks like it would be a great class!

Derek Kruk, 3D Artist

Interview conducted by Daria Loginova

For more information on CG Master Academy and the Organic World Building course, please visit the CGMA website, or email 3d.registration@cgmasteracademy.com.

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Post tags: 3d art, CGMA, gamedev, indiedev, Maya, Substance Designer, Substance Painter, UE4, ZBrush

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Trevor Carr has recently presented his version of the original hero from Metroid made in 3DS Max, Maya, Substance Painter, ZBrush, 3D-Coat, and Marmoset Toolbag.

“Here’s my take on the original leading lady from Metroid. It’s been a passion project of mine for a very long time and I’ve learned so much working on it. I’ve been in love with the series since I was a kid and I’m so excited to see what Retro studios will do with Prime 4,” wrote the artist.

Carr noted that the suit is a mix of elements and styles from different games. “When I started the process I wanted her to deviate pretty wildly from the core design, but the longer I worked the more I realized I needed to reign it in or you’d lose what was so iconic about that classic look. As with anything, there are a million ways I wanted to polish it or refine some aspect, but I’m pretty happy with where it ended up.”

The design looks kind of amazing, right? What do you think about his work? Discuss the project in the comments, and don’t forget to check out the artist’s portfolio page.

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Post tags: 3d coat, 3DS Max, gamedev, marmoset toolbag, Maya, Metroid, Substance Painter, ZBrush

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Stanislav Vovchuk talked about the production of Steampunk Lab in UE4: planning, blockout, modeling, various texturing techniques, lighting.

Introduction

Before we start I would like to thank 80 Level for the interview and fantastic chance to share my knowledge with their readers, Sergei Panin for valuable advice and priceless streams, and the Leoluch – Development Game Content discord channel for the warm atmosphere and like-minded people.

So, hello there! I’m Stanislav Vovchuk. I live in Tula, Russia, and I am a freelance environment artist looking for a full-time position.

My way into the world of Gamedev and Environment Art started not so long ago. My first prop was baked only last summer. Speaking about education, like many artists in Gamedev, I’m self-taught. It is important to note that nowadays, with the help of the internet, much can be achieved. My first tutorials were excellent Ultimate weapon tutorial and Mech Tutorial by Tim Bergholz, which gave me a common understanding of how everything works. It was a hard start, but that experience has helped me so far. Later I had been much inspired and my skills actively developed through the mentorship of Sergei Panin.

Steampunk Lab

Idea

After finishing my previous scene, I was in search of inspiration and didn’t even know what it should be. However, I was confident that I wanted to make a challenge for myself  –  work with wood, steel, and stone. These were the materials I was afraid to work with. Also, I wanted to use some new tools, programs, and pipelines. So, the concept I found on Artstation was an ideal one for my goals. It was fairly detailed, so I didn’t need to spend too much time thinking about design.

Concept by nydia ni

Moreover, it caught my attention because of the light dynamics – sunny, warm and living. The light effects would be a real challenge. The combination of a science lab, steampunk vibe, technological stuff and some feeling of home comfort were a perfect story to tell. Well, in short, it was love at first sight.

Start

As usual, everything starts with reference collecting. It’s beneficial – the more references, the better! Far too much has been said about this.

As I have already said, a considerable part of the work has been done in the concept, but I still had questions concerning the materials, the lighting and the color of the scene. That’s exactly what I kept in mind when I was collecting the references.

Blockout, Scale, Planning

Next step is creating a blockout. This phase plays a significant role and impacts the following production. Be attentive so that you won’t have to cry over spilled milk and remake most of the work or even all of it nervously. Usually, I model my blockout forms for walls, floor, and ceiling in 3ds Max and then export everything as one mesh into UE4 to see whether I caught the size and shape. I fix it until I achieve the proper result and only then divide it into modular parts. This time I missed this step and split the whole scene into modular elements at once and used them to put everything together in UE4. It’s not the best or the most convenient way, but again, I could do this due to a very detailed and clear concept.

After I put all modular parts of the house together, it was time to pay attention to all the major medium and large shapes. I modeled assets that were imported into Unreal and gave them a grey base material. I set up at least one camera straight away. Usually, it is for the main shot to understand not only scale and shapes but to get some bearings on what the scene feels like and to see the composition. As I mentioned, planning is the most critical part of your work, and you can’t make mistakes here. Also, this phase is crucial for me psychologically, due to:

• I see the future workload
• I won’t forget to make any prop
• I control scales, shapes, and compositions
• I see how I can cheat with non-visible parts later

I am filling the scene with props, trying to make them more detailed, even though it’s only the blockout stage. This facilitates my work further.

Modeling

The modeling part of the work doesn’t have any secret techniques, and everything is widely known. It’s a standard modeling pipeline: creating low-poly, then high-poly and finally baking. The only thing I would like to mention is some scripts that made my workflow easier and faster. I often use:

• UV Puppy – mainly for creating the 2nd UV channel
• Align pivot to selection – its name says everything
• Improved Face Weighted Normals – to average the vertex normal

The most complicated and exciting asset from the modeling point of view in my scene was the flying machine, which is in the center, near the windows.

The main challenge I faced here was how to split the asset accurately because it’s big enough and consists of a large number of different elements. Splitting it influenced the way I would texture it. Here is what I came up with.

Plus, I had to think of how to group all this stuff properly. The reason for this was where to use tiles, trims or unique baking. I separated them into six groups for texturing.

The part of the board with the ornament took my attention from the very beginning because I wanted to make it with a real geometry so one could feel the volume and relief. I didn’t know how to implement it. Eventually, I used ZBrush and the ready-made alphas by Jonas Ronnegard. I didn’t have any experience with ZBrush before, so it was the best decision at that time.

Due to time constraints and lack of knowledge in ZBrush, I decided not to make the retopology but make some decimation with a proper value and export it to 3ds Max. And there I deleted everything except the ornament, saved it as high poly and copied for low poly. Now some cheating techniques start: I put on “Prooptimizer” from the modifier list, reduced the number of polygons and then smoothed everything (some things had to be smoothed manually). I know it’s not optimal at all, and there are much more ideal approaches, but this one suited my needs perfectly. I saved tons of time and made the ornament with geometry.

One more asset I would like to talk about is this control center. It’s simple, but I have a few words to share about it.

It looks interesting enough, but most elements are repeated, so initially, it seemed this way.

Notably, the display pointer of the device is made as a separate mesh, which I added to all other props with scales. It allowed me to give variability to all the dashboards in my scene.

Last, but not least is this asset, an excellent example of the modular approach.

Texturing and Materials

Texturing is not my favorite part of the work, and I’m not very good at it. But this time, I did my best and tried to use various techniques, such as:

• Trimsheets. For example, stairs, railing, and balustrade were made in one trimsheet.

This part of the flying machine was made with a trimsheet, too.

• Wood planks. With the help of ZBrush, I sculpted a pack of planks (3 pieces) and then, by just combining them, I managed to create several different assets. I did it to practice ZBrush once again and to make my wood more detailed.

• Harley Wilson’s pipeline using masks. I got this opportunity when I was making the steam generator, its most significant part. I created two different UVs for two different UV channels. The first one was for the tile material, the second for baking high poly and using masks.

After that, in Substance Painter, I created the tile material of steel for the first UV and baked my low poly with the second UV for getting more details and masks. In Substance Painter, I added two custom channels – a darkened mask and a damaged mask.

Then I exported my two custom channels with AO and a normal map. In UE4, I created Master Material to combine all the textures I’d made.

By changing values, I could find the result I wished for.

• Vertex paint. Here I practiced using VP to get more damage effects for my wood. As the base for Master Material, I used Clinton Crumpler‘s shader. I just added damage VP in the green channel.

• Substance Designer. My goal was to create several materials in Substance Designer since I’d never used it before. For this, I chose the tile on the first floor and wood planks on the second. The main goal was to make them as clean and straightforward as I possibly could because I was going to use VP and decals on them further. For the walls, I used a ready-made material from Substance Share and just changed its color.

I textured all other assets as usual by creating my materials in Substance Painter from scratch or using material libraries and twitching them to my needs.

Lighting

Oddly enough, the lighting set didn’t take as much time as I had expected. And it turned out to be simple enough. All the light in the scene was baked.

I used directional light as the primary source of light and also soft god rays, changing the light shafts values.

Moreover, I added rectangular light to the window with extreme intensity values to complement, enrich and diversify the primary light source. And the final touch was the HDRI in the SkyLight with minimum intensity, just to add a bit of brightness plus Volumetric fog – that’s all. The rest is common enough: lamps with light material, spot and point lights. As for additional, fake light, I used it only to highlight a little bit more of the steam machine.

Conclusion

This scene helped me to improve my knowledge, master skills, gain confidence, try new pipelines, deal with difficulties and expand my portfolio. The first and most important thing I got was the experience. Now I’m sure – the more challenging goals you set for yourself, the more you get from your work. And if you have somebody who is more experienced and can help or give feedback, it’s an excellent chance to grow as an artist. Plus, if you have an opportunity to get a mentor –get one for sure, it is worth it.

To finish, I would like to quote Roy T. Bennett: “Great things happen to those who don’t stop believing, trying, learning, and being grateful”.

Stanislav Vovchuk, Environment Artist

Interview conducted by Arti Sergeev

© Daria Loginova for 80lvl, 2019. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 3d art, 3d environment, 3DS Max, environment art, environments, gamedev, indiedev, steampunk, Substance Painter, UE4

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3D modeler Jaakko Saari has recently shared a fabric generator for Substance Designer and Substance Painter.

The pack allows to easily create realistic fabrics. You can adjust the weave pattern to create another type of fabric.

“The generator outputs a Weave Pattern, Random Pattern and a Blended Pattern between these two. The Blended Pattern has a random pattern blended in to create variation,” said the artist. “The Random Pattern can be used in many ways, to add color or roughness variation for example.”

Please note that this is a free substance, so the artist will not provide product support for this generator.

You can get the pack on Gumroad.

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Post tags: 3d art, gamedev, indiedev, Substance Designer, Substance Painter

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Ash Thundercliffe prepared a detailed breakdown of his recent scene Arctic Research Station made with UE4, Substance tools, and World Machine.

Introduction

Hi, My name is Ash Thundercliffe and I’m an Environment Artist working in the video game industry. My current role is at Ready at Dawn working on our next big VR release, Lone Echo 2. Prior to that, I helped ship the prequel, Lone Echo, and also worked at Rockstar Games on Red Dead Redemption 2.

What was the inspiration?

One thing I always find key in this industry is to understand that tools are always changing and evolving. Each generation of consoles brings new tools to play with and things that can improve our game worlds. Therefore, as an artist you should always be learning and staying current, otherwise, you’ll fall behind and so will your art.

For this reason, any project I take on ensures that I’m always trying to improve the current skills I have, but also learn some new tools along the way. The cool portfolio piece at the end is an added bonus!

For my previous project, I wanted to set out to create a small interior space so that I could work on man-made materials in Substance Designer. I also wanted to create interior lighting (both night and day) as well as creating props that improved my high to low poly workflow and my understanding of Substance Painter.

Image demonstrating skills learned whilst creating a small interrogation room

For my next environment, I knew I needed to set some new goals and also still felt I had a lot more to learn with Substance Designer. With that in mind, I started brainstorming what skills I’m lacking and started planning out what type of environment would best fit these goals.

The interrogation scene I previously created led to the inspiration for my newly finished piece. I decided that much of the portfolio favored interiors, hence the inspiration for taking on the challenge of creating an exterior environment. With this in mind, I settled on creating an exterior space that allows me to improve my Substance Designer skills for organic materials, work on large procedural landscapes, creating lighting for an exterior space and adding in dynamic objects/fx that help the scene feel more alive.

Settling on an idea and building reference to support your goal

Prior to starting this project, there was a concept I came across that’s always been in the back of my mind for some time. The concept is by Alexey Trishkin. He’s got a lot of inspirational environments on his page so I highly recommend you check him out.  For my given goals, this concept nailed everything I wanted to achieve whilst making the end goal pretty manageable.

Once I had my concept, I needed to back it up with references.  Reference is always the key to making a believable scene or material and so this is always my first step for any project, personal or production.

What’s great about starting with reference is that you start to unravel the inspiration the concept artist was working on and start to understand their goal on a deeper level. After searching around I fully understood the purpose and design of the buildings, why the terrain and snow look the way they do as well as the sky and atmosphere for that climate.

Creating the world

With all of my scenes, I start off with a blockout, however, with this space, I wanted to start differently. As I mentioned before I have worked on a lot of interior spaces and I will always stand by the belief that a strong blockout is the key to a great scene. In this case, I needed a world to lay my blockout on and so I began the process of learning some procedural terrain software.

There are so many incredible terrain tools out there now from Houdini, Terragen, Gaea and many more, but for this project, I decided on World Machine, mainly for it being industry standard and there seemed to be a lot of documentation for learning which is key to this project. After watching a few videos I began the creation of the terrain.

One thing I found when looking at the reference and concept was that the terrain was mostly flat but in some images, there were a few dunes and bumps in the snow and so I wanted to achieve that look.

Given the simplicity of the landscape, I didn’t adjust the basic node setup much and relied heavily on the ‘advanced Perlin’ to give me the results I desired. The key things I adjusted here was setting the feature scale to hills to keep the ‘maximum height’ of the terrain low, reduced the ‘steepness’ because I wanted more dune mounds as opposed to hills and finally, I raised the middle elevation so that I could still get some sharp peaks which would be created by wind.

Dressing the Terrain

Now that I have my landscape created and in Unreal Engine, the next step was to get some materials in there to start to understand its scale. You could just do this with a grey material and a character but it doesn’t give you much of a sense of distance because everything looks flat and the same.

My first step was to create a simple untouched snow material which could cover the majority of the landscape, for this scene I won’t have any foliage or rocks so repetition was my primary concern. In addition to this, I wanted a material that not only breaks up the repetition but also helps reinforce the dynamic elements of the scene. For this, I wanted snow that had some directionality to sell the wind elements I plan on creating later on in the particle effects.

Once I created these materials I also extracted a mask from my terrain so I can get a natural breakup of the 2 materials with very little effort and also control how they break up naturally. I wanted to make sure the lower sections of the terrain were primarily the billowy untouched snow, and the higher elements which are more exposed to wind would be the directional windswept snow.

Now that I had my two materials in there and blending together naturally I could get an accurate assessment of the scale and how the landscape looked from the foreground and the background.

Time for the Blockout

Now that I finally have my landscape created I could now search along the terrain for the perfect location for my blockout. I wanted to keep my terrain looking natural and so I didn’t want to sculpt on top of the terrain, I wanted to find a spot which has a fairly flat section to lay my buildings on but also has some simple snow dunes in the background for variation.

After finding the desired location I began constructing very basic versions of the structures to assess how they would look in the space and start figuring out my camera angles.

In addition to this, I also want to set up some lighting and tried and achieve my desired mood in the scene. For this, I used the Ultra Dynamic Sky which can be purchased in the Unreal Marketplace.

As the title of the tool suggests. It gives you a fully dynamic sky and you can fully adjust any part of it. For me, the key features were the ability to adjust the density of the clouds, the cloud speed and the ability to have cloud shadows on the terrain. As I mentioned previously, having a dynamic scene was crucial to my end goal to achieve a living world so this tool proved invaluable.

Initial blockout of structures, lighting, and mood.

Creating the Mountains in the Background

Originally, I was going to stay very close to the concept and create the city in the background but I decided that I hadn’t learned enough about terrain creation to class this project as a success. With that in mind, I jumped back into World Machine and began creating the mountainous terrain.

When creating these mountains the key was to not make a terrain but instead an asset I can place in the background in a controlled way that helps me sell the composition of the shot. Think of it as a vista prop.

The key thing to creating this asset is the ‘Layout generator’, instead of creating large scale procedural spaces it instead gives you the ability to plan out where your peaks are and how many you want. I wanted only two peaks because I was going to duplicate this asset around the background. If I added too many peaks the mountains could have got too noisy, but only using one peak could have looked repetitive when placing multiple. Two to three seemed like the safest bet for the use of this asset. After that, it was simply a case of adding procedural noise with ‘Advance Perlin’ and using ‘erosion’ and ‘snow’ for the final touches.

Once these were complete I exported the terrain as a mesh and created 2 maps. One map as a base albedo produced through the ‘basic coverage’ and the other produced for the height which will be my blend between my snow and rock later on.

Now I had everything I needed I wanted to check how the terrain mesh and scale looked so I opened up Maya and imported in the terrain mesh. What World Machine outputted was an incredibly dense and detailed mesh which was perfect for what I needed it for given that I planned on using this for my high poly mesh. To get my low poly mesh I simply used Maya’s ‘Mesh Reduce’ tool to get more manageable geo for UE4 and Substance Painter.

With my high and low poly created for the mountains complete, I imported the low into Substance Painter and baked down the details using Substance’s built-in baker. After the baking, I simply used my albedo output as a color base for the material and then overlaid a snow material over the top to get all my PBR details for the snow, and then did the same for the rock. This time, however, I used my mask created in world machine to create a blend between the two materials. A key thing here is to not tile the materials to the exact scale on the mesh because that will cause a lot of repetition on the shape. What we really want is the macro details from the texture so it has some big read details from a distance. Remember, we are creating an asset for a vista, not a terrain you are expected to be able to walk on!

With the asset created all that is left to do is get the asset into UE4 and apply the materials as you would with any asset, and then start placing the mountain in the background.

Creating the Materials for the Structure

There are 2 ways to approach this: first off you could just high poly model the whole thing and bake it all down. This will cause multiple issues though, you will struggle to maintain a high/consistent texel density unless you either throw multiple texture maps at the model or use a texture at 4k to 8k which may still cause issues/increase memory cost.

For this, the best direction is to bake out the most complex components and use tiling textures and modeling for the rest. Below is the breakup I decided to use to texture the model. All of the assets in green will be created using high to low poly meshes.

To begin with, I started creating the tiling texture for the building. The structure is the base foundation for all of the other assets that go on top and so because of this, the other assets will need to work around this material.

One really great thing with Substance Designer is that I created my painted metal material first, concentrating on creating a clean base material, and then gradually working in the details that make it unique to the scene such as; water droplets and smears, slight chips in the paint and a variation in the paint caused by uneven exposure to the sun from varying snow coverage. One thing I didn’t add however was the frost coating, the reason for this was because I wanted to handle this in the layer blending. The key reason for this is that it will allow me to make the 2 structures look slightly different but also to break up the tiling base material. One amazing thing with substance designer is that once you are happy with the base material you can create a separate node network purely for the frost and snow, this is great because it allows me to be non-destructive and work on both materials at the same time.

As a final detailing and breakup, I created a decal sheet. I didn’t want to set all of these up as deferred decals because it would significantly increase draw calls and be a pain to manage if I decided to move the buildings around. I find deferred decals work best with things like grunge, leaks, splats, puddles, etc. For this, I decided to just use floating geometry set up in Maya and set them as a ‘masked’ blend mode in UE4. I also used my roughness and normals from the base material to save memory and it helps the decals blend more with the base material. As a bit of fun with most decal sheets in my personal work, I never really intend for people to get close enough to read them so for the most part I fill them with general nonsense and jokes.

After creating my base materials for the tiling sections I now needed to make my prop assets. A key benefit to working on the tiling materials first is that we have actually just done some of the work for the other assets already! A wonderful thing about the Substance toolkit is the ability to import your materials from Substance Designer into Substance Painter, the result of this means that the door and entry console I make will have similar roughness and normal values resulting in a look that makes all the assets look like they were all manufactured together and exposed to the same elements. Another great feature in Substance Painter is that because the materials were created in Substance Designer, I can now adjust the base albedo color to whatever I wanted and still maintaining the look and feel of the original material. This was super useful for creating the door material.

Making the Whole Scene Come to Life

Now that most of the scene is completed, the next step is to bring life to the environment and to do this the best way is ambient motion. It really just helps grounds a scene and makes the whole thing have so much more atmosphere and believability.

As mentioned before, we already have the moving clouds and cloud shadows so the next few things I want to add were:

• Some form of cloth animation
• Snow particles
• Frosty fog for backgrounds
• Frosty fog for the ground

First off, for the cloth animation, I settled on adding a flag to the scene. This was so incredibly easy to set up because most of the work is done in UE4. There are so many tutorials out there for flags so I won’t go into too much detail but simply put, you just need to export a flag and flag pole with 2 different materials applied, into UE4. Once in UE4 you import the asset as a skeletal mesh and paint your mesh weights to set up what does and doesn’t move.

Once I had the flag set up and in place, I added a wind node and decided on which direction I wanted the wind to go in. This doesn’t sound super crucial but part of making a believable scene is adhering to real-life rules, and if I’m going to do that I need to understand that whatever direction the wind is going in, I need to ensure that all particle effects follow that same direction.

As a final touch to the flag I added the light on top, I thought this would have two desired effects. From a narrative standpoint, it’s used to create a beacon of light for people who are looking for the arctic base. From an artistic standpoint, I thought having a light-up there helped make the wind ripples stand out and added some nice shadows to the flag

Next up was snow particles. I’ve made dust in the past so I figured this would be a similar setup, apart from instead of having them float around the room, I would make them have some gravity and directionality from the wind.

After playing around with the particle effects editor I found that the key components to making believable snow were the ‘initial velocity’ and the ‘spawn location’. The velocity controls how fast the snow will be moving when it spawns and so because snow is very thick and fluffy I wanted to make sure that when the particles were falling, they were moving slower than something like rain. As mentioned before I also added wind and so to match this I added a higher value bias in the velocity to the X coordinate so that this would be my wind direction control. When I place the snow particle in the scene I just need to make sure that X faces the direction of my wind.

‘Initial Location’ and ‘spawn’ kind of work together. If you have too much snow spawn in a small area then it will look like a blizzard, but if you have too little in a large space then you will not see the snow. I found the best result was to set up the ‘Initial Location’ to be just slightly larger than the ‘play area’ and then control the amount that spawns to fit the desired look.

As for the actual snow particle, I too often see people just use a soft circle which just looks very unnatural and ‘gamey’. I decided to just paint my own organic-looking shape and add some soft edges. To finish the snow off I added subsurface scattering this helps the snow catch the light and adds more variation when snow is floating in the sky.

For the frosty fog and floor fog, I decided to look at the unreal learning tabs because I knew they did some snow-based particle scene. Honestly, if you don’t know about the UE4 learning section, there are some incredible scenes in there to learn from and it proved to be an invaluable asset when trying to understand their particle effects.

I could have simply just used their assets one for one but the main complication with this was that they were creating what looks to be a blizzard, whereas I wanted a subtle build-up of a snowy breeze. With that said, all you need is a simple understanding of the particle effects editor and you can edit and tweak any of those effects to fit your desired outcome. The key one for me was the ‘P_BlowAcrossGround’. This Particle had a lot of really cool effects and layering, but overall the effect had a super intense blizzard look, as expected. After removing most of the components I was left with the floor fog I wanted and could adjust that to my desired result.

With those two particles removed, I was left with the floor fog material running along the ground. This worked really well with my terrain because I was using tessellation on the floor. When applying the particle effect to my scene the fog flowing along the ground looked as though it was getting caught in the snow pockets and rolling over. It added a really nice subtle effect to the ground.

Floor fog brightness increased for demonstration purposes

Finally, for the distance fog, I was again was using something from the unreal learning tab. I used the Blueprint ‘BP_FogSheet’ found in the ‘Blueprints demo’. This already had the desired effect I wanted and so depending on the location I would tweak the opacity, tiling, and brightness.

The image below shows how I separated my cards and tweaked each according to the location. For the far distance cards, I wanted thick clouds that look like they roll through the hills so I reduced the tiling significantly and upped the brightness. For the close-up cards, I just wanted it to be noticeable when going past the buildings so I increased the tiling and decreased the opacity and brightness so it almost looks like snow dust is passing by.

Lighting

This honestly wasn’t too complex of a lighting set up overall. My goal for this was an overcast cold feel, so I needed the lighting to look kind of flat but also find a way to get some depth and interest points into the scene.

First up I added a ‘Directional Light’ to the scene to be the sun and set it to ‘Moveable’, the reason for this is so that I can work on my scene as if it was an open-world environment where lighting is not baked. The other major factor to this was that baked lighting would have really slowed down my workflow.

Next up was the skylight. The skylight would prove to be essential in this scene for two reasons, first off it allows me to adjust the global brightness of the scene using the ‘intensity scale’ (again this is set to ‘moveable’ like the Directional light for dynamic lighting and quick iterations).

The next big feature of the skylight was the ‘Distance Field Ambient Occlusion’ which to simply put, adds a soft ambient occlusion shadow dynamically to anything in the scene. This is great because the DFAO helps; soften out the shadows under the structures, create more depth to the steps, snow, and the inset entrance to the buildings. The best way to demonstrate this is with a video from Epic Games.

Finally, now that I have all of the scene looking pretty good for the sky illumination, I just needed to work on the artificial lights in the scene. To start off with I added a singular ‘point light’ to the light fixture and matched the ‘source length’ and ‘source radiance’. After that, I simply adjusted the intensity to get the desired look. I really liked how well lit the interior portion of the building was and worked well with the scene, but even though I set a large ‘attenuation radius’, not enough of the exterior was being affected by the light (the below image shows the highlighted areas in blue that I wanted to have more lighting).

To deal with this problem I added 2 spotlights to the building, one light facing the steps and rail (yellow arrows) and one spotlight facing the ground (green arrow). As you can see in the third image, the ground has a much warmer feel and the rails are getting more of a specular response to the lighting.

A key thing to take away from this is that you can’t always set up lighting exactly as the world is, sometimes you have to set up a few extra lights to achieve the desired look. The best example of this is how lighting is set up for a film. Directors don’t just arrive at a film set and start filming, they have a gaffer who is in charge of setting up lighting for the desired effect and mood whilst making the scene still look believable.

The Final Touches

Now that the whole scene is set up and almost complete there is always the moment where you need to critically analyze your piece and decide what it is missing and what can be added to finish it off.

The first step for me was to set up a path that shows where people have walked and also have some believability to it. I created noisy snow with footprints running through, and painted this along the terrain between the buildings and a few paths leading off of the screen.

The next step was setting up my final shots. For this, I use the ‘Cinematic Cameras’. As the name suggests this helps you get a more cinematic feel. These may seem a little overwhelming at first but with a basic understanding of how a camera works (F stop, aperture, iso, shutter speed, etc) you can really push your scenes to the next level. On that note I also recommend any environment artists out there to get a camera and get into photography, I can honestly say it really helped me better understand composition, lighting and how to achieve a certain look by adjusting the camera settings.

The final step of any scene is the tweaks to the post-processing. I tend to add a little bit of post-processing at the start, but this is primarily to get the exposure setting closer to what I want for the scene. As a final pass, I adjust the AO, vignette, film grain and a few other settings. The key thing here is to not go too far with these settings because it could make your scene look overly processed and unnatural.

Final Thoughts

Taking on this project, I’m grateful that I not only produced a new environment I’m proud of, but I also gained so much knowledge and insight along the way.

I highly recommend any artist reading this to take more risks with your next piece to learn more about the tools you can use to create art. It’s so easy to get stuck with your same workflow and suddenly the industry takes a change in direction and you’re left behind. Learning and understanding more tools and workflows not only makes you more employable but also makes you extremely valuable to a company. I personally can’t wait to start researching more new processes that I can apply to my next piece!

Ash Thundercliffe, Environment Artist at Ready at Dawn

Interview conducted by Kirill Tokarev

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Post tags: 3d art, environments, gamedev, indiedev, snow, Substance Designer, Substance Painter, Terrain Generation, UE4

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Dmitry Doryn talked about the production of a nice stylized boat made with Maya, ZBrush, and Substance Painter and rendered in Redshift.

Introduction

Hello, friends! My name is Dmitry Doryn, I am a 3D artist from Belarus. I studied to be an architect but left my studies after the 3rd year for the sake of working in the game development industry. I started doing 3D 7 years ago, as an Intern at Wargaming.net for the World of Warships project, then switched to World of Tanks. After 4 years at Wargaming, I became part of MSQRD startup that was acquired by Facebook. Currently, my friends and I have found a small art studio, where we are engaged in our new project Loona, a mobile application for relaxing by coloring 3D dioramas.

Goal

I have a huge stock of reference works by artists that I really like and would like to recreate in 3D. I often create models based on the concepts by other artists in order to improve my modeling skills. This concept is from the amazing artist Arthus Pilorget. At first, I wanted to create the whole scene in real-time, but I didn’t have enough free time. So I focused on the main object. I really wanted to convey the state of this old but very cozy style of the ship.

Boat Modeling

Although a lot of attention is paid to details in this work, I always advise focusing first on the shape and silhouette, as these are the first things that are perceived by the eye. At the silhouette stage, I tried to get as close to the reference as possible without worrying too much about the quality of the topology.

My basic 3D pipeline is pretty simple. To Prepare the basic geometry, I use Maya and then send the blockout to ZBrush.

Having a well-prepared basic geometry in hand I don’t spend much time in ZBrush, just adding only large and noticeable details, using alpha facture and slightly change the shapes because that I will modify the texture in Substance Painter.

Then comes the most boring part: Retopology and UVs in Maya. No secrets, just a lot of repetitive work.

Since most of the ship consists of wooden planks, I separated the model into 2 materials with 2k texture sets, one of which consisted entirely of wooden elements, for convenience in texturing.

Substance Painter

My favorite part is texture creation.

I bake all the maps in the Substance Painter and make several test bakes. The final baking is done with a resolution twice the required, antialiasing x8 and function match by name (for naming parts of geometry I use this Maya plugin).

Before texturing, I advise changing the default lighting in Substance to Soft 1 Low Contrast 2Backs so that the color did not interfere with the correct perception of textures and they did not seem better than they are.

When I create layers in materials, I try to be guided by principles from the real world. If it is a mossy painted wood, then the order of the layers will look like a sequence of wooden base, paint, moss, dirt, and dust.

The general approach to creating textures is quite universal.

To create a base for the paint, I create a fill layer and then duplicate it several times with a small HSL offset and some procedural noise in a roughness parameter to create different color for each wood plank. The next few layers go with HSL offset and a very noisy and high contrast mask to create different color spots over the paint texture. The last layer is the mask for the whole group which allows showing the wood texture. I always use procedural masks in conjunction with a paint layer where I can correct the procedural mask by overpainting. This allows to get rid of a “procedural” feel of the mixed materials and add or remove additional damage or some scratches in those places where logic requires them.

Once the base materials are ready, I work with additional damage and dirt that will spread over the whole model. The approach to this is the same as to the basic materials: a stack of layers with adjustments and noisy masks. Even moss or dirt consists of several layers with a shifted color and roughness that would give them diversity.

I like the basic dust preset in Substances Painter and often use it for the final layer in my works.

This is what the final hierarchy and all the layers combined look like.

Since I am very lazy and do not like to do vegetation, I used the good old Ivy Generator and replaced the leaves textures.

Rendering

The last part is rendering. I’ve been wanting to try rendering in Redshift for a long time, so this project was the starting point. Setting up materials from Substance in Redshift is pretty easy if you use this guide for metallic/roughness pipeline.

For lighting, I used the three-point lighting scheme and HDRI taken from Substance Painter. The only trick was an additional light source underwater to fake how light bounces off the water surface.

As for the windows, I made additional roughness and refraction maps to simulate blurred refraction.

Below you can inspect all the maps for this model:

Finally, I played a bit with camera FOV and post-processing. Everything is done directly in Redshift because its new post-processing tool is very comfortable.

That’s all. Thank you for reading!

Dmitry Doryn, 3D Artist

Interview conducted by Kirill Tokarev

© Daria Loginova for 80lvl, 2019. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 3d art, gamedev, indiedev, Maya, prop art, redshift, stylized, Substance Painter

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Travis Overstreet did a breakdown of his character Viking Woman made with great help from Game Art Institute mentors during Character Artist Bootcamp.

Introduction

I’m Travis Overstreet and I’m a digital artist working in Chicago, IL. I’m originally from a small town outside of Atlanta, Georgia, but I moved up here for work five years ago. I currently work for a small startup in the mobile casino space based out of the UK. My work in Chicago has mostly been centered around creating art slot games with a few freelance ad jobs here and there. When I was in Atlanta, I worked mostly in the advertising world making various spots for internal and external use. Because of the location and nature of my past work I’ve had to cover a wide range of skill sets from various 2D and 3D tasks to animation and more.

I graduated from a small university in Georgia with a BFA in painting and sculpture. That was around 2009 shortly after the economic and housing crisis, so jobs, especially jobs for a fine artist, were scarce. I always wanted to work in the game or film industries but had a bit of a phobia when it came to the technical side of things. I decided to swallow my fear, double down and go back for my MFA in animation at Savannah College of Art and Design in Atlanta. The program there was wonderful and got me up and running in Maya, various Adobe products, and ZBrush. I was hired before finishing my degree and I’ve been neck-deep in 3D since.

Countless Benefits of Joining GAI

My wife is currently wrapping up her medical degree which is freeing me to focus on becoming a character artist. I knew I wanted to find a program or class to guide me and keep me accountable as I developed my portfolio. I was aware of Ryan Kingslein and had been seeing more and more of his tutorials and talks on the CG sites I frequented. His approach to teaching and his overall philosophy resonated with me so when I saw that he offered a Character Art Bootcamp it was a no brainer.

One of the most valuable components of GAI is the community. They’ve developed a substantial network of current and past students and teachers from all over the world, across a multitude of studios. It’s quite active whether it’s critical feedback, tutorials, job openings, philosophical views on art or the industry, or just a random post. It’s also a healthy community that offers accurate feedback in a non-toxic way. Ryan himself is constantly flooding the channels with new tutorials and processes as he discovers new ways of working and perfects existing processes. Speaking of Ryan, he’s directly involved in the Bootcamps. He guides/ teaches the first half of the Bootcamp and brings on an industry professional to help teach the second half. He stays on and gives guidance and feedback but lets the industry pro get in and give valuable feedback and advice on the development of your final piece. Their feedback and critique are invaluable. If you trust them and follow their advice you can’t help but come out with a great piece. Feedback is also quick; you’re never sitting around for days waiting to figure out what you should do next.

Also, because the community is so active and filled with industry pros, you’re getting to learn about the newest techniques, processes, and software. It really helps to know where to focus your attention when it comes to the multitude of new processes, software, and techniques flooding the web constantly.

This class helped me in a multitude of ways. If I had to narrow it down, I would say the most valuable things were the critiques and learning the importance of process. Before this class when I sat down to create a character, I had no set practice or process. Because of that, I never achieved consistent or repeatable results with my work. Most pieces would end up half-finished or rushed out the door. During this class, I was shown a clear process from beginning to end that, if followed and given the proper time and effort, would result in a finished piece of quality. I was also encouraged to add to and iterate upon the process in the hopes that the development would help myself and others down the line. I think this is part of the reason the community at GAI is so effective. Everyone shares and grows together.

Secondly, the critique sessions were extensive and incredibly necessary. Had I not had Ryan’s or Samantha Rogers’ (my industry pro-teacher) guidance and feedback my character wouldn’t be half of what it turned out to be. I’ve been in online classes before where feedback and critiques are done quickly and glossed over but with GAI it was the focus. Sometimes I learned just as much from others’ critiques. It was a key piece of my workflow that I’d been missing. I’ve been working in a vacuum for so long that I couldn’t see the mistakes I was making. Having someone shine a light on things allows you to be able to adjust and correct those issues in future projects. It’s a clear path to growth that I had been neglecting until this class.

I was most excited to learn hair and cloth at GAI. They absolutely delivered on both accounts, but they also helped me with my anatomy which I didn’t even realize had been an issue. They taught me things I didn’t know I needed, and my work has improved because of it.

Viking Woman

Start of the Project

First off, I know I wanted to create a female character, as I tend to make male characters typically and I wanted to push myself in this way. After I decided that I began a search for a concept the grabbed me. I didn’t have any other restriction than that it needed to be female. I landed on a wonderful concept that was created by Roman Kupriyanov.

This piece was interesting to me because of the complexity of the costume, the braids in the hair, and the variety of materials. From there, I collected as much reference as possible.

Head

I started off by sculpting the head and shoulders. I started with a single dynamesh sphere and built it up from there. After several sculpting sessions and rounds of feedback, I decided to go in and do a deep dive on the anatomy. It’s something that took a bit more time but was worth it in the end. I realized that I had gaps in my knowledge about facial anatomy and this was a way to learn that while also moving forward with my piece.

This process began with building out the skull. I used a similar approach as my initial head sculpt, using a dynamesh sphere and sculpting it out. Of course, I also gather tons of skull reference and poured over it in detail. Looking back on it I wished I had just bitten the bullet and bought a physical skull reproduction so I could study it and take my own reference from life.

Next up I added in the muscles and fat pads. For this, I used the curve strap brush in ZBrush. I turned on the “AsLine” button in the curve options menu and the “size” button in the curve modifier menu. Then, I placed the muscles initial position, clicked the model to get rid of the curve and used the move topology brush to fines the placement.

After I blocked in all of the muscles I dynameshed them and used a rake brush to add in the fiber directions. For the fat pads, I used the insert sphere brush and them adjusted and placed the pads using the move topology and snake hook brushes.

Next, I used a rake, trim dynamic, and clay build up brush to flesh out the skin layer. As I did so I tried to pay attention to the primary forms and planes of the face. From there, I moved down to secondary and tertiary forms. Once I had the underlying anatomy of my face in I did a few more rounds of adjustments, tweaking proportions and small forms.

One of the big takeaways from this process was the space between the eye and the outside of the nose. I had never noticed how much space there was between the tear duct area and the start of the bridge of the nose. In all of my past sculpts that area had either been non-existent or crowded, leading to a lack of realism no matter how much I pushed the surface details.

I think if you find you have a knowledge gap, it’s worth doing deep dives like this. As long as you’re still making forward progress on your piece it will grow your understanding and help your process in the future. If you don’t need to enhance your knowledge or explore the anatomy, I think sculpting from a dynamesh sphere is great and to me, it’s a lot of fun. I also think it’s acceptable to start with a base mesh for a head and modify it as needed. I’m using that approach on my current piece and it has been super helpful timewise.

Body

For the body, I used the same dynamesh approach as for the initial head sculpt. I bought a reference sheet of a female about the age of the woman in the concept. I set up references on the floor grind in ZBrush and started sculpting. Initially, I keep my dynamesh resolution very low and try to focus on the larger forms and curvature of the body. During this phase, I tend to stick to the move topology brush. Once the body proportions are blocked I shift to my focus onto secondary forms and planes, using mostly trim dynamic and clay build up brushes. I also increase the resolution of my dynamesh at this point. Around this time if I’m happy with the proportions of everything I will cut the hands off and separate them into their own subtool. This is because the fingers will try to mesh together unless the resolution is set super high.

Modeling & Texturing Clothes

For the clothing, I used Marvelous Designer. I’d played with it in the past but hadn’t made anything substantial. In order to prepare a base mesh for Marvelous, I merged the head hands and body, dynameshed them and decimated it to less than 100k. I then pulled that into Marvelous as my base/ reference mesh. Luckily, my character didn’t have too many complicated pieces of clothing. The biggest thing I learned about Marvelous is to be precise in your measurements. If one edge is longer than another and you sew them together, you’re going to get bunching and unwanted results.

Being new to Marvelous I was worried about how I was going to get the wrinkles for areas where the leather belts and straps overlapped. The solution I developed was to create proxy strap pieces where my leather would be. I increased their stiffness to try and get them to act like leather. After that, I simulated, tucked, pulled and re simulated until the wrinkles were roughly what I was looking for. One other tricky area I ran across was the padded armor section of the skirt. For that, I was lucky enough to find another GAI alumni who’d made a tutorial for it. Kory Molohon’s tutorial worked like a dream!

From there, I brought the clothing back into ZBrush and adjusted the areas where my proxy marvelous straps had been incorrect. I then separated the cloth pieces into separate subtools and did a sculpting pass on them. During this sculpting pass, I focused on clarifying certain edges and wrinkles while softening others. I used a reference to help decide what to clarify and what to soften. At the end of this pass, I also added in some memory wrinkles using alphas. Once I was finished sculpting I extracted the cloth pieces to give them thickness.

For the texturing, I used Substance Painter. I started with a base cloth material that had a weave pattern similar to what I was aiming for. From there, I adjusted the base color to get as close to the concept as I could. Then, I use a lighter looser weave material using a curvature mask as a way to simulate areas wear the cloth may have worn through some of the cloth. Then, it’s just a matter of adding light and dark grunge layers with slight adjustments to the roughness.

For the ripped areas, I used the lighter loose weave material with a very subtle negative height layer, add a black mask, and then paint the ripped areas back in. Around the edges, I add in more subtle wear using the lighter loose weave. I also create a paint layer above all of this where I paint in some height and wrinkles around the torn areas. Next, I create a paint layer and use a very thin brush with a color a bit lighter than the lightest on the worn areas, and a bit of height, to paint in loose strands and fraying. Finally, I add in a subtle lighter-colored layer with the sun fade mask applied. I use the sun fade mask on almost every material at some point. It was made by Jack Caron and available on Substance Share.

• Leather

As for the leather, most of the details were done in Substance. I made some of the major wrinkles and forms in ZBrush but the rest was done in Substance. I try to approach leather in a very layered way. My leather groups in Substance always have the most layers. It’s essentially skin, just dead and treated, so I feel like it is a lot more complex than most people give it credit for. The first thing I like to approach is the kind of grain/ wrinkle. I’ll usually cycle through some of the base leather materials in substance painter or grab some from substance source that I like. Once I’ve selected the leather base material, I establish the size of grain/wrinkle. I do this by adjusting the texture scale. For the shoulder, I went for a small grain because I figured that area was stretched over metal and had probably received a lot of rubbing and wear. For the straps, I gave them a bit larger grain just to add variety and visual interest. Finally, for the boots, I used the largest grain size of the three because I felt they were looser and more worn than any other piece of leather.

After I establish the base leather I add a layer of “leather rough” material with an edge wear mask. Depending on the leather’s level of wear and age I’ll adjust the mask and layer opacities. From there, I’ll layer on a few light and dark grunge levels. For the lighter grunge levels, I usually use the “leather rough” base material. With the dark grunge layers, I play with shifting the roughness value. I also decrease the opacity on a lot of the grunge roughness layers so that it creates a lot of depth and complexity in the roughness map. After a couple of grunge layers, I add a layer of color and roughness set to a low opacity just to tie everything back together. On top of all that I play with a few more edge wear layers as well as some layers of lighter color and higher roughness using a sun fade mask. In between all of these layers, I also place a layer with light scratches of varying sizes. All of this again depends on the age and use of the leather. My leather was all pretty beat to hell so I went nuts with wear and scratches.

In a couple of areas, I add in more substantial scratches. I start with a fill layer with only height and I knock it down just a bit. Then, I add the leather rough material just above that and put them both into a group. I then change the height layer style to normal so it doesn’t pick up any of the height info from the leather. I add a black mask to the group and then use a brush to paint in the bigger scratches by hand. Above this group, I make a new rough leather layer, mask it out and then paint back in using a grunge brush around the scratch’s edges. Finally, I make paint layer and sculpt in some height information to get the feel of raised edges, wrinkling, and puckering.

Adding Facial Details

After I did the skull and facial muscles work for the head the features were pretty solid. I just needed to add the scar to the eye. In order to do this, I duplicated the mesh, pulled the left eye closed, dynameshed, masked the left eye area and projected it back onto my original sculpt. That way I got back all of the details from my sculpt but had a blank area over the left eye to sculpt in the scaring.

For the scar sculpt, I used the clay build up brush to get the larger forms established, then used the dam standard brush to carve back in some lines and cut areas. After that, I used the inflate brush to puff up a few areas and then I came in behind that with the blob brush to get a bit of randomness and bumps. Sometimes the blob brush can cause some topology stretching so I just dynamesh, mask the left eye, and reproject; rinse and repeat. To polish it off I used the dam standard to add a few wrinkles and crease lines here and there.

For the pore details, I used a combination of ZBrush and a set of maps from Texturing XYZ. I laid out the texture XYZ maps in Photoshop over my UVs using the puppet warp tool then exported them. From there, I brought them in as displacement maps on various layers in ZBrush and toyed with their intensity levels until I had something I liked.

For the face textures, I used Substance Painter. I used a few of the color and channel maps from the texture XYZ set I purchased as a base and set a base roughness value. From there, I belt up layers of warm reds, oranges, and yellows contrasted with greener desaturated yellows. I also broke theses layers up with white mottling textures

From there, I added a few layers of veins and freckles, all broken up with more layers of color and mottling. At the top few layers, I added a few passes of color to bring things back together and harmonize everything. In short, it was all about tons of layers to create a sense of depth and complexity to the skin.

After finishing the color, I created several paint passes on top to adjust the roughness. After going into Marmoset I ended up having to come back to Substance to make my roughness rougher. What looked like appropriate roughness in Substance looked oily in Marmoset. I used Photoshop to adjust my roughness map until I was happy and then adjusted it in Substance accordingly. I also found that I had to this with my normal map. My normal wasn’t nearly intense enough on my skin so I had to increase it in ZBrush and re-bake in Marmoset.

Skin Texture, Eyes, Hair

For the skin and eyes, I followed Vadim Sorici’s tutorial on Marmoset’s site. I didn’t veer away too much at all, it seemed pretty spot on for my needs.

I also used it for my peach fuzz and hair. I made a few adjustments to the specular and subsurface settings to account for blonde versus black hair, but again, it was very spot on.

For the actual hair creation, I used Adam Skutt’s tutorial from GAI. I started in Maya, placing the main hair cards by hand, creating the silhouette. Then, I combined them and made them a live mesh and used quad draw to draw on the next set of hair cards. I then adjusted those by hand until I was happy. Then, I just rinsed and repeated that process until I was happy with the hair.

As for the materials, I didn’t do anything particularly notable other than what I already talked about in the texturing phase except for some micro normal details. For the skin and the red cloth, I added in a skin micro normal and a fabric micro normal respectively, using a mask to make sure they stayed in the right areas.

Feedback

The biggest challenge with this project was getting all of the different pieces of software to communicate correctly. Something would look great in Substance or ZBrush and look off in Marmoset and vice versa. I learned a lot about getting your work into Marmoset or whatever the end renderer is early and continue to check it as you go. As the amount of software required in CG art expands I think we as artists have to be able to visualize the final result as quickly as possible so we can iterate and make changes as early as possible. I’m only a week into my new project and I already have it up in Marmoset. It’s already helped me immensely.

Travis Overstreet, 3D Artist

Interview conducted by Kirill Tokarev

© Daria Loginova for 80lvl, 2019. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 3d art, character, GAI, gamedev, indiedev, Marvelous Designer, online courses, Substance Painter, ZBrush

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Manuel Sitompul shared the breakdown of a stylized character based on Jake Wyatt‘s comics: sculpting the body, modeling clothes, retopo, and texturing.

Introduction

Hey! I’m Manuel Sitompul, a 21-year-old game art student living in the Netherlands.

Games have always been a big interest for me. As a child, I spent the majority of my time exploring the story and worlds of Zelda, Pokémon, and Rayman. I got so immersed in these worlds that I decided to start making my own by playing with Game Maker and learning GML.

However, my first real game art experience started when I decided to study Visual Art at Breda University of Applied Sciences.

Throughout school, I worked on many projects and learned about many different sides of game art such as procedural modeling, 3D animation, standard asset creation, and engine implementation. Experiencing this provided me with a good base to start making my own projects.

Draw Your Weapons

Motivation

The journey started when I participated in a competition hosted by Yekaterina Bourykina. The challenge was to create a hand-painted character bust, with the prize being a mentorship. I ended up winning the competition and gaining tons of experience in hand-painting!

The 3D character bust I started my hand-painting journey with:

Thoughts & Goals

After the 3D bust was received so well, I wanted to set the bar higher and create a full character. I’m a big fan of Jake Wyatt and his Necropolis comic, so I decided to create the protagonist from the comic.

The biggest thing I wanted to nail in this project was the emotion. The girl is an incredibly ferocious character filled with rage, which she eventually demonstrates by slaughtering a bunch of bad guys. Those kinds of emotions aren’t easy to translate into a 3D model, but I took it as a challenge.

The reference board for Jake Wyatt’s character from Necropolis:

Sculpting the Character

I started the character by creating a blockout in ZBrush. Creating quick blobs in the shape of a human allowed me to establish the anatomy and style pretty quickly.

Basic blockout I made in ZBrush:

I continued by Dynameshing the blockout and refining the basic shapes of the body. Adding muscular detail wasn’t a priority because it was not yet determined where the clothing pieces would cover up the body. Additionally, using a hand-painted workflow allowed me to work less detailed because the sculpt would only be used for a diffuse bake, which I could simply paint over.

Dynameshing and smoothing the blockout to create a simple mannequin:

While sculpting the face, it was very helpful to have some additional features in place, such as eyebrows, eyelashes, and hair. For the hair, I used a haircurves brush, edited by Chris Whitaker and called makkon_haircurves_03. The eyelashes and other pieces of special geometry were simply modeled in Maya and put in ZBrush. I advise anyone who is new to sculpting: if there’s any task that seems easier in your preferred modeling software, it’s probably worth it.

Using makkon_haircurves_03 to create the hair strands and modeling the eyelashes in Maya:

The girl from the comic has very dynamic and wrinkled clothing, so it took me some experimentation to figure out how to approach this problem. I started by creating a simple dress in Marvelous Designer, which allows me to create realistic creases in the clothing.

Experimenting in Marvelous Designer to create clothing:

In the end, I decided to manually sculpt all the clothing except the skirt. In this case, I liked the amount of control I had by sculpting the folds by hand. Even though it isn’t as realistic as a Marvelous Designer simulation, I could get away with it because of the hand-painted nature of the project.

Using ZBrush to create the clothes was incredibly easy, I simply took the base body, masked it, and used Subtool > Extract with a subtle Thickness. I continued by using the Standard brush to paint some folds.

The process of creating clothes:

Various stages I went through while creating the sculpt:

Retopologizing the Character

When the sculpt was finished, it was time to create a low-poly version which I could bake the sculpt on. I merged all my subtools with Merge > Merge Visible. Unfortunately, Maya doesn’t like a 12 million poly mesh, so I had to decimate the mesh using Decimation Master to lower the polycount a bit.

When the decimated model was in Maya, I made the object live and used Quad Draw to draw the faces on the mesh. I used this technique to retopologize the entire character. I ended up connecting a lot of the clothing to the skin, which would help me skin the character more easily, and result in fewer artifacts in animation.

The final topology of the character:

Texturing the Character

I started this project to build some experience in hand-painted textures. Just like for my last hand-painted project, I used 3D Coat because of its dynamic link with Photoshop. Not only is this great because painting in Photoshop is so versatile, but 3D Coat also allows me to make projections of the 3D model, which I can paint over in Photoshop.

For this project, I decided on diffuse-only textures, which means the final product will not interact with lighting in any way. This means all the shadows, reflections and highlights must be painted by hand.

To start off, I wanted to create some base colors and basic lighting. I imported my model into Substance Painter and baked the high-poly model on the low-poly. I continued by using an incredible smart-material called SoMuchDiffuse, which took the high-poly sculpted data and baked material information down into a single diffuse texture. Using this tool, I added base colors and gradients for every part of the character.

The base character texture generated with the use of SoMuchDiffuse:

This is where the hand-painting starts. I continued by exporting the new diffuse texture and importing it into 3D Coat. My painting process is very straight-forward: my main focus is always to add more definition and highlight to the areas that I want the viewer to focus on, which is the face in this case. I started by painting lighter values fading from the middle of the face, which gives the face more depth. Additionally, I tried painting a lot of different hues in the face such as reds, greens, and blues. I treat this process no different than painting a character in a 2D illustration.

Using the base made in Substance Painter to hand-paint over in 3D Coat:

The eyes, in particular, were fun to make! The vertex in the center of the eyeball is going inwards to create a parallax effect. Additionally, there’s a separate mesh for the cornea, on which I painted the eyes’ reflection. Because there’s a distance between the reflection and the pupil now, the eyes have much more depth.

The cornea is a separate mesh from the eyeball itself, adding depth to the eye:

I couldn’t call the textures finished until the character was fully rigged and posed. For example, changing the position of the arms can create new shadows and creases which I need to hand-paint. I proceeded to create a basic skeleton for the character and a few bones for the facial expression.

The skeleton of the character:

Settling on a pose and the facial expression took a while. Eventually, I settled on a specific panel from the comic (Chapter 01, page 10), where the girl held a simple but strong pose. When all the posing was done, I could paint the shadows and ambient occlusion, because I finally knew which side of the limbs would face outwards and which parts would collide.

The textures before the posing was done, and the textures after I painted according to the pose:

Environment

I think an important part of selling your character is the presentation. You can spend hundreds of hours on a project, but if you don’t present it right, people will miss out on what you made. For this project, I cared a lot about emotion and immersion in character, so I tried to take that into account when presenting. Adding a simple pedestal wouldn’t be very immersive, so I decided to create a small animated forest environment around the girl.

The process of building the natural environment:

Retrospective

I have never done a hand-painting project of this scale, and it’s safe to say it was quite a challenge. Getting all the materials to feel coherent while keeping the hand-painted details consistent in the character and environment was something that took me a lot of iterations.

However, the biggest challenge was the face. The character is supposed to be an incredibly angry and fierce young woman. Yet at the same time, I needed to sculpt her in a neutral pose so the character could be used in possible future scenes where she is conveying different emotions. In retrospect, I would’ve sculpted the character with an angry expression immediately, so I didn’t have to wait until rigging to get the feeling of the scene. I could always resculpt the face if I need new expressions.

Afterword

If you got this far, thank you for reading! I hope this inspires you to make something new!

You can find me on Artstation and Twitter. Feel free to send me a message if you have any questions!

Manuel Sitompul, General Game Artist

Interview conducted by Kirill Tokarev

© Daria Loginova for 80lvl, 2019. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 3d art, character, gamedev, indiedev, Maya, retopology, sculpting, stylized, Substance Painter, texturing, ZBrush

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Sebastian Ujhazi shared his hard-surface workflow when working on guns: modeling, texturing, and presentation.

Intro

My name is Sebastian Ujhazi, and I am a 22-year-old hard-surface artist from Osijek, Croatia. I am currently working on Serious Sam 4 at Croteam, and I also collaborate with Dekogon. My first encounter with 3D happened in 2012 when my friend and I were trying to make a game in Unity. I got introduced to Maya, but I didn’t really pick up the whole 3D thing until 2017 when I decided I wanted to do this for a living. I quickly found out that weapons and hard surfaces were the way to go for me.

Modeling

With every project, I start by collecting as much reference as I can find and at the highest quality. I get those into PureRef and arrange them to my liking. I also try to find high-quality videos of the objects on Youtube, mostly disassembly videos when I’m doing guns.

In most cases, I start making my assets with the target polycount of the low poly in mind, which means, if I know a cylinder will have 16 sides, I give it 16 sides right off the bat. That way when I’m finished with the high poly, all the low poly needs for finalization is a bit of clean-up. I use a combination of classic sub-d modeling on simple parts and creasing + ZBrush (dynamesh and polish) on more complex parts that would take more time to do in sub-d.

It works by creasing all the hard edges of the mesh and then subdividing. This way the round parts become rounder and hard edges stay hard. If we were to bring the mesh into ZBrush without creasing and subdividing, we would get banding on areas that are supposed to be rounded because of the small number of polygons. Bear in mind the topology doesn’t have to be clean at this stage, it only needs to subdivide nicely.

This can all be done in Max without creasing, just set your smoothing groups accordingly and apply a TurboSmooth modifier and check Separate by Smoothing Groups.

Before subdividing, the creased mesh is duplicated to later be cleaned up and serve as the low poly. The subdivided mesh goes into ZBrush for a dynamesh and polish pass in order to get rounded edges. I then decimate it and bring it back to Maya.

The mesh we duplicated before can now simply be cleaned up and the low poly is finished. When making a low poly mesh it’s very important to maintain a nice silhouette and make the geometry most dense in areas the player will see clearly and be close to. We can now move on to the UVs.

Both geometry and textures are incredibly important in the creation of game assets, I would not label either more important than the other. The most important part geometry wise is having a nice looking high poly for baking, and a clean, optimized low poly with good UVs and good resolution so the player can’t see obvious polygons from important angles. Textures, however, in my opinion, decide whether the final asset looks good or not. So I would dare to say that more care should go into texturing.

Texturing

We’ve definitely come a long way in real-time graphics, and except for the massive increase in polycount, the huge factor in-game assets looking as good as they do is PBR (physically based rendering). Artists are quick to grasp the ins and outs of the workflow, be it metal/rough, or spec/gloss. There’s a lot of documentation on PBR online and scanned values that can help the artists use the correct ones. I’d say the most important value is roughness (glossiness) as it is, in my opinion, the determining factor of the surface and really “sells” the material. It’s your biggest friend in material separation.

I texture all my stuff in Substance Painter and approach each asset and each material differently. Sometimes I start creating a material from scratch, for some parts I use base materials from Quixel Megascans to get the correct values, and other times I start with smart materials that are either my own or bought from other amazing artists, which I heavily tweak and go from there.

Let’s take the uzi I did for Dekogon as an example, we’ll be focusing on the main metal material. I started with a simple fill layer and tweaked it until I was happy with the look. I then added some subtle anisotropic noise to get that brushed metal feel. Some barely noticeable color variation and surface imperfections, and I have my base material ready for detailing.

After I’m satisfied with my base material, I usually go straight to the edge wear, or any kind of wear revealing the underlying material as I feel it’s important to make it look good. For this, making a good mask is key. I use a few generators, knock it down with some grunges and then hand paint some wear in and out, so it looks more natural. I sometimes also use images with shapes I’m looking for as stencils and draw those in as well.

When I’m done with the wear I move on to all the fun stuff like scratches, oil residue, smudges, dirt, and dust… I mostly approach these by using grunge maps and then removing about 80% of it by using other grunges and hand painting it out. I also use other images as stencils for some unique details.

As I see it, realism is extremely important when making guns in this typical art style. We want to make the guns look natural, but also interesting, so I tend to look at my reference, find interesting detail that occurs naturally, like oil leaks and smudges, holster wear, cool-looking scratches, etc. I try to recreate those details, exaggerate, and put my own twist on them so they look good later in the game.

Presentation

For the presentation, I usually like to have a few shots with the gun on the ground, it just feels more realistic to me when it’s grounded. It’s harder to make good shots with a ground plane, so I generally don’t make a lot of those.

I don’t really know lighting theory, so I mostly add and tweak lights until I’m happy with the result and I always make a separate lighting setup for each shot. My usual workflow here is to start with a very dim HDRI map which serves as a fill light and no other lights.

Then I create a few lights that best show off the surface details. In the case of this uzi, I have three spotlights.

Finally, I add some rim lights. These are usually strong directional lights emitting from behind the gun. Here, I colored two of them blue to make the shot a bit more interesting.

I tweak all of these lights until I’m happy with them and add more if I think I could make a certain area pop more.

Sebastian Ujhazi, Hard-Surface Artist at Croteam

Interview conducted by Kirill Tokarev

© Daria Loginova for 80lvl, 2019. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 3d art, gamedev, Hard Surface, indiedev, Maya, modeling, Substance Painter, texturing, weapon art, weapons, ZBrush

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Jonas Ronnegard presented a new set of 35 Parasitic Skin alphas/brushes for ZBrush, Substance Painter, Quixel Mixer, Blender, and other tools.

The pack has been generated and refined from a collection of Substance Designer materials created by Daniel Thiger.

Contents:

• 35 Alphas/Brushes
• 2048 x 2048 16-bit
• PSD, Tiff, PNG, Jpeg
• ZBrush Brushes

Please note that in order to use the ZBrush brushes you need to use at least ZBrush 4r8 p2. Also, the pack doesn’t include Substance Designer materials.

If can’t update to the necessary ZBrush version, add the alphas to a brush in your version of ZBrush and use the brushes. For ZBrush, it’s “easier and faster to just add one of the brushes, then import the PSD alphas and switch between the alphas rather than the brushes,” noted the artist.

You can learn more and get the pack for $6+ here.

© a.sergeev for 80lvl, 2019. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 3d art, Game Design, gamedev, indiedev, Substance Painter, ZBrush

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Lucian Stroiny did a breakdown of his UE4 environment Old Classroom: modeling, procedural bookshelves, materials, lighting.

Introduction

My name is Lucian Stroiny and I am a self-taught artist from Bucharest, Romania. I am 21 and currently a student at a Computer Science University.

My journey into 3D started when I was 12 and one of my friends told me about SketchUp. I was fascinated that I can create virtual objects/scenes. I thought that I would be an architect or something similar, but after a few years, I learned about the games workflow (UDK/Unity) and films workflow as well (3ds Max and V-Ray) and for a period of time, I used both alternatively. After that, I decided to focus on real-time game engines because it was faster and also I like to see the immediate feedback from the engine.

Old Classroom Scene

I began working in my spare time on this scene but at the same time, I was working on other projects as well. The main reason behind this project was my desire to work in the game industry as a 3D modeler after my graduation, and for that, I wanted to put all my knowledge gathered in the last few months into this scene. Also, I wanted to improve my artistic skills  (e.g. lighting, composition, color pallet, and storytelling) as well as technical skills (e.g. creating more complex materials/shaders, lighting, and post-processing, creating assets in Marvelous Designer, using vex in Houdini, etc.)

Pre-production

My goal was to create an abandoned/messy American classroom in Unreal Engine 4 in a realistic style. The first thing that I’ve done when I started this project was to gather all the references that I could find on the internet. I did this by finding inspiration everywhere: Google, Pinterest, Instagram, Arstation (for concept arts), movies/series (e.g. Young Sheldon), games (e.g. Outlast) or videos from Youtube. I used PureRef for my references organization because it’s very useful, easy and has a lot of features.

I suggest watching a video from Gleb Alexandrov about PureRef features:

Production & Modeling

After the pre-production, I started the blockout phase with the base models (modular pieces and bigger objects). Here, I set up basic lighting to get a general atmosphere of the scene.

For the walls, floor, windows, and ceiling I made modular pieces on a 1m grid so it would be easier to assemble the entire room.

The main focus in this phase was the composition, general lighting and color pallet. I didn’t want the scene to be overwhelming so I tried to maintain the balance between the crowded and the empty areas.

Also, I created some objects in Houdini so it would be easier to make more iterations. A big advantage was that I could always go back in the network and change a parameter of a node: e.g. desk:

You can see the entire time-lapse of the scene here:

My pipeline for most of the assets:

• Searching for a lot of references and think of how the objects are created in real life.
• Creating the low poly and high poly model in 3ds Max/Houdini.
• Creating texture UV and lightmap UV.
• Baking maps in Marmoset Toolbag 3.
• Creating material in Substance Painter.
• Export in Unreal Engine 4.

Since I had a lot of objects to export, I made a simple script in MAXScript. Now I only select the object that I want to export, I press on the “Export FBX” button and the object is centered at the origin and exported as .fbx in the folder where I have all the models for this project.

The scene has 94 static meshes, 3 master materials and 36 materials and material instances. The textures are between 512×512 to 4096×4096.

Here you can see all the objects made for the scene:

Books

Firstly, for the material, I made a texture atlas in Photoshop and then I imported it in Substance Designer to add some roughness/normal details. For optimization reasons, not all the books have the entire cover, some of them have only the spine.

Also, here are some close-ups with the books because these details are hardly visible in the cinematic:

My idea was to have a lot of books in the scene and to work faster and more efficiently, I made two simple HDA  (Houdini Digital Asset) for the books from bookshelves, “bookRow” and “booksPile” and you can see here an example using them:

For people using Houdini, I will give a brief explanation. For the “bookRow” I used VEX and a raycast on each book that has a direction to the previous book and then moved them in order to create an entire row. For the “bookPile” it’s a simple copyStamp node with some variations of parameters.

This kind of workflow saved me a lot of time because I had more than 20 types of books which needed to be multiplied and positioned in a random way in the bookshelves.

After I generated the models in Houdini, I made some manual changes in 3ds Max and this is the result:

Materials

Most of the props from the scene are textured in Substance Painter. This was one of the challenges for this project because it was hard to harmonize all the objects with each other. Since the scene has a lot of props, I had to work efficiently and creatively on the texturing part.

For example, when I was working on the blackboard model, I remembered that I had a photo with a lesson on the blackboard from my University so I took advantage of it. I created in Photoshop a layer with the mask for the text and to give the impression that the table was wiped before, I added some other layers with multiple masks combined. Substance has a lot of standard textures for this: Grunge Wipe grainy/dusty/leaky etc.

Besides the materials made in Substance Painter and Photoshop that I already talked about, for tileable materials I used Substance Designer. For example, this is the graph for the wood parquet:

Using an RGBA Merge Node, I packed the Ambient Occlusion, Metallic, and Roughness in one texture (one texture for each channel) because it was easier and obviously more optimized this way. This was the first time when I made materials that are more complex in Unreal Material Editor so I feel that I learned a lot during this project about it. For this scene, I used few Master Materials with simple parameters like textures, brightness, contrast, hue, tint, UV tilling, normal intensity, tessellation, dirt, dirt intensity/color/texture mask, etc.

View post on imgur.com

To add more details in the scene, I used different kinds of decals to help the storytelling, e.g. text by crayons on wood, duct tape, stains, footprints, etc.

Lighting

The lighting was a big challenge for this scene, I had many technical issues through the entire production of the project but this talk helped me a lot.

I used one main directional light with an orange tint to achieve a warm feeling, a nostalgic/dramatic atmosphere. Also, this light creates a nice contrast and gives a sense of depth in the scene.

Lighting setup:

• the main direction light (static) with an orange tint
• a point light to simulate the lighting from the hallway
• a static skylight
• outdoor: a sphere with an HDRI map from HDRI Heaven (you can find there a lot of 360 HDRI skies, all free)
• an Exponential Height Fog for volumetric fog.
• a moveable directional light (same rotation like the main directional light) because static lights don’t work correctly with the volumetric fog

For a nice effect in the area where the volumetric fog is, I used the particle dust ambient from Epic.

These are the settings for Exponential Height Fog and World Settings that worked well for this scene:

For the image projected on the white screen, I used three spotlights, each of them with a light function (for each image channel: Red, Green, and Blue) with a different delay, to create the flickering effect. Here is the tutorial that helped me with this effect:

For reflection, I used few Sphere Reflection Captures and I tried the new ray-tracing reflections, which helped me a lot, especially for some incorrect reflections on the desks.

Also, I used post-processing for color grading, ambient occlusion, bloom, and vignette. For shadows, I made them with a blue tint, to create a classic orange-blue contrast.

Conclusion

This project was a big step for me and I consider that I have learned a lot during this period.

The biggest challenge of this scene was to get good lighting because I had some technical problems and I had to improve it as I went along.

Thank you for reading! Also, I’d like to thank 80.lvl for giving me the opportunity to share some insights into my process of creation of this scene.

I hope you enjoyed it! If you have any question/feedback or you liked this scene and you want to see more of my projects, you can find me here:

• Artstation
• LinkedIn
• Youtube
• Twitter

Lucian Stroiny, Technical Artist at Ubisoft

Interview conducted by Kirill Tokarev

© Daria Loginova for 80lvl, 2019. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 3d art, environments, gamedev, Houdini, indiedev, Lighting, materials, props, Substance Designer, Substance Painter, UE4

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Jason Cheung Yi Ka prepared a breakdown of his modular environment inspired by Detroit: Become Human and made during CGMA course UE4 Modular Environment led by Clinton Crumpler.

This is the modular environment I made during CGMA’s 10-week course taught by Clinton Crumpler.

Introduction

Hi, my name is Jason Cheung Yi Kai, I’m from Hong Kong. Let’s talk about how I got into the 3D world and why I joined CGMA. Feel free to skip this part to the breakdown highlighted below if you just want to know more about my environment made at CGMA. 

I started to work in the game industry around 7 years ago, starting as a programmer, moving on to make my own indie game, then becoming a 2D freelance artist, and after that – a full-time Lead artist. I work in the Asia mobile game industry drawing kawaii anime girls, gotcha machines, lots of FTP UI / particle systems. What I want to say is that I think it happens to a lot of us after graduation where we want to do so many things but still can’t find one thing that we want to stick to. Time flies by as we keep searching for what we truly want to do with our career. And I think that’s ok, and it’s normal. There is always something new and exciting to try. But one thing that never changes is that I always end up working on games. To be more specific, I always dream about making atmospheric environments for my friends to explore in video games. Last year in December, I decided once again to quit my job to self-learn all the new 3D software solutions and get back on track focusing on 3D environments.

Self-Learning

In these 7 months, I started googling and watching lots of free YouTube tutorials, then I started buying tutorials from Gumroad and Cubebrush. One of my favorite tutorials is by Simon Fuchs – Military Radio tutorial. It teaches the basic workflow of modern 3D props, starting from a blockout to high poly, then baking to low poly. It was all new to me since the last time I learned 3D was over 7 years ago back at the university. The tutorial also shows some basic Substance Painter techniques, such as creating edge wear, mixing grunge masks to build interesting roughness for the 3D meshes, etc. It can be a bit challenging for a beginner but definitely worth the pain to finish it all the way. You will feel rewarded when you see your first industry-ready product. One thing I enjoyed the most is how the tutorial video didn’t cut out all the trial and error, so we can all witness how Simon solved the problems in real-time and listen to his thoughts on how he produces high standard assets. 

Why CGMA

After a lot of online tutorials, I wanted to make my own 3D environment. I tried to follow the tips and tricks learned to make modular pieces and trim sheets, but I still felt a bit lost. It is hard to understand if I’m on the right track or not and at the same time, it is difficult for me to find any informative critique or feedback online. That is when I decided to join the 10-weeks Modular Environment course at CGMA and learn from Clinton Crumpler. 

The course is perfect for people like me who want to learn from professionals overseas. There are heaps of learning material and video tutorials provided by Clinton all in one place. But the best part is the Live Q&A section and weekly feedback, where you can feel no shame in asking any 3D related questions. Clinton is a very knowledgeable professional environment artist who can give you useful personal feedback and push your work to the next level. Another cool thing is that I can also learn from other classmate’s assignments through feedback provided by Clinton. Because this is a group learning course, we can take this opportunity to motivate each other toward the same goal and grow together. 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. All in all, my goal for this course was very simple – a great 3D environment piece for my portfolio. And after 11 weeks I achieved it! Although my final product may not be a masterpiece, it helped me improve so much compared to my old work. And now I’m here to share my process. Hopefully, you will find something useful!

Detroit Become Human in Hong Kong Fan Art: Breakdown

Reference & Planning

The first step before starting most projects is referencing. Gather as many references as you can to get a better idea of what kind of objects you will need and how they will look – a great tool for this is Pinterest. It is very tempting to start the project straight away without any references but this will likely cause more unnecessary work down the line unless you are a high-end industry professional who has a massive visual library inside your head. I always suggest having lots of references for every single project you start. 

When you are searching for reference, remember that not everything must look exactly the same as what’s on your mind, because you don’t want to waste too much time searching for that one image. Also, it is a good opportunity to accept cool new ideas to spice up your scene. For example, while I was searching for lots of old traditional Hong Kong cafe furniture I accidentally found a fancy red couch on Pinterest. The red couch inspired me to make it one of the focal points: this is where a leader would sit to impose his/her authority in the space. 

I also like to create another Pinterest board focusing on finding lighting and color references for my scene. It helps to get a better idea of the mood, drama and lighting composition. That is when I got the idea to add lots of window blinds on the side of my 3D environment and red neon lights shining from the outside illuminating the gloomy green room. You can search for Cinematography references to get lots of atmospheric shots. Mine scene was inspired by Christopher Doyle. 

Lastly, before you finish referencing, scroll through the board again and get rid of the unnecessary pins, try to only stick to one or two color schemes and one or two settings. Don’t let your board get too messy. The bad thing about personal projects is that you can have so much freedom that it’s easy to lose your direction. Therefore, references can help narrow down your target.

After referencing, I always like to do a very rough sketch or photo bash to see if all elements match together. This can be a very ugly sketch but it doesn’t matter as long as you get the whole picture in your head and feel confident to move on to the next step. It is always good to sketch the ideas out than just imagine them in your head because our imagination always shows things far prettier than they are in reality. This rough sketch can also guide you later in the project. We don’t want to keep changing ideas in the middle of a 10-week project. Commit to it!

Blockout

The next step is blockout. During the blockout stage, we will need to make sure everything snaps well together and scales properly. Therefore, I always start from importing a human.fbx as my scale reference – all other blockout assets will be based on it. After that, we will need to make sure to set up our grid in the 3D software to match with Unreal editor. You can follow this tutorial to set it up properly. 

After that, we can start building our blockout. Remember that all blockout shapes should be extremely simple, don’t invest too much time into complex shapes yet. All we need to focus on right now is the overall silhouette, scale, and snapping it nicely to the grid. Another thing to keep in mind is to always start from the larger meshes like a wall, floor or pillar and skip the small assets like a bottle, books, etc. Just like in real life, you don’t put furniture in before all the walls and ceiling are properly built. 

Export Assets into Unreal Engine

After most of our blockout is finished, I usually do an auto UV in Maya and set up the pivot point at the bottom left corner, so that the pieces can snap easily together like lego pieces. 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. It can save a lot of time when moving your modular pieces to the center. Freeze transformation every time you want to export. Also, you only need to set up the export path once and it will be saved for your next export.

After we export the assets into Unreal we can start building our scene. During this stage, we can do as many changes or rescaling as we want. It is recommended to spend some extra time going back and forward to make sure the scene looks interesting in different camera angles and all modular pieces snap together without any gap in-between. 

I also like to set up some very basic lighting early on to get a better understanding of my scene composition. However, you don’t have to do this if you’ve never baked lighting in Unreal before. Lighting can be very time-consuming, so don’t waste too much time on it and just use the default directional light – all the lights will be modified anyway after the whole scene is set up. 

Light Blocker

Usually, one problem we will encounter during the blockout stage in Unreal is the light shining through some of the modular pieces which create a lot of ugly light bleeds after the light bake. What we need to do is build a light blocker to get rid of all of that light bleeding. A light blocker is a single mesh that covers up the whole room, so the light won’t shine through it. You can see it in the image below. Keep it in low poly, with no textures and UVs because no one is supposed to see it unless the game is bugged. The light blocker will be placed outside your scene like this.

Tileable Trim Sheet

Once we are happy with our blockout, we can move on to texturing! Again, always start from the big assets first.

Before we jump into Substance or Photoshop we should go back to our references and analyze what can put into the trim, like in the image below. Try to observe any repetitive patterns or textures that can be used all over your scene.

Here is a great video by Tim Simpson explaining in detail how to use trims: 

Another thing we need to be careful about when creating a trim sheet is to make sure each trim snaps nicely to the UV grid. Before CGMA, I used to create different ratios of trims in Photoshop and ended up having a hard time UV mapping and making them look seamless later on. Therefore, remember to keep everything snapped onto a grid either 1×1, 0.5×0.5 or 0.25×0.25. I usually start by making a Trim Sheet plan in Photoshop, using the grid and ruler tool to plan my trim sheet ratio.

Lastly, let’s talk about UV mapping using the trim sheet method. It is ok to create some extra edge loops to match our trim. 

For example, in the wall shown in the image below, I added one edge loop at the top part and UV mapped it to match my beveled wall trim. I also added a few edge loops in the highlighted area, so that I could match it with my flourish pattern trim. Then, the rest of the mesh will be assigned to another tileable material.  

Another example is the pillar in my scene: I added some extra edge loops shown in the image below just to match grout and mosaic tiles. It can be vertical, horizontal or curved.

One more example is the window blinds  – they all use the same trim sheet.

There are three types of textures: unique bake, tileable and hybrid. Unique bake will always look the best. However, learning to be an environment artist will definitely involve using more tileable techniques, such as the trim sheet. It can save up texture size and reduce time.

Environment Story

Environmental storytelling is always one of my favorite subjects to research where the story can be told through the placement of each object, the type of object, movement, lighting and more. You can learn more from the article by Harvey Smith and Matthias Worch if you want to know more about it.

I decided to make a scene combining the rA9 backstory of “Detroit: Become Human” with an urban Hong Kong theme. It was originally planned to make just a Hong Kong hideout, however, my plan slowly evolved into this new idea influenced by Hong Kong anti-extradition bill protests in June 2019. I embedded this theme into my scene to give the audience an opportunity to choose how they want to feel – similarly to Detroit: Become Human where people can choose to view the story from different perspectives and support different opinions.  

Following this, I want to talk about three things that can increase environmental storytelling in your scene:

• Decal and Vertex Paint
• Lighting and Atmospheric fog
• Movement

Decal and Vertex paint

The decals and vertex paint play a big role in environmental storytelling. For example, the dirt and leakage on the wall are all vertex paint. It not only helps to break the repetition of a tileable texture but also makes it less plain and tells a better story about the place. The viewer can understand that it hasn’t been clean for a long time and the people who live there might be too focused on something else than cleanliness. Here is an example of before and after vertex paint:

Vertex paint works by blending two sets of materials using a custom painted mask in Unreal. However, if we are just using the default Unreal brush, the vertex paint will blend poorly and look fake. A tip to make your vertex paint blend more naturally is to add an extra mask into your Vertex Paint Material. Here is my material setup:

As you can see, we blend two materials by using MatLayerBlend_Standard, and its alpha input will be our Vertex paint mixed with our grunge mask. I used HeightLerp to mix the vertex paint with our grunge mask and also added some parameters to adjust later such as the height contrast.   

You can experiment with a different black and white mask to create various blend results.  

My wall tiles are also using vertex paint. The image below shows what it looks like in the vertex paint mode. The awkward green and black tile at the center is the Unreal vertex paint. Green means it will be showing material B and black will be material A. You can see that the paint is in a very low resolution and quite messy but do not worry because the black and white grunge mask will help blend it very nicely. 

Decals are like a spray for us we can cover everything in the scene with. For example, the bloodstain and trails are all decals carefully placed in a certain area. Again, decals to create more drama in the scene and break the repetition. For example, all the rA9 graffiti on the wall, bench, table, etc. won’t be using the vertex paint method because it can be quite expensive. Also, sometimes vertex paint can still look repetitive. Decals give more freedom and can be scaled any way you want. I highly recommend learning it, as it can add lots of character to your textures.

Lighting

For a beginner, the lighting might sound like a very easy task but actually, it is very difficult, especially when creating interior lighting. I tried so many iterations adding different lighting colors, more lights, post-processing effects, fog but it ended up nowhere. I think it is common for a student like me to go crazy by adding too many lights and effects too quickly. After this project, I found out that I should start from big to small just like with the blockout. It is better to delete all the lights, post-processing effects, and fog except for the skylight and everything outside the window. Then, we can slowly fine-tune the exposure in the Post-Process Volume, adjust the exterior light’s intensity, the Indirect Lighting intensity to bounce more light into the room and lastly, the Lightmass in the World Setting. 

I used Preview light quality for faster bake results as there is no need to bake with high settings just yet. Now the scene looks super dark and it is perfect! It is almost like an empty canvas for me to fill with lighting effects. What I’m going to do next is add only one key lighting into the interior. And it already looks a lot more realistic and much cleaner than before. 

As I do this, I like to check the light brightness and contrast in the Detail lighting View Mode because when I slowly add more small lights and tint into the scene it is very easy for the scene to become overexposed.  

I will only put lights around the area I want the audience to look at, such as the red table, monitors, the messages, bloodstains, and drones. Also, I try to limit my scene to only two colors: teal and red. This way, the scene won’t look too messy. 

Movement

During the CGMA course, I wasn’t able to put any animation into my final submission. However, I feel the movement is very important in the environment or else it can feel lifeless. Lucky with modern technology, simple animations like spinning fans or floating drones aren’t hard to create. I spent one extra week polishing up my scene, adding animation and particles in it. I wasn’t making professional-quality animation and kept it basic, but I feel it added so much to the scene – the blinking police lights can indicate a crime scene, drones rotating left and right can express a search for something. The wind blowing heavily outside the window, the dust flowing in the room, etc. – all of this helps heighten the atmosphere and storytelling in the scene. The particles weren’t created by me and were taken from the UE Elemental Demo scene. I recommend downloading or buying particle effects from the Unreal store if you are not planning to be a VFX artist. Get the effects that suit you, then modify them. For example, the dust effect in my scene was used as a blizzard storm, and all I had to do is to slow down the speed, reduce the spawn rate, and the opacity.

Challenge

Time is always the biggest hurdle especially when I am new to something and trying to make a scene of a high standard. Try to learn from experience and improve on your next attempt. Reading more 80lv articles will help too! The other challenge was to create realistic micro details. For example, it is easy to make just a mosaic tile floor but it is not easy to make a believable mosaic tile floor. It will require the right amount of edge wear, dirt at the right spot, the right amount of roughness and randomness to break the repetition. Again, I think this can be improved by making more materials and watching more tutorials. Also, join the DiNusty Discord group – it is a friendly community full of professionals and beginners who are willing to share and help each other. 

Afterword

CGMA is a fantastic school. I was able to finish this whole scene in 11 weeks thanks to Clinton’s guidance and all my classmates. Like I mentioned before, the best part is the feedback, Live Q&A and the discord group. I can read as many online tutorials as I can, but nothing can replace getting direct feedback from professional and being motivated by your classmates.  

I do hope you found something valuable here! And thank you 80lv for giving me this opportunity to share my work.

Jason Cheung Yi Ka, Environment/Prop Artist

Interview conducted by Kirill Tokarev

© Daria Loginova for 80lvl, 2019. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 3d art, CGMA, clinton crumpler, decals, environments, gamedev, indiedev, Maya, modular, Modular Environments, Substance Painter, UE4, vertex paint

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Alex Trevino shared a timelapse breakdown of the texturing part behind a 3D asset based on a Sheng Lam concept POTIFY. The video is an amazing example of the high quality you can achieve in Substance Painter.

“It took me six hours to make, I recorded my failings and successes.”

The final asset has this awesome look that makes you believe it’s an actual portable audio player you can turn on. You could use other tools to get this quality, of course, but right now it’s pretty difficult to compete with the Painter’s speed and usability.

The asset is based on one of the alternative social brands imagined by concept artist Sheng Lam we’ve featured a month ago:

You can learn more about the social media project in our article here.

© a.sergeev for 80lvl, 2019. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 3d art, gamedev, indiedev, sp, Substance Painter, substance3d, texturing

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Guillaume Mahieu shared the stylized character workflow in ZBrush, Blender, and Substance Painter.

Introduction

Hey! My name is Guillaume Mahieu. I’m 25 and I’m from Belgium. I’m currently working in Spain at Elite3D in Valencia as a Junior Character Artist.

Speaking of my career path, I did a Bac +3 in graphic design at Albert Jacquards School (Namur, Belgium). After my studies, I worked as a freelance artist for several companies on game projects, 3D print, VR, and more.  As for the video game industry, I have been working at Elite3D for almost a year.

The 3D industry is so incredibly interesting to me because it’s a field which is evolving all the time and you are always learning new things. You always want to outdo yourself when you start a new project. I think I will always be an eternal unsatisfied fella!

Switching to Blender

At the moment, I’m trying to switch from Maya to Blender during my spare time. The breaking point happened some weeks ago when I saw how good the version 2.8 was. The real-time viewport by itself is already something powerful to use and can speed up your workflow a lot. To me, Blender is very much like a Swiss knife… you can do all your work using it without switching to another software. That’s really amazing and it’s free.

I like the fact that the developers take the users’ opinion into consideration as well as the fact that the Blender community is really active. Blender is the future!

Character Production in ZBrush

My personal rule is to always start with a concept that catches my attention. That’s where the hype begins!

My approach to stylized characters is actually very common. Using PureRef, I create a board with the original concept and multiple pictures which could help me during the sculpting process like anatomy references, cloth folds, other stylized work, etc.

The blocking is by far the most important step of the workflow. I always start with Zspheres, Dynamesh or use the Sculptris Pro in ZBrush 2018 to create the overall character using multiples subtools. At this stage, you need to take into consideration the flow and the silhouette: the primary shapes are the priority. Once and only once the primary shapes are correct you can go further with the secondary and tertiary shapes.

Sculpting accurate and more realistic anatomy is very important when I work on a stylized character. Next step is to clean and simplify the model using the Hpolish, TrimDynamic and Smooth brushes. You need to avoid the micro details as much as you can. Try to create your own ‘mannequin’ to place the anatomy correctly before going too far in the shaping!

In the case of the Witch project, I wanted to sculpt the character completely asymmetrical as a personal challenge and exercise. Once my ‘mannequin’ was done, I started to pose the character with the tool Transpose Master and blocked the subtools.

Modeling Assets

Speaking of the hard-surface stuff like the jewelry and the blade, most of the time I use common 3D software (Blender, Maya, 3ds Max) to block the shape and then I detail it further in ZBrush.

This time, for the jewelry stones, I used a simple primitive cylinder in ZBrush, set it up in the initialize panel and used Zmodeler brush to add some bevels and support loops.

Then, I used the Claytubes and trimDynamic brush to sculpt the edges. For the strings on the character, I simply used the CurveStrapSnap – it’s as simple as that.

Texturing

Given the fact that my character is completely asymmetrical and part of a video game project, I only did a simple decimation of every subtool to speed up the workflow. I used Blender to do the 4 UV sets I needed: one for the hair, one for the skin, one for the clothes, and one for the rock/dagger. The model is now ready to be textured.

Now let’s talk about the texturing process!

I only use Substance Painter whenever I need to texture a character by combining the use of generators, hand-painting, and baked maps to control every little detail. The main thing I do for stylized projects compared to realistic ones is to have a nice definition of details and contrast in my Albedo. I always use the same maps in order to achieve a stylized result:

• The AO using it as an inverted mask
• Cavity map
• Curvature (boosted with level filter)
• Thickness (Fake SSS for skin mixed with AO)

I painted the more specific details by hand like the redness of the skin, the dirty parts, the dust on clothes, shadows, etc. In general, I also add some overall layers like the sharpen and the maps with different blending modes to increase the details and contrast even more.

Once happy with the textures in Substance Painter, it’s time to send all of them in Blender and work with our friend Eevee. As an example, here is the shader with the textures of the skin part.

Rendering

For the rendering of the final shot, I used the Real-Time engine from Blender Eevee, which is a big advantage of the 2.8 version. I can’t say too much about it now because I’m still getting used to it. However, the lighting was easy to do: I used a simple three-point lighting setup with one blue rim light on the back, one front light, and one spotlight at the top.

Afterword

Switching from one software to another was by far the biggest challenge for this project. I was a bit lost at the beginning and I hadn’t much time to find all the tools I’m used to. Regarding the character, the most challenging parts of the project were:

• The asymmetrical sculpting. I had to be accurate with the proportions
• The hair was a bit difficult to sculpt as I couldn’t see the back of the head on the original concept

I challenged myself with this concept because I’m not used to modeling female characters, so it was kind of a challenge to do it properly and I enjoyed it quite a lot. It gave me the motivation to reiterate!

Hope you enjoyed reading this article and learned something new!

Guillaume Mahieu, Junior Character Artist at Elite3D

Interview conducted by Kirill Tokarev

© Daria Loginova for 80lvl, 2019. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 3d art, Blender, character, gamedev, indiedev, sculpting, stylized, Substance Painter, texturing, ZBrush

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Antonio Sánchez did a breakdown of his Cyberpunk Yakuza character made with ZBrush, 3ds Max, Marvelous Designer, and Substance Painter.

Introduction

My name is Antonio Sánchez, although my nickname is Otto. I’ve been a character artist and a digital modeler for 3 years. I studied Fine Arts at the University of Seville (Spain), with a major in Sculpture, since my goal was to become a professional sculptor. However, in Spain it is quite difficult to make a living with this work, so, I decided to try my luck in the world of video games, seeing that a good friend of mine from the university was already working in this industry. So I moved to Madrid to study a Master Degree in Art and Video Game Design. After finishing it, I got my first professional experience in the industry at Elite3d, located in Valencia. Since then I have not stopped working and learning every day.

Cyberpunk Yakuza: Idea & Inspiration

My interest in the field of Design increased when I was working at Mercury Steam (Madrid) on their latest project SpaceLords, an action game about futuristic adventures. I was lucky to work very closely with the design team which was a real privilege. This experience plus everything I had seen about Cyberpunk 2077  and the movie Alita was what prompted me to get down to work on my new character. The idea was to create a kind of bounty hunter/yakuza with cybernetic improvements, a cyborg, but more human than cyborg.

Start of the Project

As in any design project, the first step was to work on the collection of documentation and references. Then I started working in ZBrush, using a base in T position, just on general volumes, composition, and silhouettes, nothing very elaborated. For the mechanical parts, I used a mix of traditional polygonal modeling techniques and new ZBrush tools such as Snapshot3D and Liveboolean. Finally, after making a quick sketch in ZBrush, I took it to 3ds Max in order to make it as clean as possible. After this, I returned to ZBrush to start the details pass. The last steps are the usual ones: the low poly model, UVs, bakes, and textures.

Helmet

The base of the helmet was made in ZBrush. I have to say that this part was what cost me the most in terms of time. When I finally got all the general forms to work well, I carried the model to 3ds Max to work on the volume and get clean edges and shapes. Some details were finished in ZBrush with Liveboolean in order to save time. Liveboolean allows you to save a lot of time, and if you keep working an orderly and regular way, you can always make changes without any problems.

Clothes

The jacket, shirt, and pants aren’t really that complex if you know how to use Marvelous Designer. In terms of production, its main advantage is that you can get totally realistic results in less time, unlike ZBrush where you have to model wrinkle by wrinkle. For me, the key to Marvelous Designer is to find good patterns and control the physics of the tissues, as well as being methodical and organized, and, of course, arming yourself with patience since the program usually does strange things. In the case of Yakuza, the most problematic thing was the hood. To avoid problems, I usually freeze and unfreeze the pieces and always work with the lowest possible resolution. Sometimes, I also change the order of the layers.

Cyber Hand

For the Cyber hand, I have followed the same workflow as for the helmet. First of all, I made some sketches in ZBrush. When I managed to catch the sense of the joints, I took everything to 3ds Max in order to create a clean base over it. With this base, I could work comfortably in ZBrush with Liveboolean and Snapshot3D. The rest of the pieces such as cables and screws are simple Insert Mesh placed strategically.

Texturing

Speaking of the texture work, first of all, I used Marmoset Toolbag to make the baking since it allows you to clean the maps very easily and save time. Then, after cleaning all the maps, I worked on the color in Substance Painter.

I have used some alphas and drawings, such as the silkscreen print on the back of the jacket. The silkscreen print is inspired by Japanese devils. I drew it on paper, then cleaned it and finally colored in Photoshop.

Presentation

I tried to approach the character presentation from the point of view of the design, integrating him into a scene and atmosphere according to his style to make the shot more credible. Some backgrounds are images found on the internet and others have been made manually based on references.

For the poses, I used some mocaps from the internet – I spent quite some time searching until I found the ones I liked. After that, I made small adjustments in 3ds Max, where I also worked the static poses and the animations to finally see the character coming to life. As for the lighting, although it can seem a little complicated, I prefer to render the lights in Marmoset separately and then work with them in layers in Photoshop. This allows me to play with each element and have greater control over the final result.

Antonio Sánchez, Character Artist

Interview conducted by Kirill Tokarev

© Daria Loginova for 80lvl, 2019. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 3d art, 3D Modeling, 3DS Max, character, cyberpunk, gamedev, indiedev, modeling, Substance Painter, ZBrush

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Victor Petersson did a breakdown of his character Narcissism Priest made with ZBrush, Marvelous Designer, and Substance Painter.

Introduction

My name is Victor Petersson, I am a freelance character artist from Stockholm, Sweden. I started experimenting with 3D at school (we learned a bit of Autodesk 3ds Max 2010 during the classes) and found it really enjoyable. Since then, it became a hobby that slowly evolved into something bigger. I went to a school called The Game Assembly where I focused on 3D game art and later on, I joined the industry. Previously, I have worked at Starbreeze contributing to Payday 2 and a newly founded studio that was closed, unfortunately, before shipping the first game. Now, I work on freelance tasks and update my portfolio waiting for the right studio gig.

Narcissism Priest

Choosing a Concept

The project Narcissism Priest was started right after the studio mentioned above was shut down. I knew I needed to have a new portfolio piece that showcased my current level, plus I wanted to create something enjoyable. So I started to look for concepts that caught my attention with either a lot of style or personality. Working from a finished concept is a great option if you don’t want to spend too much time on designing, – this way, you get a chance to focus more on modeling and presentation. There is always a drawback, though: if you do not succeed in matching the concept you will end up with a piece that will be perceived negatively compared to the concept itself. With this in mind, the hardest part when searching for a concept to recreate was to find something that would be fun, yet not overly complicated. I needed to get a new portfolio piece as soon as possible so that I could start looking for freelance gigs or a studio position. All in all, I ended up choosing Hayun Lee’s Narcissism Priest which had been in my “Concepts I want to do” folder for a while.

I think it is a lovely character with a lot of opportunities to showcase personality. But the absolute best part which made me choose this concept over others was the breakdown image he made. If you ever want to make a character from an existing concept, try to find one with this kind of breakdown where you can clearly see the character from the back and front. It will save you a lot of time when working in 3D as you can see all the details.

I also wanted to add a twist to the character as I looked for some artistic freedom rather than strictly following the concept, so I decided to make the character female and change some minor details. I reached out to the concept artist asking if he was fine with me making the changes. This was a great conversation and Hayun came up with great suggestions regarding how I should change the shoes and other details.

Start of the Character

I started the character with the face, – this is something I probably wouldn’t have done in production, but in this case, I wanted to start with a fun part. After the face was made, the focus was to get a body that matched the concept in terms of proportions. When making the body I worked from my own basemesh to save time and not to worry about the topology. I blocked out the female figure I felt matched the concept – it was pretty rough but great to start draping the clothes over. The only tool I used during this process was ZBrush where I utilized the transpose line, move brush and smooth brush. These tools are all you need to work on major shapes. Keep it simple and low poly during this stage and do not rush into detailing anything.

Clothes

I tried creating clothes in Marvelous Designer but I realized quite early on that I only wanted to use it as a blockout tool for the major forms. Making a garment like in my project would be far too time-consuming in Marvelous compared to sculpting out the folds and secondary forms in ZBrush. This is what I ended up using MD for:

The benefit of using MD in the beginning, however, was that the time it took me to get the base shapes was drastically reduced compared to making them from scratch in ZBrush. After MD, I started changing the base shapes in ZBrush utilizing the same move brush, transpose line, smooth brush and also masking. Then, I added all the remaining elements. Heres the first blockout of the entire character in ZBrush:

This step can be quite discouraging because it’s far from the end product, but it’s really important to get a good overview of the character before committing to polishing. First, always focus on the primary shapes – the more you are happy with the primary forms and proportions, the stronger the end product will be. From there on, it is all about polishing up all the elements and extracting details one piece of the character at a time. Here’s an example of the cloth progression:

This stage is the most fun one for me, as you can take something that looks quite blobby and make it shine.

Texturing

A big part of why I chose to do this certain concept was that I liked all the different materials present in it. I am a big fan of cloth, leather, and metal combines with each other. First, I try to get a good base in the high poly – if I can not feel what the material is from the bakes I need to go back to the high poly and work on it a bit more. However, I do not want to overdo the high poly either. I sculpted the high poly to a stage where no micro details were present. This means that I had tertiary details like memory folds and other material characteristics whereas details like stitches and fabric patterns were added later in Substance Painter to the flexibility of a package like SP intact. Substance Painter is a very powerful tool that lets you iterate crazy fast – you can change things like pattern density and strength, the color of the material and amount of dirt and such with the drag of a slider. For this reason, it is very important not to add too many micro and tertiary details in your sculpt.

When I am texturing, I always start with fill layers where I get my base values down. The roughness in conjunction with the base color is great to block in early. From there, I added subtle variations with different noises which I start to layer one by one to break up the albedo and roughness. In these layers, I also paint on top of the noises to break up the tiling of the procedural noise. On top of these layers, I add micro details like fabric patterns, stitches, seam lines and other tertiary details that are needed. Even though it is not physically correct, after that, I like to add a slight AO on top of the base color and the roughness channel to give it slightly more contrast and further variation. These are the steps I take for every material (except for the skin which is a longer process). From there, it is all about adding dirt and blood and tweaking the material in my renderer of choice.

Something very important when texturing is to do all your materials next to each other so that you could clearly see how they interact. You want to aim for high differentiation between different kinds of materials like cloth, leather, and metal, either through color contrast or roughness.

When I started to work on the presentation, I decided that I want to give the character a story. I was thinking that she might have recently smashed some kind of a heretic to the ground with her book while walking through a dark gothic dirty street. I needed her clothes to reflect this story. Here, references came in real handy. I chose a direction which the blood was coming from and then I started painting it.

The blood was painted with different native Substance brushes, some swapped with Alphas. Mainly, Dirt 1-3 and the Spot brush were used. The key is to paint in a mask of a fill layer which allows you to add and subtract very easily. The same goes for the dirt. The trick is to think of where the dirt comes from. In my case, the character is walking along the dirty wet cobblestone city streets, so the dirt is coming in the form of sand, mud, and water that she lifts when walking. This makes the dirt form a natural gradient from the feet upwards. Because the dirt is wet it needs to be soaked up into her cloth. This effect is achieved through a very light painted layer underneath the dirt of the same color but with way lower opacity, plus blurring all the dirt to give it that wet soaked feeling.

Presentation

It took me a great deal of time to nail the pose and camera angle. During the posing stage, you really should get as much possible feedback you can find. I would recommend Polycount, different Discord channels or just your friends (which s even better). The more eyes review your work the better. In conjunction with the pose, you should also mind your camera position and lighting. I can not overstate how important the camera is for the final presentation. Here is an image that shows my progress:

It takes a long time to make a good presentation. In my case, it took around 8 days including posing, setting up the camera, and lighting. The only thing I used were spotlights, a ton of spotlights. The biggest tip I can give here is to take time and move away from your computer to refresh your eyes and mind. Let other people see the shot and give you feedback, then keep pushing it. A bad presentation can kill a great character, so give it the time it deserves.

Afterword

The biggest challenge during this project was not to stress out which could lead to rushing things or cutting corners. I used this project as a tool to summarize all my knowledge and workflows I use in character art. The benefit of this was that it showed me where I needed to improve and also taught me discipline. It ended up being a very personal piece for me and I am very glad that I’ve finished it. The most important thing learned is that no matter how personal the piece is you should always talk to other people about it – not just for the sake of getting feedback, but also to get a reality check once in a while. In the end, we are not only artists, but also people, so take care of yourself no matter how much you want to finish a piece.

Victor Petersson, 3D Character Artist

Interview conducted by Kirill Tokarev

© Daria Loginova for 80lvl, 2019. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 3d art, 3d sculpting, character, character art, clothes, gamedev, indiedev, Marvelous Designer, Substance Painter, texturing, ZBrush

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