How a 3D Artist Creates 3D Environments (Full workflow Breakdown)

If you want to learn how to make Ghibli style textures in Substance Painter, the latest course from the 3D Coloring book was made for you. I'll leave a link in the description if you want to consider getting the course. Now let's get into this week's video. Hello, my name is Rasmus Bauner. I will go over how I made the scene, tomb of Atvi Langfinger. I will go over why I made the scene, references, blockout and lighting, tileable materials, asset creation, Substance Painter, masked shader in Unreal, final lighting and post-processing, and what I've learned. I hope you enjoy the video. Okay, let's go over why I made the scene and what I wanted to learn with it. For this scene I wanted to improve my ZBrush sculpting skills and my composition skills. I especially wanted to make my own scene that didn't follow a reference one-to-one. I think it's really important to be able to do that as you might not always have a concept to go by at a studio. And it will allow me to do more scenes and crazier things of my own. And that's very much my goal with 3D, creating my own worlds. As for the ZBrush sculpting, I felt like it lacked for quite a while compared to what you see from many other artists. And I thought I absolutely wanted to achieve that level with this scene. And that's the main two things I wanted to learn. There's of course also lighting and texturing and so on, but they were much less important for the scene. Let's go over the reference board for this project. I am using PureRef as my main reference software. It's a super nice infinite workspace reference board. I really recommend it. So I knew I wanted to create my own composition, but I still wanted a lot of solid reference of course, which is super important even if you're coming up with your own ideas. So you still have a solid guide on what direction and ideas to go for. I took a lot of inspiration from this one in the beginning. I then further developed on it and expanded the room a lot more. You will see more of this in the block out face section. Then I really like the colors and the ground, especially the walls on this one. This incredible art piece from Jonas. The colors are super vibrant, the light works really well and everything just works incredibly well. So a big inspiration for the scene over here from Jordan. Again, solid colors, the light is spot on. I love the statue idea here. The small ratios up here mixing the materials was really cool. So these are my main refs. Then I have secondary references. These I take smaller ideas from, for example, here from God of War. I really like the metal part here, how it works, and I incorporated that into my own door. Again, I really like the colors here, the reds and the greens. Super cool door here from Raid Shadow Legend. The propping here and everything is super grounded. The way Nate did it is amazing. Here the ice, how it's forming downwards is really cool. How the root is growing. The stairs, everything here. I like the strong focal area, which is the bright golden door. And here again, strong lighting. Then I have my detailing section. Here I take even smaller hints like the small stones here, how the rock looks. Again here, the super nice roughness, how the planks are placed. Really nice breakup of the ground. That looks incredible. Colors, how the rock is made. How the, yeah, propping, everything. So this is more for smaller things that I could use in my scene. Then we have the props here. A lot of stuff from God of War, since it's the main inspiration for the scene. Again, I wanted to improve my sculpting skills with this scene. So I thought it would be a good idea to look at what other artists did. And yeah, again, what the artists did at Sony Santa Monica and their partners was incredible. And I wanted to try and hit their benchmark as much as possible. So I just dug into Artstation and found as much as I could from them. Then we have the material section over here. How the ice looks, the super vibrant colors, the rock surface and the stone wall. I do prefer using real life reference a lot, but it can sometimes be hard. And then finding solid digital art is also an option. Again, I love the depth in the material here. It's super, super cool. Some lichen, the stone surface for the assets. I didn't want too much normal information and some mud, of course. Yeah, that's it for the references. It's super important to have solid reference when you start out trying to do your own compositions, because you really must have something to grab onto so you don't stall in the middle of the creation of it. Have a solid idea for your project and then just come back and look at all the amazing art you have in your reference board and take ideas. It's super, super important. This is the first iteration I did of the scene. I knew I wanted a large door in the back and the opening to the right with a channel running through the middle. It did feel quite enclosed and way too linear for me. It felt too boring to be honest and I needed to open up the space much more. So I did that in the iteration two. Much more space, pivoted the channel outwards, added more pillars to the sides, made the hole much bigger and added the two statues here with the chain trying to break open the tomb door. But I thought it could be even more open, so I did this iteration. Added some very beefy pillars, all the statues. Again, much more open, I refined the block out much more. I really recommend using a lot of time on the block out stage, because this defines how the composition looks of course and that's by far one of the most important things about environment art creation. I highly recommend asking your, if you have any art friends, any mentors or teachers, really just ask anybody you think could have good ideas for your scene. It's super important to get solid feedback because you can very easily get tunnel visioned if you just crunch away on your scene for a very long time. I asked a ton of people for feedback for the scene, former colleagues at Ubisoft, my current colleagues, my art friends and just a ton of people. And the scene would definitely not have come out as it did without their input and it is super important, so ask everybody for feedback. I use Substance Designer to make my tileable materials, both for the ground and for the assets that use the masked workflow. This is one of the ground tileable materials. I wanted a strong height and I wanted a strong albedo separation, so you could clearly see the the rock surface, the moss and the highlighted edges. I used Daniel Tiger's tutorial to achieve this look. I highly recommend that you check him out, he has some really really solid stuff. Here's another of the ground materials. It retains the same albedo values so they are able to blend well. I had the same main ideas, a strong height as well. For the assets I mainly used this texture. I had to make sure it didn't have a lot of height information because I didn't want to break the big normal from the high poly assets. So mainly small surface information on this one, a little bit of albedo value. I didn't want to go too crazy. Some roughness information as well. And here is another for the assets that use the masked workflow. I actually didn't end up using this texture, but I wanted to show that I didn't get the the final materials at all in the first go. It was very much an iterative process. I initially made materials that had way too much normal and height information and it instantly broke the big normal information from the high poly to the low poly. So I had to go back, redo a lot of things, remove albedo information and height information so it allowed the norm big normals to do its thing. Which was the main idea with the the materials for the masked workflow. Let's go over how I created the assets. In this case the snake statue. I knew the statue were going to sit on a pillar so it should have a relatively flat bottom. It would be connected to the cave wall. So having a more organic rock in the back and then the actual statue in the front would be really cool. I wanted to get something very similar to the incredible artist did over at the Santa Monica studio with a god of war statues here. Super super amazing stuff. I then expanded my search a bit and thought a ship figure head would be very very fitting. And I found this guy for example. I really like the the shape of it, the patterns, the tongue especially. I thought it was awesome. Then again the patterns of everything. After this I went into Modo. You can of course use any software you want. It depended a bit on the actual asset if I started out in Modo or if I just did it in ZBrush. I wanted to design the asset from the bottom up so I felt it was a bit idea to use Modo. So I just took it to a decent face and then I subdivided the the asset like this and then I exported it into ZBrush here. And within ZBrush everything got a proper shape and pattern. The base became an actual rock. The whole head got some designs. I had different materials like the gem here, a metal. I didn't really use many super crazy brushes for this one. I used the clay build up a lot for most of the the shapes. Like these guys in here I just clay build up and then I smoothed it a bit. Same with the indentation. Just super quickly make some inset here and then smoothed it out. I use the mallet fast as well a lot. It's super super good for sharp edges. I use the trim dynamic here also a lot with a square. A square alpha. This is probably one I use the most for this area here, areas here. Again it gives a super super cool look. And I just went over the whole statue like this adding a bunch of patterns and all the shapes in here. I really recommend just having a bunch of fun with this stage. It's absolutely one of my favorite stages of scene creation. Just sitting back and relaxing and sculpting away is super fun. I highly recommend going back to your reference a lot and checking out how it looks in the real world. It was a bit hard to translate the wood here into the stone. So I looked again a lot on how the artist did it at God of War. When the high poly is done I need to export two versions. I need to export the high poly itself of course and I also export a decimated low poly. The high poly is usually reduced by going up here pre-processing and then decimating here by around 60-70% for the most parts. That's because you don't really need this much resolution in your high poly and it makes the baking much faster. As for the low poly for this guy I really just went down here, merged visible letters to this thing, went over append here and then just reduced this guy by going up here pre-processing and going way down here and decimating it. Then after I've decimated the first time I go over here to dynamesh. Then I dynamesh it by a certain resolution. It depends on the scale of the asset what you need. You'll have to try that out. The reason why I dynamesh after I decimate is because it will make everything into one solid mesh. So after you've done the dynamesh you go back in, pre-process again, decimate current again. Then you can go in and smooth areas that don't really need all the detail. For example this part can be super flat so you can just go in, go up again, pre-process again, process again, reduce this guy, decimate again until you have something you think is fitting. Then you export the low poly and I have my low poly here. You can of course do retopology by hand though I am not really fond of it as it usually takes a very long time and I just don't see a reason why I should do it for a personal project. At a studio you might reduce the or do retopology by hand if you need a certain triangle count or if the asset has to move. It's very important to do if the asset has to move. When this is done I went into here and unwrapped it. Super simple, just unwrapped it based on the the flow of the mesh. So here I have half of the stone here, the other half here. Then I took a large part of the face, the lower jaw part here, the tongue, horn and so on and so on. After this I sharpened the uv edges here. You can see it is sharp here, this will help you get a better bake. After this I export it into Substance Painter like here and then I get this result after baking it. You might have to change some settings though. For example down here. So max frontal distance and rear distance is how far out the the camera you could say goes before it turns around, looks back and then bakes the normal map from that distance. So if this guy is way too high for example in here it would go out, turn around but then it would see itself the actual back side of the tongue. You don't want that. You don't just want it to go out a little bit and that's why you have to make sure the low poly fits the high poly for the most part. When you've baked your curvature, ambient occlusion, normal map and so on you are ready to use the masked workflow. So what's the masked workflow? It is essentially just one masked texture. The texture, every texture contains the default value, red channel, green channel, blue channel and alpha if you want. So by default everything that is black in the masked texture will be in my case one of the rock textures I showed earlier then whatever is in the red channel. So in this case usually at the edges would be lighter. So in Unreal I simply use this mask and it automatically puts on a lighter hue where there's information in the red channel. In the green channel I use it to darken some areas. So I put it in the cavities. I have not used the blue or white channel for anything but you could use it for anything. The blue could be snow, the white could be dust, whichever you want. When this is done I simply export this mask or in this case just an albedo and import it into Unreal. I of course also export the normal map which is very much needed. Okay we've now exported the model and the normal map and the masked texture into Unreal and assigned the masked material. So let's check out the base color here. You can see it has the base darkish texture which is populating all the mesh. Then in the red channel we use the whiter or lighter color on the edges and then in the cavities a darker shade here. So let's check out the shader. This is the shader. It's really not anything crazy. So we have this is the base material which is being populated on whole the mesh as I mentioned. Looks like this. It's being pumped into this guy which just breaks out the outputs. Then we have the mist color which brightens the edges. Then we have a darken. I also have control for roughness. Then we have a snow. All of this is using the masked texture here. So let's check that guy out. So here you can see the masked texture. Where it's white it will be brighter because it's in the red channel and then in the green where it's white it will be darker. And I'm then outputting these guys into Lerps. So this guy goes up here and brightens everything and then we output the green up to here which darkens everything. And yeah I have some controls for the normal intensity as well. I'm also using blend angle corrected normals which blends the material normal with the paint normal from the statue. Then I have some controls over the snow as well which is being outputted from the blue. Then create a material instance. This is just done by right clicking create material instance. Then I have it here. So I have some settings. I have the normal intensity, roughness for many of the layers, the stone normal intensity and then the big normal mask can change the stone surface make it brighter or darker. And every asset in the scene pretty much uses this workflow. This guy, the pillar and so on. So that's how I texture most of the asset in the scene. Again it's done to save a lot of time on the texturing part. And I have a unified material setup so if I want to change the base material I can just do that easily just by replacing it. Okay it's time to talk about the lighting setup and what changed during the making of this scene. So as you might remember there used to be light coming in from the right side over here. But I felt like it took away from the the main focal area which is the the door here because it crossed in over it and yeah it didn't work. So I changed the light to come in from the ceiling so it pointed directly towards the door even hitting it in some places. I wanted to keep the back part here pretty dark so again it's lighter towards the the focal area in the back. Settings wise I usually prefer going with the baked lighting. For me it usually gives the best result. I also use HDRI. I use HDRI Heaven to get my HDRIs really good place. I have to set it to specific cubemap here. Then I changed the source cubemap angle. This rotates the HDRI and changes where the light comes in. Intensity wise it's set fairly low. I killed almost all the volumetrics because I felt it drowned out the scene in a solid color and I didn't like the look it gave. Then for the directional light it does have quite a lot of volumetric light because I want to use it to enforce the focal area and point towards it. Intensity wise it's quite low though because I didn't want to blow out any areas. Let's check the post process. I changed the temperature a bit to give it more of a cold look. I could have used the lighting for this instead but I felt this was a fun thing to try because I usually don't do that. I have pumped up the contrast a bit just to tighten up the image. Other than that I'm using ray tracing for the reflections but no ray tracing for any of the other things. So what went right and what went wrong in the creation of this project? I definitely reached my goal of increasing my zebra sculpting skills for some of the assets. I'm especially happy with the snake sculpts up here, though some other sculpts like especially the the two statues here I were not so happy with. They lacked a lot of quality compared to some of the other sculpts. The anatomy in some areas feels off so I definitely have to practice that even though it's a giant subject for sure but it's still a very nice skill to improve on. I think in general the scene is still too noisy and not focused enough. There's too many things that try and catch your eyes and I have to improve on that a lot having a stronger focused composition. In terms of texturing there's also too much noise going on. I could have done without the snow on the assets perhaps and toned down some of the the colors but in general the the main title on the mass assets went okay. It didn't break the silhouette of the assets so that's good. I like that I came up with the composition and the story and the idea myself from some very solid reference even though it took me quite a while to do the the blockout stage. I should have asked for more feedback even though at the beginning and at the end I asked for a lot of feedback. It kind of stopped in the middle of the project which led me to work on other projects and just drop this project for a bit which can be fine. If you're working very long on a project it can become a bit stale but I took too long of a break and I should have focused more on it instead of starting new new projects but it happens. In general I'm happy with the result of the scene. I want to thank you very much for watching my breakdown. I hope you found it useful. I want to thank stylized station for allowing me to make the breakdown and sharing it on their website and youtube and so on.