CT5106 Environment Art - Design and Produce a Game Environment
Design of the House:
For this project I knew I wanted to do a witch house. To make it slightly unique I decided on it being a good witch, one who helps people with magic and spells. This then lead me to making it an Apothecary-like house/business, where people would come to the witch with illnesses or troubles and she'd give them magic herbs or potions to help them.
I first made a moodboard for the basic structure of the house. I knew I wanted it to be quaint and inviting, whilst obviously housing an irregular person. I also decided to give the house a water wheel, as I thought it fit the atmosphere of being in the woods with a river running around the house.
I then started on a sketch of the house. I'm not very good at drawing in 3D space so I didn't finish the sketch before I started working on it in 3Ds Max as I'm most comfortable with 3D there. I knew I wanted the house to have multiple sections to make it look more fantasy-like.
I eventually tweaked this first idea, I changed how the front door/porch space looks, as I couldn't find a way to make the balcony-like shape work, so I changed it into a bridge. I added an unreal engine character in for size comparison to ensure that I made everything an accurate height.
Once the block out was finished and I had begun on other details, I started thinking what assets I wanted to complete the scene, and how much of a priority they were to complete. Things like windows and doors were a high priority compared to small details that were wanted but not necessary. I made this list in excel in case I wanted to easily order or section these assets. I also added a colour coded completion column, to keep track of what still needed doing, whilst keeping me motivated to see the progress I had made. I knew not all of these would be made and that it was subject to change overtime.
I then started adding modular detail to the house. After watching a video by Polygon Academy about modular environments, I used his method of tiling a house roof, by making 3 different roof tiles, changing the shape very slightly, but making them all instances of each other so texturing is simple. I also made slightly smaller versions of each tile for the entryway roof, but the size difference is only slight so the same textures can be used for them still.
Other aspects of the house are also modular. I tried as much as possible to repeat objects instead of tweaking them so they'd have to be textured differently. For example, the logs, bits of wood on the tower, and wood along the edges of the roof are all instances. As well as parts on the water wheel.
Photogrammetry:
As the photogrammetry is a required part of the module, I wanted to make sure I completed it early, so I could give myself enough time to figure it out in case I ran into problems. I chose this cat model that I found at a garden centre, as the ridges and high level of detail it had would make lots of recognizable points for the software to pick up. I used RealityCapture, and a Nikon D3500 (with Shutter Speed 1/125, Aperture f8, and ISO 200). This enabled me to have manual control over the picture's outcomes to maintain consistency. It did however become cloudier and darker towards the end of this shoot, so I took the last 6 or 7 into Photoshop and corrected them subtly to match the rest of the pictures. I also put a t-shirt over the top of the wooden stool I placed the cat on to distinguish them, as they were very similar in colour.
Unfortunately I forgot to screenshot and document the process of the photogrammetry in the RealityCapture software so I cannot show the full range of success it had. By the time the textures were added and the model was created it looked completely lifelike, and I quote from Andre, "the best photogrammetry I've ever seen" so I was very happy with the results. Below is the high poly version in 3Ds Max, and all looked as it should be aside from the eyes. I then used the retopology modifier twice to bring the polycount down to 5 thousand from 5 million.
As the eyes on the cat model were shiny, the retopology software couldn't track them fully and so they ended up incorrect. To fix them, I put the high poly version into ZBrush and removed the old eyes to replace them with spheres as close as I could get it to the cat's original eye size and shape. This was very difficult as they looked like they bulged out a lot more than they should've, but I was hoping that when I baked and added a glossy texture to the eyes it wouldn't be noticeable. It was important to remove the old ones first as they might've poked through the bake, which can happen when there's overlapping topology.
After baking, I realised that I accidentally didn't save the RealityCapture made base colour map so I had to texture it manually. I decided that since I could change the colour, as it's a witches cat it makes more sense for it to be a black cat. However if I kept it completely black all the detail from the high poly version wouldn't be visible, so I added white detail on what would be the high points of the cat's fur using a material with a mask editor generator. I also painted on some white details on the face and paws because I thought it looked cute.
High Poly Modelling and Texturing:
Once the photogrammetry was done, I was able to focus on other models. I put the assets of the house into two categories: ones I was going to sculpt a high poly version of, and ones I would just bake low to low. For the high poly versions, they were mostly large objects that would have some visible texture, like wood or stone. I wanted to sculpt these to ensure that the scene remained in a stylized style and these sorts of textures are effective in that style. I downloaded some free ZBrush brushes for this, some that help make the effect of stone around edges and faces of an object, and some that helped carve the wood grain into faces.
Once I sculpted these, I put them into Substance Painter and used the same mask editor generator to add highlights to the "high" points and shadows in the "low" points. This was then made into a custom smart material so I could reuse the same settings and save myself time. I was very happy with the outcome of these, although as I wasn't able to do this for every single piece of wood on the house the wood is slightly inconsistent on smaller areas, which is disappointing. I also could've done a better job on the unwrapping as I still didn't fully get the hang of it until very late in this project, so some of the seams are visible.
This is one of the low to low bakes, with a material that's supposed to act like stylized metal. From the lecture on stylized materials, it was mentioned that metal objects aren't actually shiny like they are in real life, and it's simulated with texture and colour. I was happy with how I ended up doing these, and I made another custom smart material to copy and paste onto all metallic objects, just changing the colour. I also added an emmissive map to these in the hopes that they'd emit a subtle glow, although since the scene is quite bright I'm not sure how successful it was.
For my generic use materials, I thought I could try and hand draw some, as I had done it in Level 4 and I liked it, but now knew how to do it even better. I knew that last time I had made the stones too big for the environment they were in, so this time I pre-tiled them a few times to make them small enough to look like a realistic scale. I hindsight, I should've made the wood the same as the sculpted wood but I hadn't thought about that, I just wanted a nice wood texture. I'm still happy with the results, and I think they work well as stylized materials. I made normal maps from them all in Photoshop.
Landscape:
Afterwards, I started thinking about the landscape. My plan was to have soft rolling hills, with the house itself being on the top of a hill. For this I used World Machine, and kept it very simple. The image below is the height map that the software generated, which I was happy with for the most part. The dark spots ended up looking a little too much like Swiss cheese or like it was the surface of the moon, so I smoothed it out a little in the landscape sculpting mode. I then painted this landscape with 3 different shades of green to keep with the stylized theme whilst maintaining variation.
After this, I knew I wanted grass on the landscape. For the grass itself I followed a tutorial on YouTube to make not only the grass blades but also the motion and wind blowing effect. I had 3 different clumps of grass that I modelled, so I made 3 different versions of this material which slightly different shades of green. The image below is of the lightest green.
Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEMe-kcZBLw&t=1025s&ab_channel=VictoriaZavhorodnia%28akbutea%29
I wasn't sure how I wanted to place this grass, however, since the foliage tool only lets you place one type of grass at a time, and to blend it all by hand would take a very long time. Although, Andre then did the lecture on foliage and showed how to separate foliage types to landscape colours using the advanced asset Landscape Grass Types. This allowed for me to match grass colour to landscape colour, which made the grass blend into the ground much more naturally.
For the water, which was needed in order for the waterwheel to make sense, I followed another tutorial. I really loved how he made the water, although the tutorial was in French and so was very difficult to follow. His Unreal Engine was in English and he gave English annotations which is what allowed me to keep up. I'm glad I did the grass material first as this one was much more complicated, and I didn't get it exactly the same as his. One branch is for the colour, and the gradient it has as it gets deeper, the second and biggest branch is the white border around the edge, and the third is a second white border that's animated in a ripple-like effect.
Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ix7K_IubTig&ab_channel=Rimaye%5BAssetsandTutorials-NIAGARA%5D
The reason I liked this tutorial, although it wasn't the only one that did it, was because it had a white border around the edge of every object in the water, so when the water wheel would rotate you'd see the movement in the water. The water also ripples around the edges in an attempt to sell the illusion that it's running water.
Finishing Touches:
The house at this point looked like the image below, and although it's a very nice house it's not very witch-y. I wanted to focus on getting the main body down and if I had time I would add extra details, which I now had the time to do.
Now that I had the water in place, I wanted to figure out how to make the water wheel rotate. I had heard it was very easy, and it was. I made a Blueprint Actor Class and added the Rotating Movement Component into the blueprint, as well as the wheel. Then it was just a matter of centering the wheel and making sure it turned in the x-axis.
Afterwards, made a second asset list re-focusing my attention on what I still needed to do. Some of these repeat from the first list, but other aspects on it weren't what I wanted to do now that I knew more about how Unreal works, or weren't how I wanted to focus my time.
I was given the idea to have a broomstick flying around the house, as I already knew how to make something rotate, which I thought was a very good way to make the house feel more magical and alive. I also wanted there to be a way to indicate where my scene ended, so I wanted to place a fence around the edge of the house. The fence wouldn't be big enough to restrict any vision, it's only purpose was to indicate where the witch's property would end. After that it was just me wanting to give some backstory to the witch and also make it look like the house was lived in and used.
This is what it looked like after these assets were added. It's not completely finished here, but I was happy with it's progress.
After this I decided I wanted to take advantage of the engine we're using and make some more stuff move, so I decided on particle effects. I had seen one of my references use particle effects to make smoke and water foam effects, so I wanted to replicate it. The video I followed was the Cascade Particle System but for a fire tutorial, but it gave me the basic principles I needed to apply my own texture and tweak some of the effects. The smoke and water foam have slightly different settings but using the same material base.
Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuCWoI4SMTU&t=702s&ab_channel=IvicaMilari%C4%87
Whilst attempting to build and package the final result, the water material was skewed and not working as it should've which worried me as it happened the day before the deadline. I tweaked the material instance and raised the water object slightly which eventually fixed the problem, but it was nerve-racking. In future I should build the environment a few days before as it would've given me more time to fix the problem and been much less stressful.
Build:
These are the images of what they looked like afterwards, and are the final rendition of the house.
