I found a very informative article for environment artsists, Kieran Goodsoon a Junior Environment Artist at Rebellion interviews professional environment artists, prop artists, host of artstation challenges etc. All these roles connect with environment art and will help me gather enough information before starting the project. My goal for this project is to be able to get storytelling, composition and lighting into the scene.

A short summary of the answers I was looking for that I found very helpful.

How do I improve my quality of my assets?

Pay attention how the asset is created, edge definition, discoloration on surfaces and edges. This will make the asset unique itself. - Clinton Crumpler.

Why are the benefits of using benchmarks?

Benchmark is useful as it sets a goal for myself. Having a benchmark means gathering work from artists I admire. The artist mentions doing this before creating your assets could give you a clear goal, quality that is admired by other people and give you motivation to fulfill similar results as the artist. The best advice is to use real world references and have similar quality. Artworks helps you understand the quality expectations, as it consists of polycount, textures, uv maps etc. There are artists sharing their work process through tutorials and forums where you will learn a lot from. Another advice is to upload your work to communities to receive feedback such as polycount, CG society or Facebook.

Is there anything particular to pay attention to in the scene?

Lighting is important at an early stage of the project. Lighting will add mood into the scene or image. You will be able to see where high contrast, warm and cold colours will appear. Consider the brightness values in albedo and roughness textures. An in common mistake is where albedo is way too saturated or dark, the dark object will lose its details in medium light. - Lea Kronenberger

What do you look for in an environment that scream AAA quality, storytelling and thoughtfulness to design?

AAA quality is games with high marketing budget. Especially for environment artist, the primary thing is putting a scene together and storytelling without any words. - Karen Stanley

How should I approach storytelling in my work?

Increase details and add exploration value to the environment. But make all elements have sense and have a purpose. Depending on what game it is, there are different things you want to show the player. As example add some hints to the environment to lead the player, it doesn’t have to be something big.

- Otto Ostera

How do I make a room feel more personal?

Think about the person who lives there. Their personality and develop a story for them, it will add some life and personality to the environment. There should always be a story behind it. - Ivanna Liittschwager

What's so special about being involved with an online learning community?

Online learning communities will help you build connections and relationship with other artists. Tutorials will only provide you knowledge and skill. A community will increase your chances of finding jobs, have a voice, network and build a name for yourself. Online community great for feedback is Dinusty Emprise discord, over 5000 members. - Kem Yaralioglu

Do you have any suggestion or process to add story to the environment?

Start with a basic story, from there think about what happened with the environment or character. Continuing there you should be able to build the base until you are satisfied. - Timothy Dries

How do I stop myself from overscoping? [6]

Diorama is a good example that can be found in Sketchfab. Small environment allows you to focus on the quality instead of the quantity. Creating an ‘One camera illusion’ is helpful, meaning create a blockout of your scene and play with the camera angles until you are satified. - Timothy Dries

I found useful guides which could help me with my process later on for my project. The Beyond extent have hundreds of tips of modelling, baking, texturing, lighting etc. Following other artists work will teach me a lot, I also joined the Dinusty Emprise discord which could be useful for feedback.

• Style - Realistic

• Atmosphere - Dark, eerie, abandoned and creepy

• Colour palette - Blue and red for machines and other interior assets. Blue will be for the lighting atmosphere.

• Textures/materials
  -Trim sheets
  - Decals
  - PBR
  - Paintings on walls and floor
  - Marquees for arcade cabinets
  - "Radioactive" dust
  - Damaged surfaces

• Lighting - Sky and directional light, light beams, and point light

• Gameplay - Player will explore the location to find any local inhabitants or been given a task to solve.

I got some very useful feedback to improve my environment, I think it's quite difficult to add storytelling especially with the story I have for my environment. To get the storytelling into the environment, I have to increase details and explore the values to have an actual focal point. And potentially include graffiti to make the room feel more personal, this will give a sense who used to work at the arcade. I will get rid of the table as it takes up a large area in the room. Having a letterbox by the door would help with the location as it will be based in Nottingham.

• Add more tone to give it a focal point, too grey in the middle.

• Bloom from the windows

• Dust particles in light beams

• Storytelling; Who owned it? Can the environment reflect the person? In some thumbnails the focus in the upturned table, I don't want to focus on that

• If humans are alive, maybe add graffiti

• Litter since people once got together

• Maybe letterbox pon on the door and letters on the floor by the door

Unreal Engine - Testing scene

Following the guide from Tim Simpson I imported my blockout into the Engine, the scene and camera feels right. I used a human character in Maya to sort of get the correct scale. So far, I have tried to get used to the engine and learn the navigation and lighting. I personally don't like how the navigation works on Unreal Engine as it's very different to other software's. I enjoyed the lighting process as the settings were similar to Unity.

I did come across a couple of issues when working with the light, I did modular assets at first which caused different shading on the walls, this was caused due to lowpoly meshes. When modular assets have different shades, they tend to cover the seam with other assets. There is light hitting the assets on the front which is supposed to be shadows, this is something I will have to keep in mind and fix.

Since this is only a blockout, the scene looks empty right now. Once the vines and decals are added it will make a huge difference. With the planks and vines, I think there will be nice light beams coming through the broken ceiling setting the mood. I will also include volumetric fog later to get an idea how my scene will look like.

I started gathering reference images before I refined my scene. My process was to create a basic blockout and thumbnail knowing what I needed to create for my scene. Finding reference images is a long process for me since I want to make sure have a close up and three different angles of the model. I eventually started with an asset measurement before I refined my blockout.

My PureRef didn’t look like this from the beginning when I collected my reference images. During my process trying to find the measurements and refining my blockout I added more images with the information I needed. Throughout the process, I was able to keep my PureRef organized.

My process pipeline will consist of baking and custom materials, I don't have a lot of experience within those areas. After discussing the next module with Chris, I had a dilemma whether I should do lighting or materials. Since I have experience working with lighting and would say I’m decent, I decided to focus on materials. It would be a better option, both for my portfolio and future projects, showing I'm able to create my own materials shows I have knowledge within that area. And including that for my portfolio shows a good variety, rather than only environments.

Most of the process will be creating a low/high poly depending on the asset. The priority assets I will be baking are the Dance Dance machines and arcade machines. From there, I will see how much time I have left as I still want to get a nice customized material for my scene. I'm familiar with most of the applications besides substance designer and unreal engine. Other than that, I will attempt to try trim sheets, if I have time. And decals are also a priority as it will make the biggest difference.

I downloaded a free ivy asset from sketchfab created by Daniel Gryningstjerna. I will not be using this asset for my final project. This is to get a visual view how I should place the ivy and get an idea how to model it. This will be a lowpoly around 1k tri-count, this is because I have the arcade machines which is my first priority. Having foliage in my scene will make the scene more interesting, adds storytelling and gives the viewer an idea of the outside world.

I think it's good I'm using free assets for the pre-production part. A part of the process is also how to apply the textures to the material. Since this is my first time using Unreal Engine. This was completely different to Unity I would say. I found it quite confusing first but as I tried to figure out the navigation, I'm starting to learn the basics of the material editor. I tried different methods to get a transparent background but got a couple of issues. For this I used masked and alpha channel to hide the background. Other ways could have been done by using multiply and constant, but this method did not work for me.

I came across a few issues when I tried get a transparent background. There were both RGBA and A channels, the tutorials didn’t have a RGBA channel which caused some confusion. The texture file I had was TGA, I did assume that was the issue at first. But as I did some research, I found that TGA has RGBA channel. Whilst, PNG alpha channel usually is stored differently.

I tried different ways to get the volumetric fog such as light shafts, exponential fog and custom godray. The different results are the images below. The godrays didn’t really appear the way I wanted when I used the light shaft and volumetric fog/exponential fog. The result that was the most accurate, was the custom godray which came out pretty good which was similar to my thumbnail. I want to make sure I have the lighting my scene set up so I know how it will affect my assets and which ones that I would need to focus less on. Currently, this would be a quite basic lighting set up to help my blockout.

Following these two tutorials and trying out the different methods of volumetric fog has given me a better understanding which method works the best. I found that light shaft and volumetric fog/exponential fog worked better for exterior environment. Using those two methods for an interior environment only caused issues for me, it made my scene brighter and foggy which wasn't what I wanted. I tried another method where I had to create a local volumetric fog which focuses on a specific area. But this caused the same issues.

Once finishing the blockout and importing the high poly models, I did a paint over and photo bashing. I’m not entirely confident when drawing without a perspective guide, therefore the blockout was useful for this method. The final concept is missing a few things, I want to include wooden particles laying on the ground that shows that it came from the broken ceiling. The left side look a bit too empty, but I’ll fill that with decals. It’s the smaller details I haven’t included in the concept. The smaller details should add more to the storytelling. I really like the graffiti wall as it makes the room feel more personal. The overall colour palette should be cold which has a blue tint in the entire scene. The various hues coming from the arcade machines will balance it out a bit.

For the pre-production stage, I should have everything planned, through research and testing. Back in week 3, I was unsure how I will approach the texturing stage such as customised material in Substance Designer, how to plan and create trim sheets, vertex paint in Unreal engine and add decals on models.

This section will be all my research and plan of how to approach these areas. As I have been planning my texturing, I realised this is one of my weaker areas and I would like to improve my knowledge and skills in texturing. Therefore, I will be creating customised material for the supplementary skills module that I can include for my environment scene. To work efficiently I will be using trim sheets, normal edge decals, decals and vertex paint to speed up my process. These areas are important as it’s used in the game industry, I want to be able to demonstrate these in my portfolio, showing that I have a good understanding and experience within these fields. I could also split up different parts of my environment to upload for my portfolio, such as my customised material demonstrating my process and research.

My final thoughts about my planning and experimentation in these different areas have been very helpful, and I feel more confident approaching my production stage now. There might be some changes along the way, which is normal but I'm not very worried about it. I'm glad I managed to get my research done before semester 2, which means I can focus on the production stage and get my high poly models done before the next module starts. If I didn't do my planning and research into trim sheets, materials, normal edge decals and vertex paint I think I would have struggled a lot in my production stage. Realising how important pre-production is, I will be able to improve my work and find solutions when doing my experiments as well. Other than that, I know what I’m doing, why I’m doing it and how it can be useful in the game industry.

Planning modular environment

I sort of have an idea how trim sheet works but I'm not entirely sure how to plan it efficiently. I found this very informative tutorial, as he goes through the different stages of planning. I also screenshotted a few questions that could be useful for my production stage. I know my trim sheet can be used for the walls, ceiling, wood such as door, shelf, chalkboard and table. To break up the pattern I will use vertex paint or decals to add stains, dirt and signs.

Morten Olsen shows his process of making trim sheets, this is stylized. But he does show some nice ways to use the trim sheet and a plain tillable version. Having normal map bevels in the trim sheet will make the edges less sharp. But for my project, I'm planning to use normal edge decal to get those damaged corners (further down)

Here is my visual idea of a trim sheet, I went through the 4 parts of Tim Simpson demonstrating trim sheets. I feel more confident now, as this is pretty much the same process when it comes to baking other assets in general.

When creating a detailed base mesh in maya there are some stuff to keep in mind. I need to make sure to subdivide polygon before importing to Zbrush to prevent any stretching. Since I'm working from the front side, I will need to keep in mind that's how my normal map will look like. Therefore, by scaling the faces a bit will show the details. My textures will be different from the tutorial however since I will have plaster, wood, metal textures.

Plane is usually 4 meters and 2048x2048 and 512 px per square meter, this is the measurements for console. Meaning 1 meter is usually for bigger areas such as walls.

Wooden floor - Lost file TEST

I attempted to create a wooden floor by following the tutorial below. It was simple to follow and learn. I still find it difficult to understand when connecting the nodes with each other, this is more of the complex stuff. I was able to capture my material process, but my saved file didn’t have the nodes in it, so 3 hours of work was lost. Luckily, this was just a test and to know the software better. The nodes are used repeatedly which make is easy to work, noises, warp, normal maps were used very often when creating the material.

I couldn’t finish the tutorial, but I think from that stage I would be able to figure it out myself. Adding the base colour and do some further adjustments wouldn’t be a problem since that’s what I did for the wood material above.

Metal grid

I thought I could use this metal grid material which I downloaded for free by Łukasz Sommer, I won't consider creating my own custom metal grid material since it will only be used for the dance dance machine. The material can be added when I'm finished with the baking, allowing me to mask the speakers and apply the metal grid material. By doing this, I can scale it and move it around to get the results I want. Eventually, add further decals, stains and dust.

Decals will be one of the important parts of my project as this will make a huge impact on my scene. I will be adding decals pretty much everywhere to add damage, stains, dust etc. I haven't used decals in Substance Painter or Unreal Engine, therefore I will look into how to apply decals to individual models and add decals in Unreal Engine. This should be slightly easier than creating customised materials and trim sheets. It's important for me to understand the workflow in this area as I will be working with this a lot during my production stage and has a huge impact on my environment.

Below in a couple of tests I did for masking and painting on stains. I have done the painting before but not masking, I thought it would be could do know the basics and go through a quick re-cap. I included some notes I can look back into when I’m in my texturing stage.

I had one issue with the edge wear material, it didn’t appear on the edges when I applied the material. The solution for it was to bake the mesh with only curvature enabled, curvature will extract the mesh information which will allow the edge wear material to be applied. Finding these issues during this early stage will prevent me from spending too much time on these small issues during my production stage. The reason I'm looking into masking and stains is because I will use this process very often for majority of my models, and masking will be extremly helpful when I work on my trim sheets since it's both plaster and wood material.

Vertex paint blends two colors or materials with each other. This is a faster method to work with as it doesn't require any UV mapping. It's also easy to set up in the engine. In the game industry vertex color is a cheap method, but if the mesh needs more vertices it can get expensive.

To understand vertex paint, I only used two albedo/base colours to try the vertex paint on the wall. I didn’t have enough vertices which makes it looks pixelated. By increasing the vertices it will give a smoother finish.One issue I came across is that nothing appeared when I painted, it turns out by setting the color value to black and setting RGB value to 0 will work. I’m not entirely sure why it was this way, but I got the solution from Carly.

Since I plan to use vertex paint on the wooden floor it will have some height map, this required a more complex graph. I want dust as example to get in-between the gaps first the make its way up. And a darker shade to paint on to make it softer and add shadows such as Augustas Krivelis GIF.

The tutorial on the right had all the information I needed, and everything worked. There were some nodes I didn’t understand but most of it made sense. The graph has a blend value allowing me to adjust the amount of vertex paint on the model which will prevent me from erasing or painting back and forward. I was concerned I wouldn’t be able to make the vertex paint work due to my experience with vertex paint in Unity which is a bit more confusing, Luckily, everything went as planned and I hope there won’t be a lot of issues when I do the vertex paint in my production stage.

There could be other methods to approach this to get the same results such as baking individual models, but this is way too time consuming. I would say normal edges decals is better for low priority models and modular assets, to add further details. For my environment, I will be using the normal edge decals for the walls, ceiling and any picture frames. Other than that, I could perhaps use it on the other models if it’s missing any details. Each normal edge decal will pretty much have its specific detail such as damage for wood, plaster and other materials.

I would consider using normal edge decals for future projects as it gives great results and it simple to create. I’m glad I attempted to try out normal edge decals and follow the whole process as it’s a smart and efficient idea.

Ivy Generator - Test

During my experiment I found it weird how I had to triangulate my mesh before importing it to Ivy Generator, it must be triangulated to be able to generate. The software had very strange controls, but other than that the software was extremely easy to use. The result I got isn’t great, as I kept re-growing the ivy, I started to understand how it functioned. The ivy starts from the green dot which I place myself and grow upwards, this would make sense if it’s an exterior environment. Since mine is interior, I would want the ivy to grow from top to bottom.

My solution for this would be rotating the ivy in maya as it’s the easiest way. Other than that, the ivy tends to get stacked on each other, creating a large amount of unnecessary number of cards. This can be deleted in Maya though, to minimize the number of cards I can section the ivy. Such as generating a smaller area by itself. After giving it some thoughts, I will consider using this for my production stage with my solutions I wrote in this paragraph.

Here is my pipeline for each asset, after doing my research and experimenting I feel a lot more confident how to approach these different areas and software's.