I always use overpaints just for myself, to remember what I want to fix and what I think is wrong

How do I work fast and why no ready assets? I have used a lot of great examples in Unreal Engine. I have bought the Clinton Crumpler scene and reverse engineered his spline meshes and his main master material. In Unreal you can easily reuse something like that – this is a great basic pattern which gives you a good speed-up at the start and high flexibility during work. Also, I should mention great Epic Games examples of their scenes, like Infiltrator. There are tons of knowledge in these scenes. They are totally free!

About ready assets – if I remember it right, you can’t use something like that for the competition according to the rules. For blockout a simple box or a super game-ready mesh give same result. But I have used a lot of substances from textures, gametextures and substance share. I never use them as my last substance for texture, but it gives me a definition of the material and how it will work with light. And this is important.

Modeling

If you work in Maya you MUST see this gumroad tutorial – Fuze 07. This is one of the greatest tutorials about complicated Maya modeling. Right now, my main plugins are:

AMTools 0.5 (Beveling hard surface)

QuickPipe 1.5 (Good for pipes)

KTools (Mirror and flipping objects)

Hard Mesh (This is an expensive, but very powerful addon for hard surfaces)

ZhCG_PolyTools (Some powerful tools to straighten lines and making circles out of polygons)

I do not use UV’s in Maya, but there are some great plugins for that too and I can recommend them.

I totally changed my mind about modeling in Maya, when I started my professional work. I bound all my actions, used hotkeys and pop-ups and I’m trying not to move my mouse too much. Same with Zbrush – I use a great shelf from Kingslave guys + a lot of hotkeys. If you have ever played StarCraft or something like that, you will never think twice before using hotkeys and bindings. So, my recommendation – if you are doing something more than twice a day in a program, think on how to reduce the time of this. Maya has fantastic options for scripting (like in Photoshop) when It just repeats your actions and it saves a lot of time.

Right now, I started to learn Blender with the Hard Ops plugin for my hard surface workflow. It’s very strange for me, but interesting. And again, that will save a lot of time for me in my regular actions.

Scale

I am an engineer and my first thought was to open the documentation. I just googled how wide the roads should be, how big the cars should be, windows, buildings etc. But this is only the basics. Concept artists do not always think about that. More than that, you have painting magic – perspective can change dimension very much. So, that’s why it’s very important to know about perspective rules and how to do simple concept art. And never work without a human scale figure − it’s really easy to lose dimensions in the environment and you have to check yourself all the time. And don’t forget – there are artists and you have the internet to contact them. So, ask them! Simple 4-5 questions to Helio Frazao saved a lot of hours for me.

Architecture

It was a real challenge for me in the competition way. When I just started my scene, I thought that modular workflow would work great. I had been cherishing that idea for two weeks (since I first saw concept by Helio Frazao and realized that I wanted to do it). Then I started and… it didn’t not work. Well, it did work, but there were so many aspects for me to control and that it’s not always reasonable. Spline meshes worked perfectly for the streets and the upper section. Also, for wires of course. But the modular system didn’t play well with 5 totally different buildings. Another reason why I wasn’t happy with result, was that spline meshes brought a lot of random effects into the work. That sounds great, but when you are trying to match concept and create a good composition it plays a bad joke on you. At one moment you have a light in the window in one place, you change something and it randomly moves to another place. So be careful about that.

There are different ways, to save your time. Substance Designer, for example. Good tileable UVs with nice materials can give an excellent result. On the other hand, don’t be afraid to use same meshes over and over again, but with different angles. Don’t make high-polys for all your meshes – a simple geo can work very well. But you will save a lot of time on textures. This is a list of techniques, that I used for my scene to create versatility:

Spline Meshes – for all meshes with same dimensions and if there are a lot of them. If you have different meshes of different sizes – that will take a lot of time.

Substance Designer – Tileable meshes with Substance Designer can do real magic. Don’t think about sculpting high-polys all the time – you don’t have time for this. You need speed and good quality. Blending 2-3 good materials in SD with clouds alpha can give you a new unique material. And don’t be afraid of polygons – they are cheap on PC – create something interesting.

Material Blending – There are a lot of interesting ways to blend materials in UE4. You can blend materials by mask, painted in Substance Painter – they have special shader for this. Really nice, if you have something like stone and moss. Another way, there are some blending magic with the direction of polygon faces – there are a few videos about them. It’s a good way for moss and snow.

And my favorite one – vertex paint. With enough polycount it’s a very fast and simple way to create something interesting.

Spline meshes and control of dimensions.

Materials

I really love texturing – that is my favorite part of the job. That’s why I sometimes spend a little bit more time on heroic props than really required – I just enjoy this process. So, there are three separate parts of texturing for me – Tileable, heroic props / simple props and decals.

I use 3D-Coat for its UV and Retop modules. I use 3D-Coat for texturing sometimes and even combine it with Substance Painter, but only for hand paint style. But mainly my workflow is in 3D-Coat Retop/UV, then Soft/Hard edges in Maya and/or support loops for baking. Then I bake in Substance Painter of Marmoset – Marmoset rocks for hard surfaces, with tricky bolts and screws. But mostly it’s just Substance Painter and baking by name.

Then I have different workflows for each type of texture. Tileable textures – the cheap way of work – it takes 2-3 ready materials and blending them in Substance Painter/Designer with Clouds mask or something like that. Also, there are very cool nodes in Designer, like wet surface – it’s helped me a lot for my scene. The expensive way of work for tileable – open Substance Designer and go go go.

Main difference between heroic props and simple props is thinking about the future process. You just can’t add too much damage on simple props, because it will be too unique. You always need to keep in mind, that you will use graffiti, damage decals and something like that LATER in the scene. So, don’t paint something like that