Texturing

So, over the last few years, Designer has really taken off. I’m blown away every time I open ArtStation by what people are making in there. For myself, personally, I always struggle to initially get started, though it’ll just take practice. To overcome this for this piece, I thought I’d play to my strengths, so I essentially created a hybrid workflow between Megascans Photogrammetry and my own ability in Designer. Megascans is such an amazing resource, not just for texturing, but for all sorts of references – particularly if you’re going to be tackling foliage.

Essentially, I used the materials from Megascans (primarily the height information) and then layered my own edits and tweaks on top of that to create something that would suit my needs, so by the end of the process, the material was essentially completely my own and unrecognisable from what I started with. At least, that was my goal – some materials are easier to change than others. For example, wooden planks will always be wooden planks, etc.

Though, because I used Megascans as an initial base for some of the materials, doesn’t mean I relied on them completely. For some materials, such as my brick work, I created a tiling material through ZBrush and baked it down. There are a thousand ways to get to whatever goal you’re aiming for in 3D but don’t rely on one indefinitely. Be as flexible and adaptable as possible to achieve your results.

Central Pieces: Throne, Tree

The Throne was something I went back and forth on quite a lot. The chair itself was fairly simple to make with a number of various references from different media. I knew pretty early on that I was going to be wrapping the roots around the chair, so I had to be careful about details.

As with all of my models, I created a quick base-mesh of each part for general position and scale and then took it all into ZBrush to generate the High-Poly. For some parts, I would just do a simple Crease, Sub-Divide, Polish method to get nice soft edges where I needed them, and others I’d Crease, Sub-Divide and then smash out the edges with the TrimSmoothBorder brush. I found a Square Alpha and a Focal Distance of -100 works wonders for nearly every material I’ve had to sculpt. All-in-all, the High-Poly took about twenty-thirty minutes to build. The game-ready asset was simply just a cleaned up and UV’d version of the base.

The tree was hands-down the hardest part of the entire project. I really enjoy doing foliage – it’s something I’m always looking to improve, but it’s just as equally frustrating as it is rewarding at times.

I must have made four or five different atlases for the tree, and while each was better than the last, it still didn’t look quite right. The final version involved me sculpting two or three leaves and then hand-placing them in ZBrush along the branches – it task that took a day or two, but ultimately it paid off in the long run. The textures were done in Designer and it was a fairly simple task of creating the planes (and by extension the clumps) in Maya before exporting them to SpeedTree.

The roots were pretty fun to do, actually. The actual model for the roots is actually entirely separate from the tree and just ‘crashed’ through the model in UE4. I used simple Splines in Maya to create the shapes and generated cylinders that conformed to said Splines. With them made, it was a simple task to taper them and then they were ready for the engine.

The skeleton was actually provided by the awesome Storm Flemming over on ArtStation. She was kind enough to let me use it for my scene.

Lighting

So as I mentioned, the lighting was worked on constantly throughout the project. Initially, I was going to have the time-of-day to be roughly noon, early afternoon. I found it pretty difficult to get my histogram balanced across the scene though. Lots of dark areas that I couldn’t find a reason for there to be a secondary light-source to help it.

After throwing the idea around for a few days, I did a really quick test of it as a moody midnight setup and thought it looked so much better. I wanted to create a real cinematic feel for it and the nighttime lighting worked perfectly for it.