Hi, this is my second interview on 80 Level. My first one can be found here. Big shout out to the guys over at 80 level, you guys are doing a great job for the community!

I am pretty humbled and honored for getting a staff pick on Artstation for my latest piece on a stylized rendering scene in Unreal Engine 4. Thanks a lot to all of you! As a thank you I wanted to share this breakdown with you guys.

I am Berker Siino a freelancer working for clients such as Liquid Development, Airborn Studios, Metalpop Games and some companies in the serious games and simulation space. At the same time, I lately find myself more often in start ups to help getting the art teams up and running with workflows / pipelines and knowledge about 3D art and engines.

My current clients are switching more and more over to work with Unreal Engine 4 and I decided to deepen my knowledge in UE4 with a new personal project. Therefore I did some studies with light, shader networks and rendering in UE4 to be up to date with the latest implementations of the engine. My previous work at Crytek at the beginning of my career enabled me to gain deep technical knowledge about engines and art creation. I learned to become an efficient game developer and problem solver next to being artist. I am a critical thinker and always ask “why”? Understanding the underlying technical basics of the work is one of the most important skills you can have as an artist.

We are in some sort of transition in the games industry these days. Getting assets into real-time applications has become way easier these days and renderings are getting closer to offline rendered quality. A lot of tasks are automated, scanned or recycled from libraries. Tools like

Quixel Suite or Substance Designer/Painter give us the flexibility to be fast and work with a high-quality standard. This trend will keep developing more and more and we will have to make sure to go back to the roots and understand the basics of fine art itself. The tools will soon be as easy to use as holding a pen.

The Reason For The Creation Of The Stylized Unreal Engine 4 Scene

The reason for this scene was to understand the asset creation workflow and rendering pipeline of UE4 and the question of what can I achieve visually in a short time. The approach was to create a lot of assets in a modular way for a bigger bundle of content. I will demonstrate the workflow with Zbrush and Quixel for texturing of three wooden planks which I used as modular pieces to build up certain wood elements or furniture like stairs, terrace, barrels, chairs, etc with one texture set as the base.

Furthermore, I wanted to learn more about dynamic rendering and the use of global illumination in combination with “Light Propagation Volumes” within Unreal Engine 4. My artistic choice for a stylized scene with strong colors and a lot of gradients from GI bounce light was a great way for me to test and experiment with Unreal Engine 4 rendering. It was a welcome change for me to work out a great look without scanned data or a photoreal look. Just the basic workflows for sculpting, modeling and texturing plus the benefit of PBR.

Wooden Assets