3D Scene Breakdown: Fantasy Bookstore in UE4

Inspiration and Reference

When I was exploring concepts for my demo reel and Klaus’s painting popped up on my screen, I was instantly drawn to it. The way the natural elements of the concept crashed against the Victorian and Japanese architectural styles felt very exciting and original to me. When finally deciding to take on the project, my first goal was to achieve that feeling of conflict between the organic and inorganic forms. 

Because of this contrast between the natural and the artificial elements within the environment, I found it quite difficult to find direct references capturing what I was hoping to achieve. As a result, I largely went without key references, excluding Klaus’s original concept. Instead, I focused on creating a clear picture in my head of how I wanted my final result to look and feel like while gathering reference for more specific aspects of the scene. 

Another goal of mine was to achieve the same feeling of scale and vibrance as in the concept. I didn’t want the environment to feel like it was an isolated and confined locale; instead, I really wanted to push the feeling that it was just a small slice of life from a bustling, lively, and expansive world. 

There were certain moments throughout the project where I decided to deviate from Klaus’s concept and inject my own creative vision into the scene. To me, this was a very important aspect of translating the concept into 3D. I didn’t want to just recreate the scene; I wanted to capture the feel of the original piece while also expanding upon it and developing my own character through the environment. That brings me to the patio, which I think was my largest contribution to the concept. Also, while I was in production, it was the component I was the most excited to create. 

The idea of the patio came to me pretty early in development, when I was reference-hunting and building my blockout. I felt like something was missing and realized that it was because I didn’t have that intimate moment to really connect with the audience. That is when I started building “Iroh” as a character. I asked myself: if I were to exist in this world and if I were to own this bookstore, what would my personality be like? How would I engage with the world around me? What would my hobbies be? I know it sounds cheesy, but I think these questions are really important for environment art. It means that you’re not just creating an engaging setting; instead, you’re creating a character, a story, and you are injecting a piece of yourself into the art. 

Scene Layout

Having a clear, organized and modular approach to the environment was a challenge, given how organic it was. This made my blockout and planning stage quite difficult, as I didn’t have many real-world measurements and references to work with. Instead, there was a lot of feeling my way through the layout, until I reached something which looked good. After I found it, I moved on to the next part of the scene that wasn’t working. I loved the composition of the original, so it was something I really wanted to successfully translate into 3D. This led to a lot of very fine adjustments and a lot of banging my head against the wall until it started to look and feel right to me.

As for the natural aspects of the scene like the branches and roots, I took quite an iterative approach. I tried to build these things up in a cohesive way, so I had a good understanding of how it was all going to turn out in the end. There was so much sculpt work to be done in the scene that I decided to focus on sculpting in major forms while allowing my materials to take care of the actual details in the bark and moss. 

I did all of the sculpt work for the branches and roots within ZBrush and made great use out of both the decimate and Zremesher tools. I figured that with the amount of ground I had to cover, I would have lost my mind having to do all of that retopo work manually. 

Another thing I made sure to do was to nail down my shots as early as possible. Doing this, I was able to avoid a lot of unnecessary work on aspects of the scene I didn’t plan to focus on. I would highly recommend having a clear idea of what you really want to show within your environment, so you don’t end up wasting your time fretting over unnecessary details. 

Vegetation

The vegetation in the project is actually something I would have liked to push a little further. This was my first time creating real-time foliage, and I ended up trying out quite a few different techniques to see what felt the best to me. A big thing for me is that I didn’t want the foliage or anything else within the scene to feel unnatural, overly embellished, or cartoonish in any way. I knew that I was creating a whimsical and fantastical world, but I wanted it to feel grounded enough that you could really immerse yourself in it.

The moss-covered doorway on the left side of the bookstore was one of my biggest challenges throughout production. I really wanted it to feel lush like you could fall into it and it would catch you like a pillow. Because of this, I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to get away with my original tiling moss material. Instead, I took a fur style approach and painted moss around the doorway using cards. 

To create the texture of the cards, I started with a few Megascans moss atlases. Bringing the atlases into Substance Designer, I used various shape splatter nodes to arrange them in a shape that would work being overlaid on cards. Once they were in the engine, my very talented mentor, Stef Velzeboer, helped me create a tri-planar shader to apply color breakup and world offset to the cards. This really helped sell the effect and gave the moss an extra level of detail. 

You can find my full vegetation shader here.

For the rest of the foliage in the scene, I ended up taking a more traditional approach. Check out this great tutorial by Peyton Varney which I found incredibly useful. It goes more in-depth about the techniques I used. 

Interior and Glass

The interior of the bookstore was a tricky one, and I ended up going through a couple of different techniques before finding something that worked. Originally, I had hoped that I could get away with a bump offset texture to fake the interior. No matter what I tweaked however, it just looked off, and it was not holding up the illusion that there was actually something tangible beyond the glass windows.

When that didn’t work, I decided to up the ante and tried using a cubemap for the interior, similar to the ones that they used in Insomniac’s recent Spider-Man. Unfortunately, that didn’t go so well either. I realized that the issue was in the circular and abnormal shape of the storefront - from one angle the cubemap would look fine, but when panning alongside the windows, the perspective quickly started to warp and break the illusion. 

My final solution was to just model in a physical interior and slap on the same textures I was using for my cubemap. I found that after modeling a simple cube behind the windows, I was able to fake the interior even better than with the previous methods, as it actually held up with the movement of the camera. 

As for the glass, it took quite a bit of tweaking to get it looking right, but after scrounging around for some online tutorials I was able to create a good base to work off of. The warped glass effect was achieved by getting my refraction down and then using a tiled Perlin noise on the normals of the material. It was surprisingly easy to set up! 

Here is my glass shader.

Texturing and Trim Sheets

I found that each different asset and texture provided its own challenge, and I feel like my texture work improved immensely throughout the project. The props I was most proud of from the scene definitely fell towards the final stretch. 

Throughout the project, I found a lot of material references from talented artists and used them as a sort of visual benchmark for the quality I wanted to achieve. Using this method, I found I was really able to up my game and realize where my texturing was falling short. I also created quite a few materials within both Painter and Designer to help speed up my texturing workflow. When using them across multiple assets however, I would always be sure to make substantial tweaks to the materials. This really helped to make the props feel unique from one another.

Steam donkey prop and my layer stack in Substance Painter:

For the huge amount of wood throughout the scene, I got quite a lot of use out of trim sheets. It’s a great way to create tiling materials with a lot more localized details than what you’ll get with a basic tileable. Here’s a great tutorial by Polygon Academy that breaks down the trim sheet workflow:

Background and Effects

The background was a pretty significant challenge for me and another aspect of the scene I feel like I really could have improved. Backgrounds are tough! 

The first thing I wanted to figure out was my use of fog. I’m sure it's quite noticeable that while adding a lot to the atmosphere to the scene, I also used the fog to hide a lot of the blemishes and imperfections in the background.

For the assets themselves, I got a lot of mileage out of

• 2 simple sculpts for the large tree trunks
• Some frankensteined branches from the foreground
• A couple of quick trees generated in SpeedTree 
• Some simple cards using an alpha mask for the distant trees
• An emissive card to fake the distant buildings
• Some very simple blocked out buildings for the midground

After that, it was mainly just placing these different assets to create nice compositions for my planned shots, sort of like 3D collage work. 

I also wanted to give the environment as much life as I could, and I thought a simple and effective way to do that was to load the scene up with tons of particles! The fireflies were my favorite to work on, and I created a couple of different variations of them. One was localized around a specific point, like lights and areas of dense vegetation, and the other was a more global but subtle spread. For the birds, I used a sprite sheet that I found online, and matched the animated material with UE4’s particle system. After that was working, I just had to tweak the volume, direction, and speed of the particles to create a natural-looking flock of birds.

Lighting

The lighting is another aspect of the concept that I decided to change quite substantially. I loved the paper lanterns so much that I wanted them to have a larger impact on the lighting of the scene. That meant that the scene had to generally be darker, to help the lanterns pop out. Like everything else in the scene, it took a lot of different iterations to get the light feeling the way I wanted it to. 

The most valuable advice I got when lighting my scene was from a mentor Aaron Dodd. Aaron suggested that I push the lighting as much as I could and that I just try and be loose with it only dialing things back once it became obvious that I had gone too far. I had a super fun couple of days when I just started throwing spotlights everywhere. I would use them to push out highlights and lighten underexposed pockets throughout the scene. I really started to feel like I was painting with light and pushing out different major and minor forms.

I mainly used static lighting throughout the scene, with a couple of diversions here and there. The lantern on the table is the one instance throughout the scene where I used ray-traced lighting, which I found to really help soften the shadows around the table. There was a drawback, in regards to UE4’s inability to render translucent ray-traced shadows, but I decided that the added ambiance was worth the hit to accuracy and realism in this case. I can’t wait to experiment more with ray-tracing over the course of my next project!

Default vs. Ray-Traced:

A resource that I found to be instrumental in learning technical aspects of lighting within UE4 is the Unreal 4 Lighting Academy series by Tilmann Milde. You can find the series right here:

Conclusion

All in all, I’m quite satisfied with how Iroh’s Bookstore turned out in the end. There will always be things to improve upon and nitpick over, but I think it's important to know when to wrap things up as well. I learned an incredible amount throughout the project, and I can’t wait to push myself further on the next one. 

If I were to give any piece of advice, it’s to work hard, have fun, and take one step at a time. Projects like this are big, and I find they can easily become overwhelming. Personally, I was a lot more relaxed and a lot more productive once I just stopped worrying about the end game. Also, seek feedback wherever you can and talk to people! I would probably still be sending out cover letters if I wasn’t open and excited to share my project with those around me. Finally, there is an incredible amount of resources out there, such as 80 Level, and you should be making use of them as much as you can. 

I am so very grateful to be featured on the website, and I really hope that this breakdown will be of use to some of you out there! 

If you have any questions for me, please feel free to contact me through my ArtStation page.

Robert McCall, 3D Environment Artist

Interview conducted by Kirill Tokarev