Breakdown: Building Game-Ready Desert Temple Environment

Introduction

Hello 80 Level readers and artists, my name is Almog Rotem. I'm an Israeli 3D Environment Artist for games.

I first got into 3D while traveling in East Asia, thanks to someone I met who told me about 3D animation. After I came back home, I started looking into it and decided to join a private school in Israel for a 5-month course covering 3D animation. Halfway through the course, I became more interested in 3D for VFX and games, and that's when I discovered Think Tank Training Centre. I studied in Think Tank's on-campus program, which lasts 16 months.

Funny enough, by the time I finished Think Tank, I had decided I wanted to focus my career path as a 3D Generalist for VFX. After graduating, I worked at a VFX studio for 5 months, contributing to shows and movies for Netflix, Apple TV, and some studio projects until the industry strike happened. Right after that, I decided to develop a game idea I had been thinking about for a while. I built a team of 10 artists who helped bring the vision to life. I was responsible for art direction, coordinating the team, and supporting the artists with environment and character work

Later, I was given the opportunity to work as a teacher assistant at Think Tank Training Centre, helping and guiding students through their projects. Meanwhile, I wanted to try new things in 3D, so I decided to build a game environment, and it immediately felt like the right direction for me!

Dome Temple

For this project, I chose to recreate the Dome Temple, a concept by Edward Barons. I was drawn to it because it tells a strong story visually, and it also reminded me of video games set in desert environments, like Assassin's Creed Origins, Red Dead Redemption 2, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and more.

My goal was to create an environment that both 3D professionals and general audiences would immediately associate with a video game or, even better, feel like they would want to explore and play in it from the very first look. I started the project on my own and later sought feedback from my mentor, Damien Peinoit, a senior artist in the industry. I believed creating a large environment would challenge me and help level up my skills. 

References

Gathering references is one of the most important steps every artist should invest time in finding the right references, that step will save you a lot of headaches and time!

I like to organize all my references in PureRef. Here are a few tips I find helpful when working with references:

• I usually gather 3-6 images for each asset or material. Having too many references can be overwhelming and confusing when it’s time to decide how the object should look;
• I like to take my main reference into 3D Painter or Photoshop, sketch out my planned workflow, and then bring that sketched image back into PureRef. It really helps when I feel lost during the process;
• Gathering material references is essential, for example, wood, bricks, sand, and so on;
• It's also very important to collect real-life images. When aiming for realistic art, trying to capture the same feeling and atmosphere as real-world environments makes a big difference;
• I keep my PureRef board organized by adding notes and labeling sections. It might just be my personal preference, but it saves a lot of time and makes the board much easier to navigate.

Blockout

I like to start by blocking out the hero asset to understand approximately how big it should be. I add a human figure to get the proportions right.

After that, I block out the big shapes first and then move to smaller assets and objects. This stage is very important for understanding proportions as I mentioned before. When importing into Unreal, I also block out the lights. You can even use some Megascans assets or any placeholder objects just to see how things look inside Unreal, how the lighting blockout looks, how everything compares to the concept, and what makes sense in real life.

Obviously, it won't look exactly like your concept at this point, but it helps you understand the object positions and have the whole environment blocked out inside Unreal. For the water in my scene, I simply created a placeholder, just a simple plane covering the water area.

One thing I regret not doing earlier was setting up my render camera angles right after the blockout stage. Doing that would have helped me know which areas are more important, so I could focus on them. Whatever the camera doesn't catch or show, I would have known not to spend too much time detailing.

Assets

Everything mentioned above also helps you decide how to approach material and asset creation.

One method I highly recommend for game projects is using modularity kits. Creating a modular kit can save you a lot of time and headaches! That being said, my bigger objects in this project weren't very repetitive, but for parts that were, I built modular kits that I could reuse throughout the project. For example, for the rocks, I created four different versions by sculpting high-poly models and then used them across the entire scene. I did the same for assets like the windows, cactus, and more.

A good tip my mentor taught me is to use the Packed Level Actor (PLA) feature. With this feature, you can group a set of objects together into a single PLA, which creates a new object and a new level containing the packed objects. Inside the PLA level, you can still modify each object individually, and changes will update automatically in your main scene. PLAs are also optimized for rendering, meaning they are much lighter and more efficient than manually duplicating assets all over the scene.

Landscape

For the landscape, I started by using Gaea as my main software to create the sand and ground. In Gaea, I imported a placeholder object so I could match the landscape height to my blockout.

After building the landscape, I exported the Albedo map, Height map, RGB mask (which I'll explain later), and Roughness map. I imported the landscape into Maya and used the sculpting tools to adjust the ground and match it to my blockout to avoid any object intersections or crashes.

As soon as I brought the Gaea landscape into Unreal, I noticed something felt off, not technically, but artistically. I kept it there as a placeholder for a while.

Eventually, I decided to switch and use Unreal's built-in Landscape system instead. It gave me much more freedom with sculpting the terrain and adjusting things in real-time. For the landscape material, I used four different ground types: sand, dry sand, mud, and wet soil.

I set up a landscape material that allowed me to blend between these layers, and I also added a Runtime Virtual Texture to the landscape.

A great trick for making your landscape blend naturally with your assets instead of making it look like you just dropped objects on top is using Runtime Virtual Texture. RVT allows the color, roughness, and normal of the landscape to blend with the objects that have the RVT material set up.

I applied RVT materials to some of the rocks and other objects in my scene to make everything feel more realistic and grounded. Trust me, it helps a lot!

UVs & Texture Preparations

After blocking out the scene and most of the objects to match the feeling of the concept, I started adding more detail and polishing the forms. At this point, I went through the concept plan and started marking which objects should preferably use a Tileable Texture and which ones should have a unique texture.

I think it's important to decide that early, it gives you a better sense of what you need to focus on when polishing the assets. For the UVs, I followed a 4K map with a texel density of 10.24.

I didn't use any special UV techniques. For unique assets that fit within the 0-1 UDIM space, I usually start with a base shape in Maya, polish it a little, and import it into ZBrush. Personally, I think it's better to create the base shape in Maya with correct proportions, then bring it into ZBrush, use DynaMesh, and continue sculpting the high-poly model. After sculpting the high-poly, I duplicate the object, decimate it (to a good amount of polys, but not too high!), create the UVs in ZBrush, and then bring the low-poly version into RizomUV to clean and organize the UVs properly.

Very important: Before importing into Substance 3D Painter, make sure to Soften Edges in Maya! This ensures that your high-poly bake will be accurate and won't have sharp artifacts.
After baking, I texture the asset inside Substance 3D Painter.

This workflow of using decimated base mesh from ZBrush is especially important if you're planning to use Nanite inside Unreal. I positioned the object in Maya where I wanted it approximately in Unreal and imported it to Unreal as a group from Maya. For simple assets like wood pieces, I kept things simpler, modeled the base mesh in Maya, UV'd it there (or adjusted in RizomUV if needed), sculpted the high-poly in ZBrush, and textured it in Substance 3D Painter.

When I start texturing, I like to keep it simple at first. I get the entire scene textured roughly, and only after that do I go deeper into adding detail and variations.

Tileable Textures

For the Dome Temple I created, I used tileable textures made with Substance 3D Designer. I started with a basic brick texture and later improved it.

I noticed the dome walls had broken areas, so I created a second brick texture set. Using a mask made in Photoshop, I could reveal the broken areas in the material. In the material itself, I added a tile parameter to control how the mask appears and placed it exactly where needed. I used a similar technique for the marble floor, creating a broken marble mask and a second texture set for the cement underneath.

RGB Mask

The RGB Mask method is very common in the game industry – it's a fast, efficient way to add or change details on your objects, like color, roughness, and normals.

I used Substance 3D Painter to create my RGB masks. I created four layers with only color channel editable. The first layer (base layer) was black; we don't want any color information at the base color; the rest of the layers were red, green, and blue. You can add some preset masks to start with.

I set up my RGB material so that I could control each channel individually (Red, Green, Blue) to adjust it as needed.

Decals

Decals are very important and add a lot to your scene – they're fast, easy, and not heavy on performance. You can create your own decals using Substance 3D Painter or 3D Designer or use Unreal's built-in decal library.

I used a mix of both. I thought that adding some sand decals inside the temple would help sell the desert environment. Besides standard decals, I also created animated decals to mimic layers of sand being moved by wind.

Overall, I used three layers to create the desert atmosphere:

• Animated sand decals;
• Small pebbles flowing around using the Niagara system in Unreal;
• Big sand gusts scattered across the environment, also using the Niagara system.

Vertex Paint

Vertex Paint allows you to paint multiple materials directly on a mesh. It depends on the polycount (so, in my case, I kept the mesh relatively low to save on render time). For the bronze dome, I noticed it had three different types of material – base bronze, old scratched bronze, and green patina.

I created three separate materials in Substance 3D Designer and added them to a Vertex Paint material in Unreal. On top of that, I added controls like:

• Mask Contrast;
• Mask Brightness;
• Noise Mask (for procedural variation);
• Color adjustments
• Mask Tiling.

These extra settings gave me more control and allowed me to make the painted materials look cleaner, more realistic, and more procedural.

River

I tested a lot of ways to create the river and found that the easiest and fastest was using Unreal's Water plug-in.

Note: The Water Plugin requires a built landscape to work! Using the plug-in, you can place spline points to control the river's shape. Each point has parameters like width, height, velocity, etc. The default values usually work fine, but I adjusted the velocity and changed the water color a bit to better match my scene.

Fog

William Faucher is a great generalist artist for Unreal Engine 5 and has a lot of helpful tutorials. I used his plug-in called EasyFog to set up the fog in my scene, it's very simple and quick to use. Besides EasyFog, I also used Exponential Height Fog to get the general fog atmosphere across the entire scene.

Foliage

For the foliage, I used SpeedTree. I created the plants I needed, and for the textures, I imported Megascans textures into Substance 3D Designer to modify their colors, roughness, and normals. I also added different patterns and variations to match the concept art more closely.

Lightning

I kept my lighting setup very simple. I mainly used a Directional Light, which handled most of the lighting for the scene.

Inside the temple, I added some Area Lights and placed a few Spotlights at the windows to enhance the mood. Overall, I didn't do anything too complex with the lighting, keeping it simple helped me stay focused on the environment.

As I mentioned earlier, I wish I had set up my cameras during the blockout stage, it would have saved me a lot of time later on. At this stage, I created and placed my cameras. Some of them are animated shots, while others are still frames.

I like to create a lot of different angles first and then later filter out and pick the ones I like the most. I usually use a 16:9 DSLR camera setup in Unreal, it gives the render a more cinematic look.

Rendering

For exporting, I used Apple ProRes, along with some adjustments through Console Variables.

• Apple ProRes – Each export format (JPG, EXR, Apple ProRes, etc.) uses a different "color bit depth". The color bit depth defines how much color information each pixel can store: JPG = 8-bit (lower color detail), EXR = 16-bit (very high detail, often unnecessary), Apple ProRes = 12-bit (a good balance between quality and file size for most needs);
• Anti-Aliasing – I used anti-aliasing to keep my renders clean and sharp. I also set the warmup frames to about 120-150 frames. Warmup gives the anti-aliasing and lighting time to "settle" before the actual recording starts, resulting in smoother outputs;
• Console Variables (CVARS) – CVARS can adjust graphics, performance, rendering, debug tools, and more in real-time. Important: If you're not familiar with using CVARS, be very careful. Using them incorrectly can heavily slow down or even crash your project. If you know how to use them properly, though, they can help improve your render quality.

Color Grading & Editing

After rendering all my cameras, I used DaVinci Resolve for final color grading. Most of the heavy lifting was already done inside Unreal, DaVinci was just for final polish. I kept my editing very simple:

• Minor color adjustments;
• Small exposure tweaks;
• Added slight chromatic aberration;
• Added a soft vignette and a touch of film grain.

Conclusion

It took me about 4 months to complete this project. I faced many challenges along the way, especially since I didn't know a lot of professional game workflow techniques when I started.

But thanks to friends, constant research, and staying motivated, I managed to complete the Dome Temple project, and I'm very proud of that! Most importantly, I'm very happy with how much I learned, not just about building environments but doing it the right way.

My advice to beginner artists:

• Reference Board! Always have a strong reference board. Without it, your project wont be realistic and would look off;
• Pick a concept you love. It will motivate you to keep working on it, especially during the tough moments;
• If you can, find a mentor. Even a few sessions with an experienced artist will teach you way more than working alone;
• Keep pushing forward. It's totally normal to have days where you don't feel like working. Just keep going;
• Always ask for feedback. Family, friends, artists, and even non-artists can sometimes help spot things you missed!

Thank you for taking the time to go over my process on the Dome Temple project. I hope that something in this article helped you with your own work  or inspired you to start building your own environment!

Check out my ArtStation page for more renders and projects. Thanks again, and I wish you the best of luck on your journey!

Almog Rotem, 3D Environment Artist

Interview conducted by Amber Rutherford