Bringing Halloween Inspiration to Haunted House in Unreal Engine

Introduction

My name is Peyton Varney and I am a Senior Environment Artist at Naughty Dog where I have been for the past six years. Overall I have been working in the industry for around seven years now and have contributed to projects such as Marvel’s Spider-Man and The Last of Us Part 1 and 2. I went to college originally for computer animation but fell in love with the environment side of 3D a lot more and ended up switching to games.

Creating immersive worlds that tell the story with or without a character was something that I particularly enjoyed in all mediums, and it led me to follow that into game development. In my time in the industry, I have also been given the opportunity to pay it forward with the information I have learned and shared through teaching. I have been teaching with CGMA for the past five years, contributed to the Gnomon Workshops tutorial collection, and started my YouTube channel to share free content which then led to this.

Haunted House

To me, this environment is more than just another project that I added to my portfolio. I really enjoy teaching and sharing information with others. I think when I see someone have that passion and creativity with ideas in their head but feel limited to what they can achieve with the medium because of some technical skills, it motivates me to help out so they can overcome that barrier and achieve their own goals.

I teach and have also created paid tutorials, however, I wanted to have another avenue for people to learn that isn’t behind a paywall. I know sometimes paying for a course or content can be restrictive depending on your financial situation, so I wanted to have a place where I could create short tutorials or tips on my environment art process with no cost. Although I went to college for game development, a lot of the things I learned throughout my time before and after graduation were from peers, YouTube, articles, and other non-paid sources of media. So that's where the YouTube channel came in.

I have a lot of fun making videos for the channel and I treat them as individual little projects that can be sometimes done just in a day or so. Over the past two years of making YouTube tutorials, I have continued to try to find what the viewers enjoy most and find helpful. 

This specific haunted house series is the first tutorial series on the channel that has more than two episodes. It is also the first one on the channel where I cover my process from start to finish. Around six months ago, I wanted to tackle a series that would occur during the fall season in the United States, and it would be just me starting from scratch and not necessarily having a direction. I wanted to show myself making every part of this environment in Unreal Engine 5 and not cutting anything out.

Although you may not get deep-dive demos into every little topic or feedback as you would get in a class, I thought that sharing the process of making an environment without leaving anything out would be helpful. I had originally planned to release one video a week covering it, but between time constraints with the project and just overall life happening, it turned into just something I decided to take my time with.

The recording process is a challenge but also rewarding. Trying to show your process and vocalize what you are doing is another level of the creation itself. As I said, I didn't have any specific end result beyond finishing an environment and attempting to record all of the steps in Unreal Engine. So in the end, I ended up with nine videos that covered the different segments in ways that I felt would be well broken up.

I additionally made a material blending tutorial that involves the environment in the latter half of the videos. I wanted to wrap it up in a quick and efficient manner because as I mentioned, I really was concerned about it just being too much nothingness and rambling on about the same topics in the process. The inspiration for the scene itself was just that I wanted to achieve a small environment with a mixture of modular assets, interesting shaders, and fun lighting that I could have a lot of opportunities with. The fall season of course includes Halloween, so the inspiration was everywhere!

I think a lot of times after the reference gathering phase, people get stuck and don't know where to start with the blockout. That's part of why I really enjoy Unreal Engine's real-time capabilities. Once I have collected a couple of reference shots of the mood I want to go for and set up a PureRef board, I tend to jump in and just be loose with it. I think of traditional mediums when I am in this stage where I want to just throw an idea down in the scene and not commit to anything yet, just be quick and loose and get a sketch down in a 3D space to see how things are working.

With the engine being real-time, I can do the same with lighting. I do not really go to the fullest extent of what I want for lighting because it may be hard to work on my assets and shaders in a dark or super foggy space, however, I want to get a rough idea in there to make sure that the thought is coming across. I've used Autodesk Maya predominantly in my time in the industry as my modeling software and did so for this project, just out of convenience.

As you watch through the first couple of videos in the series, you will notice how I just block out with in-engine shapes and when I feel comfortable with the direction, I switch over to importing in initial assets. I didn't really dive into ZBrush for my workflow on this one, but it is a very dominant part of my workflow generally. The tree creation utilized SpeedTree for the blockout and the final result, and you can actually find my entire blockout of the tree in episode two.

Texturing

This project utilized some unique shaders to help pull it off but nothing super special, I kept things simple and quick with a lot of what was created. The textures themselves were all made inside of Substance 3D Designer. There were no baked or one-off textures in the scene, and everything used tiling textures. I leaned into vertex painting heavily to help break things up and get blends and variations to the space. This allowed me to be able to reuse a lot of the shaders and not spend a lot of time constantly making new ones. I have a couple of moments where I dive into my texturing workflow, both in the earlier videos of the series but also in the latter half where I created a blend shader tutorial and spent the last bit of the series painting in details on the house. 

Composition

From the start, the composition was one of the biggest things I wanted to get an idea of fast. This scene specifically was more about composition and shot than the gameplay space and movement. I still made sure that element worked, of course, but since this was more for the pipeline creation of assets and how I set things up, I focused a little bit less on gameplay elements that don't really exist in this space.

I like to start with simple and proven methods of pleasing compositions. I worked with cliche but effective elements of design and composition like the rule of thirds and pushing the depth with foreground, middle ground, and background shapes that help immerse and invite the viewer into the scene and keep them interested as they discover more. I established these big reads and the layout in my initial blockout and although a lot changed, the core essence of the original idea still stayed with the composition. If you can figure some of those things out early, it will save you a lot of headache and rework later on, when there is a lot more detail and stuff that you have to adjust!

Lighting

Something that helps a lot with forming composition and an interesting piece is lighting. It is one of the most important parts of environment art and a stage of the pipeline that needs a good amount of time dedicated to it. Even if you aren't planning to be an environment artist, it's crucial for presenting your environments in a believable way and unifying it all.

In addition to this, post effects like fog, particle effects, and anything else that can add those nice details to a scene help bring it to life. In this scene, I kept the lighting simple but effective. I had my directional and sky lights doing most of the job, but halfway through, I realized that it wasn't enough and I needed something more to bring the piece together. I then implemented warmer lights with street lamps and lamps on the house as well as interior artificial lighting. This created a contrast to the otherwise cold and dark environment.

Unreal Engine 5’s Lumen features coupled with ray tracing gave me a lot of freedom in this stage. Lastly, the only other notable thing in the space is the fog. I use exponential height fog for most of the scene, but I additionally wanted to place fog cards throughout to get more texture in the air. This is one of the only things that I did not create from scratch and I decided to go with William Faucher’s EasyFog. This tool is extremely easy to use and has a rather nice array of options for adding fog cards to your scene. Sure, you could make similar stuff from scratch, but he packaged it in a really solid way to make using it an ease. Highly recommend checking it out if you want to avoid the headache of creating your own! 

Conclusion

I am overall happy about what I got out of this process and environment. My goal was to try to best show how I make a personal environment piece quickly and efficiently. I wanted to record every second that was spent in Unreal Engine 5, and while there might be a minute or two missing, I otherwise achieved that and was able to share it on my YouTube channel. This platform, which provides free educational content, is part of how I learned when starting in the industry, and I am thankful now that I can contribute back. I find making these videos relaxing and stress-free, it is my way of almost journaling my art process, and considering I never try to force myself into a strict deadline with personal work, almost the entire creation is enjoyable for me. 

My advice to the person looking to work on their next personal piece, portfolio project to get into the industry, or whatever else would be to simply create stuff you are passionate about. There are so many factors at play, but the one that you can always control is your own artwork. You are an artist after all, and the idea of personal artwork should be exactly that: personal. It’s what sets you apart as an individual and tells your story. Creating what you want to create is going to show through, and that passion is going to yield a stronger rate of completion, quality, and story that otherwise would have just been forced!

Peyton Varney, Senior Environment Artist

Interview conducted by Gloria Levine