Building a Scene of an Abandoned Tree House Taken by Nature

Introduction

Hello, my name is Connor Brandenburger. I am a self-taught/mentor-led 3D Environment Artist, and I currently work at Sony Bluepoint Games. I have been working in video game art for the past 6 years, and I've always had a passion for video games my whole life, so making them seemed all the better! I've worked on many unannounced projects, as well as a PS5 exclusive Godfall, and Metroid Prime Remastered.

I was mentored by my older brother, Taylor Brandenburger, as well as self-taught. My brother brought me up to speed through many pipelines he had introduced me to, many of which have evolved with time, as does the gaming industry. My brother was a great source of knowledge in those early years, one of those people you can ask anything without him being annoyed because he's family.

A Sanctuary Without Its Keeper

I used AI-generated concept images to come up with the scene I had in my head. I then put a lot of the images into PureRef to have a bank of concepts that I could work off of. I find it important to sometimes limit the creativity in the beginning of projects to not burn myself out quickly.

If I have to know/create what every bolt and pile of dirt should look like, burnout on a big scene like this will hit fast. I had a timeframe of 2 weeks that I wanted to be done within, so the AI concept images really helped with the front load and getting the ball rolling. Mainly using them to find inspiration and to find my own path in the scene.

To start, I blocked out the layout I liked best from one of the concept images I had. I did have a timeframe of about 2 weeks on this project, and I wanted to see what was attainable within that span of time. Some things I started with ended up getting cut because of time constraints. Blockout consisted of cubes and spheres, all with different colors to dictate what was what.

Then came modeling. I will go over the tower first. I started by importing my blockout from Unreal to Blender, where I could accurately gather scale. Also, it's very important to have a mannequin in your modeling software, so you can clearly know the scale ref. After the blockout was imported, I decided I wanted to make around 5 long plank variations as well as 5 short, small planks.

After those were made, I was basically kitbashing the entire tower, building it from the ground up, adding meshes and different variants I deemed necessary. Support beams, wood standing on one another for support, broken pieces. I eventually swapped from wood boards to sheet metal for a different color change within the model.

I really wanted to give off the vibe of the wood being stacked by a real human, so there are a lot of bends and odd placements with the wood planks/logs. I also created a vine geometry node that you can see in the screenshots below. It was pretty barebones, but it got the vibes of vines across. It took some adjusting manually, but the result looks nice.

I created the shed almost completely similarly, the floor was a different workflow. I utilized a plane in Blender and subdivided it greatly. I then threw on a displacement modifier in Blender and plugged in a Height Map. I then changed it to UV and adjusted the UVs to the scale I wanted. In doing this, you get the accurate texture to the geometry's look.

After the geo was displaced, I then added another form of displacement, including a cloud noise to give it a natural, bumpy cloud feel. I then carved out some pathways in Blender using the soft select tool and also delegated drops where the puddles would be.

The Foliage

I approached the foliage utilizing some tools in my toolbox and megascans. This was a big-time save for me in the long run. With my budget of about 2 weeks, I couldn't see myself making all the foliage. I did, however, use Unreal Engine 5.7.1's new tree creator, and with a little elbow grease and tuning the materials, I got a pretty cool result.

Regarding the vines that are in the scene that were made with a PCG tutorial online, the YouTuber goes by "Procedural Minds". He showcased his Vine tool and broke down how it works, and it was a straightforward process. What I loved about the tool was that you had to add tags to each static mesh on which you wanted vines to be generated. So you can dictate what you want more clean and what you want more engulfed by nature.

PCG is just getting started, and for select tools like Vines, it was a super user-friendly approach. I would like to add, however, that the more basic the geometry is, the easier those tools will work. I ended up having to create a blockout mesh of my tower to apply the vines, since the vines wanted to keep going in between planks, causing a funky-looking space. Once I created the blockout of the updated tower, it was a pretty fast process to get the result I liked. Here is a little showcase of how the tool works.

Everything was built on modifiers and basic shapes in blender therefore, it was all a pretty simple UV unwrapping. A lot of the UV shells needed to be manually put into select places because of the trimsheet pipeline I was working through. Trim sheets are basically a texture that can, but doesn't have to be baked in detail, and you manipulate the UVs to your desired look.

You can get the same Cube to look different because of how you orient it on the UV map with a trim texture. Super powerful workflow, but you need to know what you are doing.

As I said previously, I mainly used a trimsheet/tileable workflow on these main assets. I madetrimsheets that could be used across a wide spectrum of assets. UVs are the more important part of the process when it comes to trim sheets. Making the UVs follow the exact path you want is a big deal, one UV shell that flipped in the wrong direction could throw off the look of the whole
asset. When making these trim sheets, it was important to adjust as I go.

I started with no moss and lighter colors. I then decided, based on how the scene was going, that I would utilize the existing textures for the landscape and introduce them into my trimsheets. Therefore, the scene feels like one whole piece that's living in unison.

The Scene

I assembled the scene by trying to capture the big models first. I tackled the tower, then the shed, the trees, and then the ground. It was, all in all, the best way for me to work to take care of the most daunting things first. The rest is easy, right? I scattered everything around the scene by hand, whether that was crates, barrels, vines, clovers, flowers, rocks, grass, you name it. I hand
placed it all.

What mainly helped me out with the more specific placement was the foliage section of Unreal. I utilized the foliage types and selected one at a time with "single" placement on, not paint. When it comes to the foliage placement, I started with placing the foliage type that was in closest comparison to the landscape, in my scene, this was the clovers.

I placed clovers, then, when I had a good amount of ground coverage, I moved to semi-large foliage sparingly. I go from small to large, so I can pinpoint areas I want to look cool. This workflow only works with the next step, which is blending. I then blend from the semi-large plants with the medium plants to surround it, giving a sort of fade-off effect. I basically section off the level and focus on one section at a time, and rinse and repeat this process. Below is a quick demo of how I scattered foliage.

I also used a good amount of decals with different intensities to help sell the overall look of the scene. Here are some quick examples. This helps the scene look and feel like it's all in the same world.

Lighting

Lighting-wise, I am mainly working off of Lumen, one of Unreal's most powerful tools. I am also relying on pointlights very heavily in this scene because of a little trick I found out some times ago, If you have an exponential height fog in the scene with volumetric fog turned on, you can places point light in scene, turn up the volumetric scattering intensity (to the desired look) and you can create little fog volumes you can place around. The image below shows it turned on and off, as well as the parameters and their values.

This is also another great way to capture godrays. It's a little more challenging to get it to look right, but the basic instruments are there for the taking. I ended up using a mix of volumetric scattering intensity with a beam mesh from Unreal Engine source files. It works well, and when overlay'd with a texture that moves it really sells the feeling of godrays going through fog. Just can't go too overboard with it.

I used the movie render queue. This was my first time using it, so I had a lot of engine crashes because of overloading my system. But overall was a pretty good process once I got it going. I did, however, have to take the EXR images that were rendered out and color-match them in DaVinci Resolve to get the accurate color profile that I had in the viewport all this time. That, with a simple vignette and some highlights on the godrays where about all I did in post. The scene spoke for itself and didn't need much fine-tuning in post.

Conclusion

It took me around 2 weeks and about 1-2 hours per day to finish this project. I gave myself this budget to see what I could achieve during this timeframe. It's important not to overload yourself and to burn yourself out. It's also important to know your own limitations and what is realistic.

I had to cut out a good number of things I wanted to include in this scene to meet the deadline I set for myself. The main challenge I ran into in this project was budgeting time accordingly. Nothing was all that challenging in the sense of art, it was more about managing time and where to put the 1-2 hours a day into.

I learn a lot through this scene, especially learning about Unreal Engine's PCG and new tree creator tool. For beginning artists, I would advise you to set a goal for yourself. Dedicate 1-2 hours a day to working on a project, and you will see it slowly coming to life. Consistency is key.

Connor Brandenburger, Environment Artist

Interview conducted by Emma Collins