Building Artistic Environments with Scanned Assets

Ronald Houtermans did a breakdown of his beautiful urban environment, which combines scanned materials with beautiful shaders and lovely lighting.

Ronald Houtermans shared with 80 Level editor in chief Kirill Tokarev a breakdown of his beautiful urban environment, which combines scanned materials with beautiful shaders and lovely lighting.

Intro

Ronald Houtermans

Hi, my name is Ronald Houtermans and I’m an environment artist from the Netherlands. I started at a couple indie studios and for the last two years I’ve been working as an environment artist for Nixxes Software, where I’ve worked on Rise of the Tomb Raider: Blood Ties DLC and am currently working on an unannounced project.

About the project

I came across the ‘behind closed doors’ website for urban exploration and I knew I really wanted to make something amazing looking like the photos on there, I spend a couple hours just browsing all the different types of buildings and saving reference. I felt like an urban setting was really missing from my portfolio, and I’m a big fan of The Last Of Us’ art, so I wanted to make an abandoned looking building and learn more about materials and creating foliage.

References

I made a reference board that had elements that I really wanted to create, I used certain walls from one environment, and a ceiling from another. Gathering proper reference really helped me out a lot. The main reason for using that website and creating the ref board was that I didn’t want to spend many hours experimenting with layouts and set dressing… which ended up happening anyway, but at least I think I had a more solid base thanks to the crazy amount of reference available.

I started out with a block out scene in Maya and exported the entire environment to UE4 as a single mesh, there I added a skylight and a directional light to check the result quickly in the engine. I then deleted out elements of the block mesh and replaced them with more final looking meshes in the engine. This way I could clearly see what still needed to be done, and the layout remains as planned.

Creating assets

I tried re-using as many modular pieces as possible, saving on time, but there were certain important pieces that I wanted to have unique details, like the different layers of paint on the brick wall in the back, or the paper press in the center of the room.

Above a very early state of the environment,, this wall was my starting point as a test to see what kind of elements I would need and to establish the quality I wanted. I used a blend map for the different coats of paint on the wall. I also used decal projectors to create some unique dirt patches, leaking damage and holes in the wall. Then I created some modular assets like the pipes, vents and cables. I also wanted to paint in a first pass of the foliage. When I was happy with this keyhole scene I started planning out the rest of the scene and assets.

Materials

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Using scanned materials

Some of the foliage in the scene are Megascan texture assets, like the ferns, moss, and grass. For the paper press I wanted to work with layers, do the texture pass in Substance Painter, model in the spiderwebs and paint in the moss with the UE4 mesh painter.

As for the set dressing, I set up a couple of hotkey camera positions and treated them like their own scenes, kind of painting each mini scene with assets and switching between them all till I was happy with them all. Having a lot of references really helped me with creating assets for set dressing and using them in compositions.

Lighting scenarios

Lighting this scene was harder than I expected. Way too early on I started experimenting with lighting and post-processing, which was a mistake. It was fun, but it took a few hours on the total that I could’ve spent elsewhere. I ended up with something too bright looking, I was in too much of a rush wanting to see the end result I guess, but it did help me to figure out what I didn’t want. I experimented with different light setups, but ended up deleting it all and used a skylight and a directional together with volumetric fog.

Keeping the lighting setup simple really improved the scene a lot. After adding just the skylight and directional light the scene was too dark, I already had a collapsed / open roof, so I removed parts of the ceiling where I wanted the light to hit the paper press and the wall behind it. Adjusting the environment to the directional light helped to make the lighting look more natural, instead of using a lot of point lights to fix darker areas. In the end, I think there are about four soft point lights to help bring more attention to the centerpiece and the doors behind it.

With some optimizing this scene should run fine as a game environment. My biggest priority for this scene was to make it look pretty, but I did keep performance in the back of my mind. The scene is missing proper LOD work, and it’s usually around 2100 draw calls and 60+ FPS minimum in the editor. It should be able to run much faster with some optimizing though. The most surprising part was that the entire scene is around 10+ million triangles, but it still runs great. the entire floor has, for example, is pretty dense to allow for some vertex painting, without LOD’s and higher resolution textures everywhere. I think the moss for the entire scene added another 1 mil triangles, however, the engine handles this wonderfully with grouping up instanced meshes like foliage, etc.

And finally, I got a lot of great feedback on things like set dressing, lighting and pushing color values from communities like polycount, 10k group on Facebook, colleagues, and friends who helped me push this even further. Without them, I would have never taken it this far. Thanks a lot! ?

Ronald Houtermans, Environment Artist at Nixxes Software.

Interview conducted by Kirill Tokarev.