Building Uncharted-Inspired Environment In Blender With Storytelling Focus

Introduction

Hey guys! I am Priyansh Dutta (John), and I am a 22-year-old 3D Environment Generalist from India, specializing in props, real-time environment creation for games, and environment concept art and Illustrations in 3D.

My usual choice of software for the majority of my projects happens to be Blender in combination with ZBrush, Substance 3D Painter, Substance 3D Designer, Photoshop, DaVinci Resolve, and After Effects.

I also happen to be a self-taught artist, and looking back at it, I started my journey in 2020 during the lockdown period when I first discovered 3D as a medium. For a major portion of my life, I was a traditional artist, and as far as I can remember, what interested me the most as my subject of choice was landscapes and plein-airs.

This interest of mine was reflected heavily in the artworks that I made later down the line when I started learning 3D, and ever since, nothing excites me more than the process of capturing the magic of fantasy lands and dystopic cityscapes through my environments and illustrations.

Yuri's Discovery

Yuri's Discovery has started off as a personal project which I do intend to turn into a series in the future. The main concept for the project is to trace the journey of our character, Yuri, as she traverses through various foreign lands and worlds, discovering the secrets that each one holds.

I do intend to turn it into a series, with the main objective being to improve the narrative aspect of my environment. One of my biggest struggles so far as an environment artist has been the aspect of storytelling through the worlds that I make. I am pretty fickle-minded and often suffer from shiny object syndrome when it comes to making art and practicing things that actually matter. So, I decided to begin Yuri's Discovery as a fun little personal project in order to keep things interesting.

Apart from that, a lot of the inspiration for the project came from titles like Lara Croft, Uncharted, and Indiana Jones since their depiction of adventure and the thrill of discovery is something that I wanted to portray in my scene.

References

Let's be real: building a big scene can be quite a daunting task since a world has a variety of things: setting, weather, architecture, scale, shading, and camera angles, to name a few, and building one means taking care of all of these. But that does not mean everything has to be done together at the same time.

Break your scene up and take it one step at a time. While working with big scenes, gathering your references first can sure be a very big time saver. My main mantra while approaching such scenes is plan carefully then create freely.

For this one, as I mentioned, I wanted to go with the Lara Croft and Uncharted vibes; hence, to make things easier, I collected some in-game screenshots from the games as a part of my initial references. When working, I like to break my reference board up into four sections for better clarity: First, a section containing overall references and inspirations for the environment; second, for the lighting; third, for the style of materials/textures; and fourth, for the architectural elements (if present).

For gathering references, I find Pinterest to be really helpful, whereby you get a wide variety of references and inspirations sourced from the web, which I can then save and create boards for any of my projects and keep things well organized. Apart from that, I also use PureRef for referencing.

Another practice that I found helpful while starting any environment is to ask a few questions regarding the world in question. What is the overall theme/vibe I want to go for? What type of architectural elements do I want to show? What was the purpose of this place? Is it a peaceful sanctuary? A place of worship? If the character is on a ledge, how did the character get there? Is it via stairs? Or does the character have to climb up? Such questions help to make your approach a lot more purposeful rather than entirely imaginative. It is very important to ground your worlds in reality, no matter how dystopian or fantastical. That helps you sell the believability of the environment.

Once everything was set, I finally started the referencing process by arranging inspirations/references appropriate to my scene into separate boards on Pinterest and PureRef.

Blockout & Modeling

Like many of my previous projects, this one also started off with a rough blockout to get a look and feel of the environment before I got to the detailing, texturing, and all the other good stuff. But even before the blockout, we need to sort out the composition for the scene.

The composition can be very useful in terms of selecting the camera angles and placement of key components of the scene, such as characters, important details, props, and much more, in a manner that directs our eyes toward them. I personally like using the rule of thirds or the golden ratio, depending on the scene. In this case, Blender's camera composition guides (which can be found under the Viewport Display tab) come very handy, giving the user a wide range of guides to choose from for their scenes. 

To use the rule of thirds, activate the guide from the Viewport Display and just align the Intersections of the grid with the areas you want to direct the viewer's eyes.

After the composition is taken care of, we can start off with the main blockout process. I usually divide my entire production pipeline into four parts: blockouts, primary details, secondary details, and touch-ups. While blocking out I try to keep things relatively simple using basic geometry to sketch out the major areas of action and give the scene a foundation to be built on. I also like to call it "sketching in 3D".

In Yuri's Discovery, the entire scene is situated in a sanctorum of sorts. So I am focusing more on the bigger shapes, such as the layered slab-like structure of the sanctorum descending down in steps, the big ledge/platform where my character would stand, and the strategic placement of pillars to create natural vignettes of sorts for diverting the viewer's eyes to the point of interest, etc. Of course, a major issue to be tackled while blocking is that of the scale, which can make or break your scenes. To avoid any confusion, I prepared my blocking with respect to the human figure in the scene.

I also like to do a few lighting passes in this stage since it gives me greater freedom to play around with the lighting setups before I narrow down on the ones I like.

After I was done with the block out, lighting setups, compositions, etc., I moved on to the primary details, where I started building the main architectural elements for my scene with respect to the human scale for accuracy. During this phase, something that I have found incredibly useful is assessing the entire scene and identifying the repetitive elements of the environment. This single-handedly has the capacity to bring days' worth of work down to hours. This is also a practice that is done very often in the games industry, whereby large environments need to be populated.

If you want to save time, it's not advised to build each and every element of the scene individually from scratch unless the scene has a lot of unique elements, usually interiors/indoor spaces). Another practice that I possibly cannot stress enough is the concept of kitbashing and the idea of maintaining a kit library/asset library. It can help big time if you want to build scenes like this in a few hours or so. Blender also aids in this by providing an option for Asset Libraries in its newer versions, making it much easier to build and maintain kits in an organized fashion.

To make it even more simple to understand, notice how the entire scene can be broken down into a few key elements: pillars/columns, ledges/ platforms, and stairs, arranged and re-arranged in combinations to build the background up. Just try to break the repetitions up by introducing occasional areas of rest and switching back and forth between variations of pillars/stairs and ledges. Hopefully, that gives you an idea of how powerful the concept of kitbashing can be if used correctly.

UV Unwrapping & Texturing

Usually, whenever I am working on a portfolio piece or something real-time, I tend to follow the much more conventional pipeline, addressing issues such as a texel density, UV space, and the usage of timesheets and decals. However, it all depends upon the main goal of the project, i.e., what exactly are we going to showcase through the project? For this project, I kind of did a quick and dirty UV, either projecting it from view or doing a quick cube projection inside of Blender.

Hence, for this piece, most of the unwrapping and texturing was done within Blender itself since this project was solely done with the purpose of practicing storytelling, composition and sharpening visual aesthetics, rather than preparing something for real-time use.

I usually source a lot of my textures from Fab, Textures.com, or Pexels rather than creating them from scratch, which helps me speed up my workflow significantly.

While texturing, however, I like to stack multiple textures using the node-based texturing system of Blender's Shader editor. My main aim during this process is to break up the texture and its repetitions making it look as seamless and natural as possible. The attached breakdown hopefully gives an idea of how I procedurally break up my texture maps inside of Blender.

Composition

The assembly of the final scene happens to be pretty straightforward, thanks to all the referencing, planning, and composition previously chalked out. Now, when it comes to the arrangements, the various elements of the scene are arranged in a strategic manner so as to lead the eyes of the viewer to the area of main interest (the tree of life in the middle of the sanctuary). To break it down, we can see that the shot has been composed in a fashion such that the primary pillars on both sides of the camera, as well as the overhanging archway in combination with the ledge below, create a very natural vignette for the shot, perfectly framing the Tree Of Life at the center. As previously mentioned, the composition follows the principle of the rule of thirds, which would also explain the off-centered placement of the camera. 

The stairs play a very important part in the scene in giving the audience a direction, helping them navigate into the world, Starting from the flight of stairs coming up the platform to ones descending down the platform into the heart of the sanctuary and the second flight of stairs leading up to the tree, all can be looked at as examples of guiding lines almost discreetly directing the audience towards the main point of attraction. 

The details for most of the parts are placed uniquely by hand due to the small and compact nature of the scene with repeating elements. While placing details, I tried to include more details specifically in the foreground, such as broken tiles, carvings/geometric designs on the floor, old vases, wooden chests, ropes, small statues, etc, depending upon the context and theme of the scene. Since the foreground is the closest to the camera, making it look detailed somehow sells the illusion of the rest of the scene being equally detailed to the viewer, even if they are not.

As for the character, it is from Sketchfab By Arion Digital. Here's the link to the original character for those who want to check it out.

Lastly, I used a cube with a Volume Scatter node in order to introduce volumetrics to sell the illusion of depth in the scene, bringing the scene together.

Lighting & Rendering

Lighting, for me, is mostly another means to contribute to the storytelling of a scene. Lighting should be purposeful, and to do so, I often stick to a rule of thumb religiously when doing my scenes. Show what's important, and cut out/ tone down the rest. For instance, in this scene, I intentionally kept the foreground (overhanging platform where the character stands) and surrounding elements in shadow so that the Tree in the distance could shine through and vice versa. By doing so I am purposefully pointing out or highlighting what exactly I want my viewer to see. Lighting everything equally takes away the depth and contrast of a scene, robbing it of its drama and appeal to a big extent, which might make the scene look flat. 

Blender's in-built sky texture, Nishita, is pretty good at simulating outdoor lighting to some extent; however, the only issue is that it doesn't produce accurate lighting in terms of color and intensity of the sunlight.

To counter that, my main lighting setup consists of sunlight, which uses the node setup to light my scenes. In the shader editor of the "sun," I introduced a Blackbody node, which gave me better control over the color temperature of the light, allowing me to simulate physically accurate lighting. This is then used in combination with Blender's Sky texture, which I use not for lighting but for toning down the shadows by turning the Intensity down to 0 and turning the ozone all the way up, which pushes just the right amounts of blues in the otherwise harsh and dark shadows produced by the sunlight. This setup can then be used to simulate lighting for various times of the day, with the scene then being rendered in Cycles with a minimum/maximum sample count of 2048 samples, with a Noise threshold of 0.0100 and a time range of around 60 minutes.

My main goal was to amplify the elements in the scene that were already working to make the shot stand out. Another very useful trick that I've learnt while grading my shots is to try and play around with complimentary warm and cool tones. For example, If the overall vibe for the scene is pretty warm or consists of warmer colours, try introducing some cooler tones in the shadows to balance it out. If the scene is predominantly painted in cooler tones/colours, then instead of just doing the opposite and making the shadows warm (which often doesn't turn out to be pleasing at times), try introducing complimentary tones for the shades. For example, If the midtones and highlights are in tones of blue or aqua, then a little tint of greens in the shadows tends to work well. Sticking to such complimentary colour pairs often makes my colour grading process much more controlled instead of being totally random.

Conclusion

Finally, talking about the duration, starting from planning, referencing, rendering, and post-production, this project took me roughly around 5 days to complete, with a majority of that time being used up in the pre-production/planning phase of the project. Likewise, some of the major issues that I faced from a visual/aesthetic point of view were coming up with a composition that suited the overall theme and vibe of the scene, chalking up a variety of camera angles, and testing shots before settling on the final composition. Another major area of challenge was to bench out a finished piece with a working narrative, all within a span of a week, since I also wanted to see how fast I could come up with an idea and execute it into a fruitful piece. Lastly, figuring out and incorporating narrative and guiding elements for the scene in a way that isn't too evident but also brings the scene together, all the while trying to remain true to the original theme. This also turned out to be the main challenge that I had to address for this project.

For beginners just starting off their journey as Environment Artists, there are a few things that I learned the hard way over the years that I thought would be worth sharing. Firstly, I'd say practice is key because it's not possible to get good overnight. Secondly, a very helpful tip, which was shared by one of my fellow artists when I was starting early on, was to try and practice nailing the aesthetics very well. The rest does follow on its own. To do this, you can attempt a simple but effective exercise where you try to re-create shots from your favorite film in 3D/2D, depending upon your medium of choice. I usually use ShotDeck and their amazing library of screen grabs from films. Try to re-create the lighting, the camera angles, or the arrangement of the scene elements. It will teach you a lot about visual aesthetics and what exactly makes the shot work the way it does on the big screens.

Thirdly, make it a habit to work using references. I know it may be a lot of fun to go with the flow or create things out of your imagination, but in the long run, it will result in a very steep learning curve. Fourthly, prioritize the goal of your project. Ask what exactly I plan to showcase through this project. Is it the modeling or texturing? Is it optimization? Maybe I want to build a finished real-time environment for my portfolio. Or maybe I am just trying to improve the aesthetic aspect of my art. Then work accordingly. I've seen beginners who wanted to practice their lighting, building an entire scene from scratch just so they could light it. You can surely do that, but like I said, if your main goal is lighting, then just focus on it. Leave the rest out. There is nothing wrong with using pre-made assets or keeping a live asset library at your expense at all times, depending upon the goal of your project.

With that, I would like to wrap up this article covering my project, Yuri's Discovery. I'd like to thank Gloria Levine for providing me with this wonderful opportunity to write and share my experience with the esteemed platform of 80 Level and its audience. I hope this article provides information of value and is helpful for those who come across it.

Priyansh Dutta, 3D Environment Generalist

Interview conducted by Gloria Levine