LogInNiki Marinov spoke with us about designing an environment using materials from his own Signature Collection for Substance 3D Assets, inspired by a traditional Bulgarian village.
Introduction
My name is Niki Marinov, and I'm currently a Material Artist at Frontier Developments, having worked on Jurassic World Evolution 2, F1 Manager 22, Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin, Planet Coaster 2, and the newly announced Jurassic World Evolution 3. My journey with 3D started in school over 10 years ago, and I've worked at various startups and small companies before joining the industry back in 2020. While my background in university was in Computer Engineering, my passion has always been 3D, and I'm mostly self-taught in that area.
Substance 3D Signature Collection – Bulgarian Village
A year ago, I was approached by Adobe to create my own Signature Collection for Substance 3D Assets. This was a dream come true for me, as I had always admired the great artists featured in their collections while I was on my journey to becoming a professional artist. You can learn more about the project here.
In essence, I wanted the theme to be unique and personal. Since I had received immense success with my winning entry in the Meet Mat 2 contest, I decided to expand on that theme with this project. I planned trips around the country and visited many ethnographic villages, taking a million reference shots with my camera. I then carefully selected 10 materials from these references and began working on my collection.
Blockout
The composition is roughly based on a few Bulgarian ethnographic villages, but mainly a village called Etara. I scanned a couple of houses with my phone and imported them into Blender or Maya to use as reference for the actual scale of each object. Once I had a good sense of the shapes, I used satellite images of Etara to roughly base my blockout on. I modeled the front and the back of each house based on different references, so that every time I rotate the asset, I essentially get a new house.
Topology
Nothing here was sculpted or retopologized, so I won't be expanding on this here. I kept the meshes really low-poly and only added geometry to support the placement of materials and easy unwrapping inside of Maya. I kept everything in the same texel density, and only when I was done applying the textures to the models did I subdivide them so that I could rely heavily on Nanite displacement inside of Unreal.
Materials
The idea of this collection is that anyone using the Substance 3D Suite can download it and open the graphs to learn from them or just use the materials commercially in their projects. That's why I needed the materials to be very versatile in how they look and function, on top of having all of those exposed parameters.
The most important tip I can give you is to try to "sculpt" the silhouette of the shapes before adding any noise. You should be able to tell what the final material is supposed to be before adding noise whatsoever.
Composition
After I had the houses, I started worrying about foliage. I decided to start creating the Ivy with Blender, but that took way too much time and so I decided to finally start using SpeedTree, which made everything super easy and fast. Once I had those, I made a bunch of assets for set dressing, all of which use those 10 materials heavily. Once that was done, I needed something in the background, and so I made a small hilly village Blueprint using low-poly houses that I could scatter in the distance. The last thing I did was to grab real-world height data from Tangram and put that into Gaea to generate a real-life mountain from Bulgaria in the background as a little Easter Egg.
Lighting & Rendering
The lighting was quite difficult for me as I changed the vibe of the scene multiple times. I relied heavily on HDRIs and Lumen to achieve my desired result, and then tweaked the colors in the post process value and in a custom-made LUT texture. I tried to take all of the shots from eye level, similar to how I would take shots with my camera and treat the renders more like photographs. And after those were rendered, I color corrected all of them through Adobe Lightroom.
Annoyingly, the best results came from a bunch of console commands for Unreal, as half the features don't work correctly without them.
АО - Post Processing
r.Lumen.DiffuseIndirect.SSAO 1
r.Lumen.ScreenProbeGather.ShortRangeAO 0
Lumen
r.RayTracing.NormalBias 5
r.TemporalAA.Upsampling 0
r.Streaming.PoolSize 8000
r.Lumen.Reflections.Quality 4
r.Lumen.Reflections.MaxRoughness 1
r.Lumen.Reflections.HierarchicalScreenTraces 1
r.Lumen.DiffuseIndirect.Allow 1
r.Lumen.DiffuseIndirect.Dither 1
r.Lumen.DiffuseIndirect.SampleAngle 2
Renders
r.TemporalAASamples 64
r.TemporalAA.Upsampling 1
r.SceneColorFringe.Max 0
r.MotionBlurQuality 0
r.TonemapperFilm 1
Conclusion
The Substance 3D Collection took me around 2.5 months to complete, while also working a full-time job. The houses, foliage, props, and Unreal scene took another 1.5 months. With some feedback on my materials, I believe I spent a total of 4.5 months.
The most challenging aspect was that I wanted to tell a story and wasn't willing to compromise on the scale and size of the project. I definitely cut some corners, and if this were a proper game, most of the assets would have gone through a more thorough workflow. However, since this scene served only to showcase the materials in the series, I didn't need it to exercise any other function.
I have to state that this workflow isn't standard and isn't the way we would approach making games in a studio setting. This project only needed to showcase the 10 materials and the assets needed to support them, not the other way around.
Don't be overwhelmed by the fear-mongering online, such as claims that AI is taking artists' jobs and there won’t be any in the future. Yes, there will be a change in how we make things, but that shouldn't discourage you. You can achieve anything you want as long as you put in the effort. Learn the basics, and every new software will simply apply those same principles to a new canvas. Create for the sake of creating, and everything else will follow.