Creating an Immersive Urban Street Environment Using Blender and Substance 3D

Introduction

Hi! My name is Pauline Ferrand, and I'm an Environment Artist from France. My journey in the environment art world started eight years ago when I joined a game art school for five years. I was a big player of video games, and I have always wondered about the game creation process. But as I realised the industry had more and more aspiring artists with a decreasing amount of work opportunities, I decided to give myself the best possible chance by joining Artside partway through, where I could learn more about art and tech.

As I learned more, I always wanted to push the boundaries of visual quality even further. So I spent a lot of time on each detail, by making shaders and tools to work more efficiently in bringing this world to life. I'm currently finishing off my final school project with three Character Artists, three Concept Artists, and another Environment Artist, so there's still plenty to show!

Urban Street

In my final year at Artside, we had the opportunity to choose a project to work on over several months. Since this project would mark the end of my studies, it had to make an impact. I spent several days searching for a concept that would allow me to focus primarily on vegetation, materials, and lighting. My attention was then drawn to the excellent Li-Moly concept, which interested me both for its composition and its colors.

Pré-Production

Before starting production, I broke down the image and made a list of everything I would need (how many different plants, materials, elements to model, all the decals I would have to create...) And at the same time, I kept adding real-world images to my references. I was also thinking about what workflow I would use to save time (for example, I decided that my small props and walls would have different shaders since they wouldn’t use the same techniques to add detail.) 

After this brief pre-production phase, it was time to start blocking out the scene. I started with Blender before importing the scene into UE, and began placing a camera in the scene and adding gray blocks to represent the various houses on the street. Blocking is one of the parts I like the least, since there are little to no visual changes during the process, but it's also one of the most important steps for establishing a solid foundation.

Getting the proportions right was difficult, since I had to accurately represent the concept in 3D while maintaining consistent proportions. In particular, the Unreal Engine model couldn't be too big or too small relative to the doors from the beginning of the street to the end. It was complicated to balance the camera settings (position, focal length), the size of the buildings, and the interpretation of the concept.

Production

After my blockout was done, I had to start modeling. I used Blender and kept the details simple, as nothing is really zoomed in in detail. I knew the texture quality (which I wanted to focus on in this project) would be enough to provide sufficient detail for the image. I unwrapped all my assets to the same texel density using various Blender add-ons such as Texel Density, Text tool, UVPackmaster, and Mio3 UV, in order to maintain visual consistency throughout the scene.

I created all of my tileable textures with Substance 3D Designer, in which I always start with a simple base of details, and I add more and more layers. For example, for my stone wall, I simply blend some noises to have a basic shape, then I add some details like leaks, brushed shapes, spots, scratches, cracks... I always try to follow the "big, medium, and small" detail rule as best as I can.

I planned to use vertex paint to add extra details to my surfaces, so I procedurally generated three variations of the texture (one with the minimum of detail possible while still retaining the idea that it's a wall, one with more cracks, and one with more leaks).

I decided to split my walls and props into two different main shaders. I used VertexPaint with several variations of the same tiling stone texture for the walls, and I also used RGB masks with Vertex Paint for the props to add specific details on top of the generic textures (E.G. I created a generic terracotta texture for my flowers pot, and I added some baked information textures based on the UV 2 to add some occlusion, curvature or dirt that would be painted using Vertex Colors).

I knew my carpets would need a wind effect and wouldn't require RGB masks, so I created a specific shader for these elements. I made a generic Normal Map to fake height information and assigned a specific diffuse texture, which came from a carpet image found online, that I edited in Photoshop to match the concept's color palette.

I used Material Functions in the project to save time, particularly for creating gradients or adjusting the Hue, Saturation, and Lightness in my various shaders. For my vegetation, I started by creating the shape of my leaves in SpeedTree and exporting 3 texture maps (a packed RGB Map with veins, Normal Map, and Vertex Color Map) to have enough information to add details in Substance 3D Designer, as I used these textures as the base of my leaves.

Once they were done, I created the atlases and used them in SpeedTree.

In Unreal Engine, I used the Vertex Color of my plants to add some color variation. The VertexColor Red is used for random color changes, the Green is used to change the color according to an individual gradient for each branch/leaf (also used for the Wind), and the Blue is used to change the color according to the position of a plant in a group of plants.

Lighting and Post-Production

Day Light 

I wanted the lighting to be as realistic as it could be, so I used Ray Tracing and increased the number of rays to get a finer look. Dithering was used in the RayTraced shader passes to alter the opacity on the plants and remove the "black blobs" that were due to the hardware ray tracing having too many pixels for the rays to work properly. My First move was to orient my sunlight (directional) first to have the same mood/accurate shadows to my concept.

I placed some light blockers in my scene and some spotlights to light up the shadows in certain areas, particularly on my plants. For my DirectionalLight, I changed the source angle to get smoother shadows, set its color, and tweaked my SkyLight's Intensity to get more intense shadows. Then I've tweaked the settings of my post-process volume to change the final tint of the scene, set bloom and contrast settings to get it as close as possible.

Night And Rainy Day Light 

For the 2 others lightings, I kept the Lights actors in the scene but used the UltraDynamicSky plugin to create the time variants and used it to add the weather effects. When I was satisfied with the mood and colors, I adjusted the colors and the intensity of those light actors/or added some in the lanterns (for the night variant). I used a Material Parameter Collection to change the Roughness of all my assets and the saturation of my vegetation by changing just 2 sliders parameters to switch easily between the Dry/Rainy variants without changing all of my instance materials.

Conclusion

This project took me 15 weeks, including reworking my posts in socials. The biggest challenge was managing to achieve a sense of coherence (particularly in terms of the vegetation and its colour) across the three different moods I wanted to create. The lighting was the most time-consuming.

I would like to thank everyone who took the time to give me feedback on this project: Sacha Veyrier, Lionel Cregut, Yoan Autin, Quentin Ferlay, and Clement Masset, especially Arnaud Claudet, who taught me all about vegetation processes. To my friends, Jade Ziegler and Sylvain Lebeau.

Thank you so much for reading this article! Here are my ArtStation and my LinkedIn if you are interested in my other works. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions or are interested in my projects!

Pauline Ferrand, Environment Artist

Interview conducted by Emma Collins