Creating Desolate Subway Station Inspired by TLOU with Substance 3D

Introduction

Hello everyone! My name is Maja Banas, and I’m currently in my second year at Digital Arts & Entertainment (DAE) of Howest University of Applied Sciences, studying Game Graphic Production with a minor in Style. You may have seen me in a recent post where I shared my very first environment. Now, I’m excited to show you my progress and everything I’ve learned while creating my second environment.

A bit about me: art has always been a big part of my life, as a child, I was almost always drawing or painting. I fell in love with 3d for the first time when I came to Howest. I had never tried 3D before this point, but it interested me so much that I wanted to learn more about it during my university studies, and I’m glad I took the risk. Exploring this new creative outlet filled me with excitement and deepened my passion for creating art. 

I’ve just completed my second semester of my second year at university, and I’ve definitely found my passion for environment art. I’ve learned a lot from the many skilled people around me and also the many skilled people that I’ve met online whilst working on my project. 

I’m grateful to have this opportunity to share my process with you for a second time. In this article, I’ll walk you through how I approached each step of this project, from concept to completion, and what I learned. Hopefully, I can provide some useful insight, and I hope you enjoy it! 

Inspiration

This project was an assignment for my Environments 2 course at university, where we had to create a small, fully optimised, traversable ‘Ruins’ scene. When thinking about the theme, pretty much the first thing that came to my mind was The Last of Us. The game is one of my favourites and is filled with many beautiful ruins in many different scenarios, which gave me a lot of inspiration.

Though my favourite were all the subway station environments. I thought that they all had a nice atmosphere, and I thought I could create something cool with that scenario, and I felt like I already had ideas for all the different areas I could create for renders.

Even though I loved all the concepts for TLOU that I found, I wanted to make this project a bit more my own by trying to concept a bit myself. 

Getting Started

Concepting isn’t my strongest skill, but I still wanted to challenge myself in that regard for this project. At the same time, I didn’t want to spend too much time on this stage either because I knew, with my perfectionist tendencies, I could easily fall into the trap of endlessly tweaking things in the search for the “perfect” idea. Therefore, to keep things moving, I took a more efficient approach by combining photobashing with drawovers to create the final concept I would follow. I kept it relatively simple, as I prefer to handle set dressing and more detailed design elements during the actual building phase. This was the final concept that I ended up with:

As you can see, I was heavily inspired by the already existing station environments in The Last Of Us, and that influence definitely comes through in the concept. When planning the composition, for this main angle, I focused on the rule of thirds and having a primary focal point (the hole on top right) and also a secondary focal point (the entrance to the train on the left) in order to create a balanced and visually engaging scene. I also incorporated leading lines to subtly guide the viewer’s eye toward the main focal point.

Before getting started on the blockout in Blender, I like to make sure I will be working from the correct perspective and camera angle. To do this, I used Fspy, a super handy tool that lets you match the perspective and camera settings from your concept art and transfer them directly into Blender. It speeds up the workflow and helps with accuracy. I tend to keep my blockouts very simple and focused, enough to establish the core structure before diving into the details. 

This makes sure I get it done relatively quickly, and I can already set up a small scene in Unreal with a very basic light setup.

Asset Production

For this assignment, we were given quite a few technical restrictions, one of which was keeping the assets to 5k tris. This meant I had to think a bit more about how I should tackle certain models, such as the train carriage and any used megascans. 

Most of the assets were under 5k tris to begin with, mostly simple shapes with small bevels to soften the edges. I made the platform/station pieces into a modular kit so that I could easily build up the scene in sections.

As I made the meshes, I would replace my blockout meshes in the scene, and piece by piece, I built it up in Unreal. I also used a few Megascans to set the scene a bit more. I built up the ground and a temporary wall. Any Megascans that I wanted to keep, I had to decimate to fit into the 5k tri restrictions. I did this straight in Unreal with the decimate tool, and it worked quite well.

For the train carriage, I used a mixture of different references in order to create the interior and exterior of the train that worked the best for my scene. Like I said before, to keep to the 5k tri limit, I had to separate the mesh into sections and then put it back together in my scene in Unreal. It was quite daunting at the start as there were a lot of pieces to the train, but after a lot of trial running, I managed to section out the train into pieces of 5k tris.

I had to make sure to keep the polys as low as possible in order to minimise the number of separate mesh groups I would have to make. But also, this being my hero prop, I did have to make sure it didn’t look low-poly.

Texturing

For the textures, we had to stick to the 2k resolution limit, which for this kind of scene didn’t cause issues, as the player is never super close to anything. I used a few unique textures that I made in Substance 3D Painter in order to texture most of the props. For the train, I used two 2k textures, one for the interior and one for the exterior. I decided to do this because I wanted the player to be able to walk through the inside of the train, so I didn’t want to cheap out on the textures there.

In this project, I also made use of Substance 3D Designer. I first experimented with it on my previous project and quickly grew to enjoy working with it. I’m not a very technical person, so getting used to the node-based workflow took some time, but it was worth the effort. I still relied on a few tutorials to help me get started with certain materials, but I always try to avoid copying them one-to-one. For me, it’s important that the material feels like my own work, and I find I learn much more by experimenting and finding different ways to achieve similar results. I always try to adapt what I’ve learned so that it fits the style and needs of my project as closely as possible. 

Here is the tutorial I used for the tiles by Joseph Aleman:

It provides a nice base for realistic tiles, and he explains the build-up of the material well and in such a way that I learnt a lot from his videos. 

This was also the first time that I made some Designer materials fully on my own, which was quite a nice feeling, as I still get lost in Designer, and I feel there is still so much I have to learn about it. Though I’m slowly getting a bit more confident in Designer, and I think if anyone reading this hasn’t used it or is maybe thinking about it, I think it’s worth it to learn, even with the learning curve at the beginning.

Designer materials are very procedural, so it’s very easy to make material variations that can be used for vertex painting. For this project, I used quite a few variations, especially for the tiles, to bring in some damage localisation and reduce visibility of tiling.

I feel like adding vertex painting always helps the scene look more realistic and adds easy detail and depth; it can also be a great tool to emphasize any storytelling elements.

It was also important for us to keep the shader complexity optimised. Just by not creating huge node monsters in your shaders, you can quite easily keep the shader complexity on the green level. 

Assembling the Final Scene

Assembling the final scene has to be my favourite part of making environments. To fill up the platform area, I added a few more meshes, such as trash cans and trash bags, vending machines, and broken tile piles, to give it that feeling of abandonment. 

One of the most satisfying parts was adding foliage and scattering smaller details throughout the scene. It’s amazing how much these elements can transform the atmosphere and make everything feel more grounded and alive.

Unfortunately, for this scene, I didn’t have time to learn how to make realistic foliage from scratch, so I used Megascan assets for now. Creating realistic foliage assets is something I would like to learn, and it’ll be something I look into when I revisit this project or start a new one. But as you can see here, there is such a big difference after adding some foliage. 

It’s also the same with the other areas, such as the inside of the train. The scattering of trash, leaves, and rubble brings the scene to life. It also adds breaks in the empty spaces, making it feel more realistic. 

Although subtle, adding particle effects in the air can bring a scene to life, in my opinion. It gives the impression of the air not being perfectly clear and provides the illusion of slight movement of the air. Here are all the final images:

Lighting

As mentioned before, we had to focus a lot on optimisation, one of the more important areas was the light complexity, and we also needed to make sure to use PBL (physically based lighting). At the beginning, I didn’t focus on it too much; I lit my scene quite quickly so that I could move on with modelling and texturing. As you can see, though, when it was time to look into the light complexity, it was quite bad. 

Having never focused on this before, it was quite surprising at first how few lights you need to have very bad light complexity. The lighting was quite a journey for me in this project. I mainly struggled with lighting the inside of the train whilst trying to keep it optimised because it usually came out a lot too dark, so I had to think of some other ways to achieve some good lighting on the inside of the train. I had to go through each light, mess around with the attenuation radius, and remove any lights that only provided a minimal difference.

I was slowly getting there; however, I needed to try and remove all of those white areas. I decided to try and use a bit more ambient light to try and fill the inside of the train with more light. I did this by turning off castshadows on some of the bigger/brighter lights and playing around with the light channels, in order to bring light inside. This ended up being a big improvement, and I managed to reach a pretty decent level of light complexity.

In terms of design for the lighting, TLOU has quite a distinct and recognisable lighting style. I studied several scenes from the game that shared a similar atmosphere to what I was aiming for, and used them as a reference while also adding a bit of my personal touch. I noticed that they used a lot of bright lights, which sometimes in some areas were almost overblown, and that they also make use of a lot of godrays. I tried to replicate that look by keeping the light colors quite light and slightly tinting them yellow to achieve my desired atmosphere. I also focused on creating a strong god ray coming through the hole in the ceiling to add visual impact and depth. Looking back, I think there are still some areas where I could push the lighting even more, to further match the style of TLOU. Though that’s something I plan to revisit soon, as I’d love to refine this scene and take it to the next level.

Another thing I wanted the lighting to do is to showcase some of my materials, such as the metal pipes, train, and tiles. Reflections and roughness variations play a big part in bringing the materials to life. In these shots, I feel like you can see how nicely the lighting helps showcase the material’s detail and depth.

Conclusion

I worked on this project in the first half of my second semester for around six weeks. I feel like I managed to get the project to a solid level, though with more time, I would have loved to spend some more time polishing certain areas of the project and exploring some new techniques. However, with the time and skillset I had when starting this, I’m very pleased with the results; it’s my favourite piece I’ve made so far. 

I think the main challenge was learning how to work optimised, as it was not something I had focused on before this. It was a cool challenge, though, and I learnt a lot about what and how I should try and keep my projects optimised. I also think it’s always a challenge to try and learn as much as possible and create as good an output as possible in not that big of a timeframe. But like I said, I’m very happy with what I managed to produce for this assignment.

I think my favourite part of the project was dressing the scene; adding the foliage, particles, etc. That’s the moment when the vision starts to come together, and it’s definitely what I enjoy doing the most because of that.  I also discovered a new love for making materials in Substance 3D Designer. I think it’s super cool what you can create with it, and I enjoyed learning about how different materials can be built up. I hope to expand my knowledge of Designer further as time goes on because even though it’s a challenging software, you can create amazing materials with it. 

I’m still very new to this industry and what it holds, but I feel like working on this project helped me find my passion for environment art. Being able to create an environment inspired by a game I’ve admired for so long was an amazing experience, and it made me excited for what the future might hold.

Finally, I also want to thank everyone who helped me out on this project, especially those who helped me out in The Dinusty Discord, as I learnt so much from the community. I want to give a special thanks to Finn Bogaert, as he helped keep me motivated throughout this project. I look forward to building on these experiences and further developing as an artist!

Thanks for reading!

Maja Banas, 3D Artist