Designing A Brutalist Terminal Building Using Blender

Introduction

My name is Marius, and I am a freelance Concept Artist and Art Director from Lithuania. I've started doing art just for fun, and for a long time, it was just a hobby. At some point, I started getting commissions from various indie developers, as time passed, I understood that if I kept going, I could make a living out of it, and I haven't stopped practicing since. In the beginning, I was just doing digital 2D painting, but later on, as the industry changed and shifted, I understood that 3D skills are a must. I took a class from Jama Jurabaev, one of the best artists out there, and this class launched me into the 3D world. Since then, I worked at various studios and had a chance to contribute to projects from Riot Games, Gunzilla, Wizards of the Coast, Warner Bros., Marvel, and others.

The Triarch Terminal Project

This project was made as a demo for my 3D Environment Concept Design mentorship at Arttrain Academy. The goal was to guide students through the project step by step, giving them a blueprint of how to develop a project, come up with new ideas, and execute them. I strongly believe that a good project starts with good preparation. I always gather a bunch of references, when I see something that inspires me, I try to mix it with something else and come up with a new design or idea that way. In this case, the topic was TERMINAL, and I knew I wanted to do something brutalist with a strong, big shape, but also play with verticality, and this is how TRIARCH TERMINAL came together.

Workflow

Nowadays, my process is 95% 3D, and that gives me a lot of freedom in terms of composition, as I can move the camera and change the lighting in 3D, coming up with new comps really quickly.

I feel like a lot of people are trying to show too many things in a single image, lately, I try to focus on just one thing and make it clear that my image is about that one thing, and that means I try to fill my frame with that hero object as much as possible. Of course, you need to support it with other things to make the environment believable and functional, but still, if my image is about this terminal, I want it to take as much screen space as possible, I don't want to end up with a tiny terminal far away if the goal of the image is to show the design of it. So always ask yourself, "What is my image about?" and try to "sell" that thing as best as possible.

Also, I like to think about my projects as a real-life functional space and make almost a game level out of it. I like to think about where I could walk, what I would see there, which makes the space more interesting and believable. Also, art directors and production designers always appreciate it when artists start thinking about level design even in the concepting phase. And I always do it just with primitive shapes, I don't want to get into detail yet, and this step is just to figure out the layout and help me find new interesting angles and ideas.

There are no tricks for modeling, really. I model the thing that I'm designing, and I also sometimes would use kitbash elements that I made before, or I bought from someone else, to reinforce it. My logic about using assets vs making something from scratch especially when it comes to commercial work is, if it's already been made and I can buy it I'm not going to spend 20 hours modeling it from scratch, I am not interested in creating something that's already been made and I'd rather spend that time and energy designing something new, something I haven't seen.

The best "trick" to save time in my opinion, is to keep everything as simple as possible in your scene and overall workflow. Keeping your scene light and fast allows you to work faster. While working as an Art Director, I've seen a lot of scenes, and beginner artists tend to overcomplicate things where it’s not necessary. For example, I've seen an artist creating an amazing brick texture, and it was all made procedurally. It had like 500 nodes that I have no idea how it worked. It looked alright, but it took him a day to make, and even that single texture was slowing down the Blender scene. But why would you do that when you can take a brick photo texture and just project it on the geometry? It will take one minute and for sure will look more realistic, also it is extremely light on the scene. This is just an example of unnecessary overcomplication, so you have to be smart about how you set everything up, and if you do it properly, that makes you faster. 

In general, I think speed comes from experience, it's not about how fast you move your mouse, it's all about decision-making.

As I am a Concept Artist, I usually don't need to deal with retopology and UV unwrapping. The goal of concept art is to solve a problem, sell the idea, or develop a design, but no one cares if topology is clean or if UVs are correct as long as it looks good. So my scenes are never clean in terms of topology, and UVs are usually projected from the camera. The whole project is created in Blender!

Texturing

As already mentioned, I try to keep everything as simple as possible, and all of my textures are just projected photo textures on simple geometry. For metal and glass, I just play with roughness, metallic, and transmission values, but it's still a simple photo texture in most cases. 

Here are a couple of examples:

As you can see, the simple photo texture is just projected on the triangle facade, and the material setup is just the same albedo texture plugged into color and bump. All of the textures throughout the scene are set up this way.

Another example, this is probably the most complicated setup in the whole scene:

Composition

I simply keep adding details and polishing surfaces. I like to work with scans that I made myself or bought from someone, as it helps to push the realism.

My composition is usually set from the blockout stage. I pick one comp that I like and work from that angle, so that doesn't change anymore. For detail-scattering, there's no simple answer, it's important to group the details and leave enough rest areas, keep a nice rhythm and flow, as well as try to reinforce the composition and create leading lines to the focal point.

Lighting & Rendering

Lighting is a topic that I could do a separate interview on, but I'll try to keep it short.

First of all, lighting has to sell the design. I try to find an angle that shows it the best. A lot of people try to fake the lighting too much because 3D allows that, you can easily put a lot of lamps everywhere, but that's not how real life works! And because of this reason, a lot of people struggle with creating realistic lighting, it just looks off when you don't see the lamp, but something is casting the light. I like to think about lighting in my projects as if it's a real-life movie set. I think, "If they were filming this, where would they put the lights?" It's harder to light this way, but if you do it lighting feels justified, more realistic, and cinematic.

For daylight scenes, I always use just one sunlight, and I sometimes use a plane or a few to create some shadows and control them that way. For the night scenes, I try to hide the lamps just as they would do on movie sets, it is always either out of the frame or behind some object. A good advice for night scenes is to try to light surfaces and objects, not the space itself.

For rendering, believe it or not, it's been a couple of years since I properly rendered the image. Nowadays, Blender viewport looks so good, I just take a print screen, bring it to Photoshop, and maybe fix a couple of things there. So all my latest projects that you see are just print screens, that way I saved me so many hours of render time.

For post-production, I use Blender's real-time post-processing. Nothing fancy, just some glare, some curves, and color balance, that's about it.

Conclusion

Hard to say how long it took. I did a lot of explorations, design variations, lighting variations, etc. With all that, I would say about 10 days.

Coming up with ideas and doing good preparation for me is always the hardest part, if you do good research before you even start and make a good plan, everything else is just execution and should go relatively smoothly.

My advice: keep everything as simple as possible, use a lot of references for everything, and make a clear plan of what you will do and how before you even start. Avoid doing something that's already been done, try to come up with new, interesting ideas, that's where the value of an artist nowadays is. And keep practicing, as long as you don't stop, it's just a matter of time for you to reach your goals!

Marius Janusonis, Concept Artist & Art Director

Interview conducted by Gloria Levine