Jean Negreiros talked about his UE4 project Discovery: creating two hard-surface hero props, working on vegetation from scratch, setting up lighting, and more.
In case you missed it
You might find this article interesting
Introduction
Hello, my name is Jean Negreiros. Currently, I work as a Senior 3D Artist at Imersys, a Brazilian company of Virtual Reality, and I also do some freelance as Environment Artist.
I started studying Computer Graphics on my own in 2010, and in 2011 I took a 2-year technical course on the same subject. During that time, I learned the basics of various things in CG such as digital painting, image and video editing, 3D modeling. In 2012, I entered the CG market.
From 2012 to 2016 I worked as a freelance 3D Artist Generalist. I worked for Architecture, Engineering, and Advertising, rendering static images and animations, using software like 3ds Max and V-Ray.
From the middle of 2016, I migrated to Games and Virtual Reality, so I started to study these topics. At the end of 2017, I joined Imersys and I've been working there for 3 years already. In addition, I always get freelance gigs and I also graduated as an Audiovisual Producer in-between the jobs.
Discovery: Project Idea
The start of the project was unpretentious: I wanted to do an Environment project to apply what I learned in the last few years and also create something for my portfolio as it felt kind of stuck.
So I researched for some references on the internet and found Edward Delandre's concept art that I thought was very beautiful. I decided to use it as the initial reference for my idea. In addition, I searched for references for each object I had in mind. This is my general reference board for the project:
Making the Van
The van was the first Hero asset in the scene. I wanted to model a vehicle for some time, and I thought it would look cool inside the scene, so I started researching some vehicles and found the Volkswagen Syncro T3. As it is an old car, I thought it matched the scenery. This is the car's reference board:
This is the final high poly version of the model:
The first texture set was the external body.
The second texture set included the objects on the outside.
The third texture set has the wheels and tires, and the fourth – the seats.
The stickers on the car glass were taken from a sticker pack created by Cypubog. The graffiti scattered around the car body is from Geoffrey Soudant's pack.
Creating the Environment
I started making the initial blockout within Unreal to get a sense of what the main objects would look like:
After I finished blocking, the scene started to take shape, so I began refining the objects.
The first thing I worked on was the ground. I created some materials in Substance Designer which would be the layers of my Landscape Material inside Unreal:
Vegetation was the stage where I learned the most in this project. Initially, my idea was to make a single texture, a "Mother Atlas", for all the vegetation, so I blocked it from this form:
After creating the first tree, I randomized some parameters generating a total of 4 versions.
The rest of vegetation followed a very similar process:
This is the final version of the “Mother Atlas”. All vegetation in the scene was within it and everything was created from scratch, I did not use any ready-made maps.
In addition to the trees and plants, I also worked on some organic assets for the composition such as stones, roots, branches, and trunks, which were made using the Blender Sculpt tool:
Making the Drone
The drone was the main Hero asset in this project, the whole story revolves around it. During the production, I was taking the Hard Surface Rigging course, and one of the exercises was to rig a drone, so it motivated me to create one for my project. To get inspired, I looked for some references:
The next step was making the animations and exporting them to Unreal. In total, there were 4 animations used in the video:
Composition
First of all, my goal was to make the scene complete and very humanized and then try to take advantage of the whole composition to get some still shots and takes for the cinematic, always trying to focus the attention on the Hero assets – the car and the drone.
I used a lot of natural frames and lines, objects on different planes, even the light as a perspective.
To help add a human factor to the scene, in addition to the vegetation and organic assets that I mentioned earlier, I created debris, garbage, and other objects to create an “abandoned place” atmosphere:
Most of the objects were scattered either manually or with the Unreal Foliage tool:
Lighting
The lighting I used was totally dynamic, nothing was baked, and I didn't use ray-tracing.
I used a Skylight with an HDRI to control the areas of indirect lighting. Together with Ambient Occlusion, it created a Fake GI. With directional lighting, I wanted to bring in shadows and more light to some areas, so I used a few lights to fill in the space.
In the night scene, the process was the same, but with other light sources such as bridge lights and headlights:
Within the Post Process Volume, I adjusted a few parameters, such as auto exposure, ambient occlusion, bloom, flare, and white balance. Then, the screenshots were taken to Affinity Photo where I made further tweaks with Affinity's Adjustment Layers. I copied these layers to a standard Unreal LUT texture, applied the same effects to it, and configured it as Color Lookup Table. This allowed me to achieve the result from Affinity within Unreal:
You can learn more about the use of LUTs in Unreal here.
Creating the Video
For the video, I created a Master Sequence with 6 Level Sequences inside it, and in each Level Sequence I used the camera animations that I had already thought of when I created the script:
Self-Reflection
Everything in this project was a great challenge, each object, each texture. I faced difficulties during many stages, and I stopped to look for solutions to the problems as they appeared. I had never done all the vegetation from scratch, I had little experience in rigging and animation; the rubble, vehicle, drone, and all the compositional assets required a lot of work because they were complex objects. I greatly improved my skills with Unreal shaders as well.
From start to finish, the project took 6 months, but I worked on it in my spare time; sometimes I set it aside for a while and I also had a vacation in the middle of that production. So without breaks, I think it would have taken me about 3 months.
The result is far from perfect, but I was very happy with what I got. I learned to believe more in myself, not to be afraid of the problems, and to solve them patiently. I'm excited about the perspective of working on other projects like this.
Jean Negreiros, Senior 3D Artist at Imersys
Interview conducted by Arti Sergeev
Keep reading
You may find this article interesting