LogInNick Hofbauer talked to us about the process behind the Art Nouveau Door project, showing how he set up the stained glass by hand-painting numerous layers on top of each other and explaining how he set up the reflections in Marmoset Toolbag.
Introduction
I am Nick Hofbauer. I am an Environment Artist with a background in quality assurance and creating outsourced environment art. Art has always been a love of mine since I was a child, and that love for it carried me through college and into the games industry. After many adventures, I am currently seeking my next environment artist job role.
I have previously worked on World of Tanks and the MLB The Show series. I am also a moderator on the DiNusty Empire, a game dev art community with members from around the world. Last year, I was in the position of helping run a community project called the Adventurer’s Museum that briefly took over ArtStation when we finished.
I had fallen in love with video games growing up. When I became a sophomore in college, I found out that there was a pathway into the game art field. Now that I learned I could add to this world of video games that I adored, I began to shift my focus in that direction. I took some new classes to learn the basics of the art programs and skills needed. Soon, I found myself self-teaching the skills and direction I wished to go.
It started with wanting a shorter project of limited scope. Thankfully, I have a few folders filled with inspirational art and images. I had this image of the Belgium Rose Door saved and had been intrigued by the stained glass work and the curving stone archway. After circling multiple ideas, I finally settled on this as my prop.
Once I chose my project, I began to research more images of the door. My goals for this prop were to get a strong base for PBR texturing, so I knew I needed to get good close-up images. Once I felt I had enough information I worked on breaking down the project into pieces and worked out a plan of how to tackle each section.
I discovered that a few years back, they had renovated the door. I had a choice between the old blue door with some old broken stone or a new unpainted door with a clean stone archway. Unlike so many damaged, aged, and dirtied props, I wanted to challenge myself with a clean prop with minimal levels of dirt. I also added a range of quality bar concepts I wanted to aspire to. These extra images helped when I got to the texturing level to remind me how far I wanted to push myself.
Geometry
When I was beginning my blockout for my door, I utilized tricks in PureRef to make it transparent and locked on top of Blender. After getting the rough shapes and scale to match the door, I quickly moved PureRef aside. My focus was now to get a clean geometry for each piece.
The archway was the biggest challenge to get a clean tiered look, as well as to make sure the geometry connected without being too messy. With a quick use of the knife tool, I was able to cut out each separate brick section and could go back in and clean up. While these stone pieces were separated, I made sure to align as much of the Geo as possible since they would need to merge back for the low-poly.
The same PureRef trick was used on the stained glass metal trim. Originally, I started with splines and slowly adjusted the curves to match the references. However, as I moved on to the more intricate sections of the flowers and leaves, I switched to the Pen tool. Once these splines were set up, merged, and turned into Geo, I was able to go back and manually adjust any incorrect sections of messy vertices and faces. I knew I could keep it a bit messy as I planned to bake them onto a window plane and not have a low-poly.
I approached my topology focus by minimizing as many polys as possible while keeping my main shapes and silhouettes. I focused on merging all the stones of the arch and began to clean up all unnecessary Geo, as well as make sure the vertices and edges were clean. Thankfully, with my previous work on the high-poly, most of the work was removing hidden faces and merging vertices.
This planning stage on the high-poly made my work a lot faster. One of the tricks I had picked up was that I could mark all the right-angle sections as hard edges in Blender. Once those were done, I could do a simple Select Similar by Sharpness and turn all my hard edges into Seams.
Now, with basic seams, I could begin my unwrapping and packing process. I utilized Blender’s default unwrap for the entire prop. It is more powerful than people give it credit for. Once I had my islands unwrapped, I relied on UV Packmaster 3. This powerful addon saved me time in my low-poly unwrap. By applying some checkerboard textures, I could scour my prop for any errors with the unwrap to clean up before moving on to the bake.
Texture and Glass
I approached the texturing step knowing I would be authoring most of the texture in Substance 3D Painter. I knew I needed to focus on the stone of the arch, the wood of the door, and the stained glass. As for the bricks, I was able to apply a Megascans and did some light adjustment layers to change it from the base material.
For the glass, I started with a base layer that had a very low roughness and a high metalness to get that reflective, mirrored surface look. From there, I began to break down the height and normal variations seen on the reference images. I started with a base of Cell 1 for the general noise of the glass.
As I experimented, I found that a Crystal 1 was able to match the directional line noise seen on the reference images. Utilizing masks, I could rotate the angles of the lines around like separate pieces of glass. Finally, knowing some parts of the reference showed some smoother sections, I was able to add a top layer where I could control the Height and Strength via masks.
The color of the glass was an experiment of hand-painting a lot of layers on top of each other. Once I had a mask for each color, I began to add some mixed greyscale Grunge Maps to help break up the colors and remove harsh edges. This was a slow process to get the colors looking as close to matching the references as I could. With some layer adjustments, I could get the colors to look just right.
I utilized Marmoset Toolbag 4 for rendering. I was able to make use of its premade glass material for the stained glass of the door. There, I was able to control the levels of Opacity as well as adjust the Roughness again to make sure the glass helped catch a lot more of the lights.
When laying out my render, I limited my work to using one Directional Light and a skybox that had some buildings in it. For that, I used Marmoset Toolbag's Courtyard Brick Building Corporate. This put the door in an urban scene where I could utilize the skybox for some refractions through the glass, adding to the transparency of the material. For the camera shots, I went through and adjusted the lighting as needed to get a clear exposure and to help reduce any hard shadows.
I love using post-processing, but I know that too much can take away from the scene. Increasing any of the Contrast, Clarity, and Exposure levels was kept to a minimum to not over-add to the render. I always add a very limited Sharpen level to make everything feel crisp. A little vignette helped to darken the edges and darken the backgrounds at times to keep the focus on the door. These touch-ups were kept within a 0.5 adjustment, so I would overwrite all my work with just post-processing.
Conclusion
When making props, references are key. It's also an important skill to know when to pull back from the reference and use the constraints of modeling programs. These constraints allow me to plan how I would break down my project: what needs to be a material, what information can be done in textures that are not needed to model, and even slightly adjusting things to make it easier to bake.
I had constrained this art piece to be clean and not to rely on damaged geometry. This limited my project scope and the tools I would need. There was no need to throw this into ZBrush when a lot of the information could be done in Substance 3D Painter. With no damage, I could lean into a cleaner prop that emphasized form and materials.
I found my workflow adjusted to this focus on the materials and exploring where I did not need to over-model a part of my prop just to get extra information. This was offset by learning how to properly add the right texturing information into Substance 3D Painter.
For any beginners out there, I would advise exploring and failing on projects a lot. To grab something that catches your eye and try to recreate it. Sometimes the project fails, but it's learning from that project, learning from the failure, and how to apply your knowledge to the next project that always helps people grow by leaps and bounds.