Making a Sci-Fi Fortress in Maya, Substance 3D Painter & Unreal Engine

Introduction

Hello! I’m Granger Martin, I’m attending Ringling College of Art and Design as a graduating senior with a BFA in Game Art, in which Ringling awarded me Trustee Scholar last fall. This summer, I’ll be working with Activision's Toys for Bob studio as an Environment Art Intern. 

The Scrape-Goat Project

Scrape-Goat is a senior thesis I developed in Unreal Engine 4 alongside my brilliant partner, Carson Cuneo. Overall, they gave us 16 weeks to develop the game. You play as a robot goat rancher, Bill E. McGrazer, and use your goat to fight off alien thieves when they steal your most powerful goat – The Bleating Edge.

My section of the map is the alien thieves' fortress. They installed the structure on the sides of the canyon using a system of gears and tall rusted beams with ridges. The primary intent was to have a sharper, faster, and overall more intimidating area to contrast with Carson’s calm landscape. My previous Ringling project was a spotless retro bar, so I’d wanted to break off of that and do something with an opposite tone. 

When we were brainstorming for thesis ideas, the first piece we were inspired by was this concept art by Jordi Van Hees. From then on, playing with verticality was something we were excited about.

I started with a basic level design blockout to see what would flow gameplay-wise, then took that layout and did functionality passes. What’s fun to play doesn’t always make sense and vice versa, so balancing those two was challenging, especially with small interior spaces. In the end, I found that people enjoyed having the “Robo-Goat” run along long walkways and ram into the enemies’ shins. With this, I modeled conveyors throughout for the robot goats to run along, with vents you can shoot open. This gave both the characters in the game something interesting to do and also helped me flesh out the area. 

Because the concept was specific, I researched and combined a lot of references trying to get a style to construct the architecture. For real-life reference, pictures of large rusty mining structures became my main inspiration. I had a hard time finding game references that were close to what I wanted to create, so intricately painted Warhammer miniatures became big help with designing textures and modkits. 

Carson and I had a lot of back and forth discussing the alien world, and it really helped inform design decisions in both of our areas. For example, since the area beneath the fortress is a forest and Carson’s trees have unique white bark, when the aliens build their architecture, white planks should be one of the materials.

Another discussion that influenced my designs was the alien thieves themselves, who had lizard scales underneath their armor. Lizards are exothermic and don’t regulate the temperature inside their bodies like mammals would. That’s why there are heaters, fans, and other temperature regulatory equipment common throughout the fortress.

Modeling & Texturing

I do all of my hard surface modeling in Maya. I initially imported the Unreal blockout into Maya as a scale reference. For this project specifically, my workflow started with modeling one asset to a third pass, then modeling the rest to match. In a few days, I modeled a walkway as the first large asset and used its design to help inform the other architecture to keep everything consistent.

Next, I needed to break the different pieces of the larger fortress into sections. Dividing what I could reuse and what would have to be custom-made helped me manage the workload. The main structure is shaped octagonally from the top down, so the easiest way to cleanly break it up was to model the corners and leave an open balcony for them to survey the surroundings.

Getting into smaller modeling, I modeled and UV'd 3 wood planks, then placed them sporadically to make sure the reuse wasn’t obvious. Sometimes, it’d help to preserve UVs, then dent the wood by adding and pushing edge loops.

On the material side, I did a majority of my texturing in Substance 3D Painter since it handles different metals very well and it allows me to add detail layers like paint and grunge quickly. The most involved texture was the trim sheet. I modeled out a sci-fi panel in Maya and baked it down to get the normals. I used it for tiling floor sections like the bridge since it’s too long to custom paint reasonably. Having a trim sheet also helps to fill out smaller thin areas that need a texture, like the base of the windmill.

The biggest challenge was definitely the size of the space and the constant iteration. Ringling helped a lot by teaching us how to work efficiently, and I feel grateful for the faculty’s continued feedback and support for the project.

Lighting & Rendering

Our goal with lighting from the outset was to get a cinematic feel. When the game and story progressed, we wanted the lighting and mood to shift too. Originally, another person was responsible for the skybox and lighting, but they left the project, so I took it on and created it to match our Star Wars inspiration.

With the canyon and the fortress being a red color scheme, I thought the sky should be soft complimentary green. I photobashed cloud textures to create the virga clouds. They’re placed on planes rather than baked into the skybox, so we had more agency to move them around to fit compositions. I added the planets in the sky in the last few weeks of the project to make the planet feel more alien. They have rim lighting from using a material fresnel function, with a translucent panning noise layer above it to simulate the planet’s atmosphere. I used this same noise layer on the skybox to add a subtle moving cloud effect. 

This piece by Concept Artist Joshua Viers was a big inspiration for creating the skybox. Carson and I had amassed a big Pinterest board of lighting references, and this was the one we liked most.

Since the fortress was mechanical and at high elevation, I wanted to make sure there were a lot of moving elements, or else the atmosphere wouldn’t feel right. The metal windmills are a combination of looping timeline rotations in Unreal with painted physics weights on the cloth flaps. Carson gave me a sped-up version of his dust VFX I used in the exterior areas to add visible wind, and I created decals of sand building up in crevices.

UE4 has a helpful actor simply named “wind”, which adds an even force across all physics actors. This was incredibly helpful in keeping our environmental effects consistent. I also animated elements in the interior fortress; the electric chamber arms had to be keyframed in Maya with IK handles. In the post-process volume, I used the skybox texture as an ambient cube map to get more interesting and cheap reflections on the metallics in dim lighting, especially the goat on his back. If it’s set too high, this can blow the scene out easily, so balancing it and keeping it on the low end was important. 

The Ringling College Influence

For our thesis courses, we had three main critiques with all the faculty attending to vote on the project and its progress. The entire process taught me a lot about when to stand by creative decisions and when to iterate. It could get intimidating to explain the project to industry veterans, but it really helped me improve my workflow. It motivated me to create things with intent since I knew I would probably have to explain them at the critique in a limited amount of time. You never want to get in a situation where someone asks why you created something and you don’t have an answer. We also conduct playtests within our major and that’s a really helpful way of getting other people’s perspectives on what’s working and what isn’t. 

The Future Plans

I'm planning to continue making architecture and environments for different game worlds and styles. Seeing other artists’ projects online, I’m learning innovative tricks about modeling assets procedurally, it’s an area I’m excited to learn more about. Moving into a creative role is something I’d like to do in the future when I get more experience. Working with Carson to create this game world was very fun and fulfilling. 

Granger Martin, Environment Artist

Interview conducted by Theodore McKenzie