The Mob Boss: 3D Environment Breakdown

Introduction

Hi there! My name is Rhiannon Remo, I’m 21 years old and I'm a passionate 3D Environment Artist for games living in Los Angeles, CA. I recently graduated from Gnomon School of Visual Effects, Games, and Animation, where I had been studying Game Art for the past three years. As an avid gamer my whole life, I certainly knew I wanted to work in games, but I had originally started out wanting to be a character artist. It was only until about a year into my program at Gnomon when I finally had my first environment for games class that I decided to switch. Although I still enjoy character art, being able to work on such a wide variety of props and technical aspects is really what made environment art speak to me. 

The Mob Boss: Start of the Scene

I first started with “The Office of the Casino Boss” by Tian Gan as my concept. I had wanted to make an interior scene with a lot of intricate props, and his wonderful concept checked all my boxes for what I wanted to make.

My first step in starting any scene is to organize and plan, so I started by drawing over and color-coding the concept to figure out all the props I had to make. I could just make a list, but I find this process to be a lot more visual and helpful as it can help me pinpoint which props take up the most space and thus are essential to get done early on. At this point in the process, I also gather material and object reference for the scene. For this project, I specifically collected a lot of reference for the Versailles wood floor, wallpaper, weapons, and the tufted office chair. 

Modeling

Before I even start modeling any assets, I open up Unreal and start to grey-box block out my scene as well as get some basic lighting done. This allows me to get a sense of scale and lighting for everything early on so when I do start to slowly add in props and textures, they have context.

Next, I generally export these grey boxes out of Unreal and into Maya for each prop and start modeling from there. I was able to model certain props entirely in Maya like the chandelier, but assets like the chairs I had to bring into ZBrush to sculpt the cushions, after which I would bake in Marmoset Toolbag.

Although this is my usual process, I decided to break it for the light machine gun, grenades, and cases. I had been wanting to learn how to hard-surface model in ZBrush for quite some time now, and this seemed like a perfect opportunity, so I ended up completely skipping Maya altogether for these props. It might have been a pain to learn, but ZBrush can be really powerful for hard-surface in certain situations. Arraymesh, for instance, is an amazing tool as it allows you to instance subtools which can be really useful for repetitive parts that you want quick iteration on. I used this specifically on the repeating bolts and holes in my light machine gun as well as the stun grenade. It’s simple, but I also really enjoy not always having to select faces in order to do something to them. With ZBrush's ZModeler you can instead have something done (like insetting, extruding, etc.) by polygroup or polyloop instead of always having to select the faces individually, which ended up saving me a lot of time. 

Texturing

In terms of texturing, almost every prop was textured in Substance Painter, except for the wallpaper and wooden floor which were made in Substance Designer.

I find one’s strength in texturing relies heavily on their reference. Guesswork often ends up with questionable results, so I always make sure I have a bunch of reference open for whatever I am texturing.

In Painter at least, I tend to texture “chronologically.” By this, I mean I start by making what an object would look like coming right out of the factory/ workshop. Then, I ask myself what environment it has been in and for how long. Once I know that I can start to add dust, worn edges, fingerprints, etc., but I always try to add these wear and tear details where they make sense.

In terms of this scene specifically, the prop I had the most difficulty texturing was actually the yellow cushioned chairs. The cushion material is supposed to be a kind of silk jacquard which I had physical reference for because my grandma has a similar chair. I suppose since I had the real thing in front of me, I was exceptionally picky about making it look right. The hardest part was probably getting the type of weave right as well as getting the look of silk. I ended up having to give it almost half-metallic properties even though technically, all materials are supposed to be either completely metallic or have no metallic at all. Certain things like silk almost seem to have to break that rule even though it isn’t physically accurate.

Composition & Story

A lot of the composition was just referring back to the concept, but like any concept, the perspective, lighting, and just objects in general don’t always make sense. By translating it to 3D there are almost always discrepancies and building on those differences and tweaking things is what makes us artists. I was trying to tell the story of a modern mob boss (with a particular taste in Victorian design) who had to abandon his office in a hurry. Because of this, money is strewn haphazardly around on the floor, with most of the safe it had come from already emptied out. Either the last couple of hundred-dollar bills were too insignificant to care about, or he was in such a hurry that he didn’t care. Guns and grenades are also brazenly out in the open. This is obviously not a man who cares about the law. Dust and water stains also plague the room, leading one to assume his departure might have been some time ago. Telling myself stories like these helps me dictate what props I should make and where they should go. The rest is just making sure it looks nice. 

Lighting

The original concept has light streaming in from just one of the windows while the other is blocked by curtains. Although it may have looked nice in the concept, that setup left the room rather dark, so I left both curtains open in my scene, which allowed light to reflect off of objects on the right wall. I also ended up including several lights in the room with shadows turned off to give more ambient light and reflections, otherwise, anything not directly touched by the light coming out of the windows would have been black.

In terms of post-process settings, I went with a rather simple setup. First and foremost, I set the Min and Max exposure values to 1 to ensure that the exposure in the scene was not changing as I looked around. Besides that, I just tinted the shadows and gain slightly green to compliment the red walls and the green props in the room. For the god rays, I ended up going with a plane that I had changed the vertex color of the edges to black in Maya, then used that vertex color along with a panning black and white “beam” texture I made to drive opacity in Unreal. Finally, I added some emissive color to make it brighter and more yellow.

Also, although it may look like light, the orange “light” that appears to be visible behind the curtains was actually just an emissive texture driven by vertex paint. I attempted to get subsurface to work on the curtain, but I found that this solution ended up being more optimized and easier to art direct. There were certain parts where the light wouldn’t have scattered through the curtains, but with this method, I could paint it where it looked best artistically, rather than where it should have been realistically. Moments like these are what makes us artists, not some machines simulating realism. 

Challenges

Overall, my main challenge for this piece was just dealing with the sheer number of props in this scene. I had 10 weeks to make the whole thing, so I had averaged at least five completed props a week, most of them being extremely intricate and detailed.

What also made this project harder was having to learn how to hard-surface model in ZBrush as I went. There were many times where I would make something and then a week or so later learn that I could have done it ten times faster using another method. That said, I find I learn the fastest and the best when I am applying what I am learning to a project I am making, so although it might have slowed the process down, it certainly ensured I completely internalized what I learned.

Regardless, this project certainly hammered home (yet again) the importance of planning. If I hadn’t outlined what props I had to make and by when early on, I would have been completely lost and even more behind schedule. If I can give any advice to future environment artists, it is to plan well and plan early. 

Rhiannon Remo, 3D Environment Artist

Interview conducted by Arti Sergeev