The Neighbourhood: Planning the Texturing Stage for a Modular Scene

Introduction

My name is Martín Letizia and I am an Environment Artist from Buenos Aires, Argentina. My passion for video game art began when I was an adolescent. In those years, I began to be a self-taught person, participate in forums, learn about the video game industry and I started to immerse myself in a new world where I could create and see something taking shape from a basic shape/primitive. All of this made me discover my vocation.

So I decided to study Game Art at university. Since I graduated in 2018, I’ve been working as a freelancer, researching, acquiring new techniques and software for the video game industry, and also sharpening my skills for a better production as an Environment Artist.

The Neighbourhood: References and Planning

The first step was to gather as many references as I could to get a better idea of the buildings, objects, and lighting/mood that would best represent the neighbourhood I wanted to make. Then I planned the way to approach the asset creation so they could be as reusable and modular as possible.

To keep as little amount of draw calls per mesh as possible, I chose to make a generic 128X128 RGBA mask with 4 trims, one per channel.

I created a 2nd UV Channel for those meshes of a modular piece that would use the same texture but would have different colors, keeping the same UV islands so the vertex count would remain the same. Then I placed each UV island at a different color channel so that I could control them together inside Unreal Engine. 

For example:

Texturing

The way I chose to texture the building parts was by using a Wood Trim Sheet.

For this trim sheet, I decided to set the spacing by determining how big a particular texture would be in the object. Once done, I began by creating a plane with the size of 400x400cm and splitting it into sections to model the main shapes and edges. That mesh was imported into Substance Painter as highpoly to bake out normal, AO, and ID map information. I spent the rest of the process texturing and experimenting with smart masks for adding roughness and color variations as well as edge wear.

I made wall and roof materials in Substance Designer, whereas the sidewalk and asphalt were created in Quixel Mixer since there is a bunch of amazing materials from Megascans, and by combining them with procedural noises and masks, you can achieve incredible results very quickly.

Besides that, wall, sidewalk, and asphalt materials were combined with vertex painting and masks to blend the dirt, damage, and wet textures in order to make them look less uniform.

Props like the Air Conditioner, Electricity Box, Trashcan, Traffic Cone, Vektor CR-21, Boxes, Trash Bag, among others, were baked and textured in Substance Painter to create their respective masks such as dirt, roughness, and damage and use them in procedural materials inside Unreal Engine.

Jeep Wrangler Production

The workflow and the way to approach any asset will be different according to the type of project (First-Person Game/Third-Person Game) and the platform on which it will be running (Mobile/PC/Video Game Console).

In this case, I chose to work almost in the mid-poly workflow for the exterior. For the wheels, rims, and interior, I chose to work with a low-poly/high-poly workflow.

So I started to research reference images to get as many details as possible. The blueprints are a great way to start getting basic shapes and silhouettes. But also, it’s good to use real-life vehicle references because sometimes there are details that can be missing in the blueprint.

Jeep Wrangler Materials

Besides having procedural parameters such as car paint, plastic, metal, glass, and lights, I added procedural dirt because like with most of the assets, there is always a story behind it, such as its owner, usage, material properties, location, and interaction with the environment.

So I created a 2nd UV Channel specifically to make a dirt mask inside Substance Painter and be able to have control over the contrast, intensity, roughness, and color of the dirt that the vehicle would have inside Unreal Engine.

Final Scene and Composition

The blockout stage was really important to test different building looks, the Jeep Wrangler location, and see which one was more interesting to the eye. The following steps were modeling them with more details, focusing on materials, making vegetation with SpeedTree, and creating props. To achieve the final organic look and gain more visual interest, I added dead leaves, asphalt patches, and paper trash (which were taken from Megascans), bottom dirt, graffiti, damage, dirt, cracked sidewalk, and a fake interior with curtains, blinds, and drawings on windows. 

Also, using a baked lighting system with a subtle exponential height fog, a skylight, and a stationary directional light with a warm tint, at a certain angle, allowed to use shadows from the trees to create these interesting compositional areas of light and dark that kind of lead the eye through the scene. All of this and the use of post-process volume with some adjustments on values such as Exposure, Screen Space Reflections, Film, and Contrast, really helped tie things together in terms of the overall vibe of the environment and showing off all the different details and shapes.

Final Thoughts

During the whole production, there were enjoyable and challenging moments which meant a learning opportunity and a motivation for improving my skills.

The important thing is to have clear objectives and set small short-term goals to advance progressively with effort and passion.

Also, organize your time into daily and weekly tasks with short deadlines in order to make priorities is a good way to reach the expected results.

Perseverance and constancy are as well, two essential values that always help us to achieve our goals. And when you let yourself follow these values, everything else happens on the way.

Thank you so much for reading and I hope you could take something valuable away from this article.

Martín Letizia, Environment Artist

Interview conducted by Arti Sergeev