The Plague-Master's Crypt: Creating a Stylized Environment in UE4

Introduction

Hi there! My name is Madison, and I’m a 3D Environment Artist at Lucid Games, creating assets for Destruction AllStars. I also did some work on the Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit Remastered. Prior to my job at Lucid, I studied Game Development, Game Art at Falmouth University in Cornwall.

The Plague-Master's Crypt Project

The Plague-Master’s Crypt scene began as a much smaller project – I had been wanting to do another stylized scene for a little while and decided to take a break from my other personal project and create a small diorama after I started looking at Tobias Koepp’s Stylised Dungeon tutorial series on Udemy. 

Creating another stylized project was something I was really looking forward to, building on the work from my previous project The Sanctuary, but this time creating cleaner meshes and textures for a more polished result. Over the past year at Lucid Games, I’ve learned so much and I wanted to also implement this into a new project!

The overall aim was to make a stylized environment, focusing on an internal space that incorporated external elements to help it feel more grounded and delve into hand-painted textures created with Substance Designer and ZBrush, inspired by the stylized dungeon series, whilst also maintaining some individuality in terms of the layout and theme of the dungeon.

While I didn’t use a particular concept, I’ve always been hugely inspired by the world of Overwatch and love to incorporate this into my personal projects – this time, I took inspiration from the Reign of the King section of the Blizzard World hybrid map, as I loved the lighting and materials used to make a cool, ghoulish dungeon area that was still bright and colorful. The amazing work of Jasmin Habezai-Fekri, Jimmy Malachier, Thiago Klafke, and Lucas Annunziata was also a huge inspiration during this project, and their stylized works are really beautiful!

Approaching the art direction, I created some moodboards of game environments to take inspiration from, including games like Overwatch, Torchlight, and World of Warcraft. All these games inspired me in some way with their textures, lighting, and environments and I wanted to channel elements of these into my scene – the final layout for the dungeon came about after I jumped back into Dragon Age: Inquisition and saw the undercroft of Skyhold. Creating a space using natural rock formations and blending in some focused architecture would allow me to practice sculpting, as well as help focus my attention on specific areas of detail like an altar and study area, and so I began to roll with this idea in mind and create some sketches.

I also started getting inspiration at this stage for the blue lighting and contrasting warm lights! I focused on creating a solid blockout early with a lighting set-up to explore different color combinations, as the texturing and lighting were things I identified as strong elements of these game’s styles. 

Initial Blockout

As mentioned above, I generally begin my projects with some moodboards for lighting and style, and usually, if I’m taking inspiration from real-world terrain/environments, I would research the foliage and rock compositions/structural elements so that I can then identify which areas I want to over-exaggerate and stylize to create fun silhouettes and shapes. In this case, things like crumbling bricks and worn stone would be key elements to the project. The sketches I did were really rough and loose, primarily to give me a general idea of what I’m aiming for and help nail down the number of modular assets I’ll likely need to create an environment – at this stage in the project, Alex Lac joined me to create a themed character for the scene and help out with some more of the sculpted elements like bones and corpses!

Having these sketches of the layout and the props really helped in explaining the themes of the project and meant we had a shared reference point. Once I had these, I downloaded an asset pack of rocks online and blocked out the general space while using Maya to block out modular elements that I could add detail to later. I brought all these assets into Unreal and applied a base material with a value of 1 on the Roughness, Metallic, and Base Color – I can then sketch on top of a screenshot of this blockout to plan further detail and note any changes that I need to make, and get a better visual idea of how the scene would look later.  

You can see all the iterations of the blockout below and how much it changed! As I wasn’t working from a set concept, I tried really exploring some different layouts, and identifying strengths and weaknesses of each iteration of the blockout was key – I have a lovely group of friends over Discord that regularly gave feedback on the structure and composition, which was great to keep me motivated and focused! I knew I wanted a detailed altar area at the front, and then some more detail at the back to make it feel like there’s a world beyond the scene we’re seeing. This eventually led to a tiered structure that you can see in the final piece – this was simplified later so that the scene didn’t have too much visual noise. 

Buildings and Assets

All the assets for this project were created using Maya, ZBrush, and Substance Suite – I tried to keep a consistent workflow throughout the project. I started with creating a low poly mesh in Maya, which I then unwrapped and brought into ZBrush where I sculpted in the details. Creating the low poly and unwrapping it before sculpting was useful for a few reasons – firstly, it meant I was more inclined to maintain the silhouettes, keeping strong shapes that would be more effective in the scene. It also meant that I could bring all my assets, with accurate UV’s and lightmaps, into UE4 and construct the scene early on. This let me see what was working well and what assets needed some adjustments to their overall shape before I spent the time sculpting in detail and working on the materials. I followed this for all the elements, starting with the larger tiling elements and moving onto smaller elements like candles and barrels to populate areas that needed more detail and avoid anywhere that was already too noisy visually.

For the elements of the structure that had to be aligned with a curved wall, I used the Curve Warp tool. This works by using an extracted curve (in this case, extracted from the wall mesh) and deforming a modular asset along it – I used this method for the banisters by creating one repeating segment of a banister, duplicating it to the correct length, and then applying a Curve Warp that took the curve from the wall. This can be read about here! This meant that I could easily adjust the size and thickness of the banisters, trim and other elements of the meshes without having to be destructive in any way. It also meant that if I had to change the walls' length or angles, it was really simple to then adjust the relevant meshes too! 

Texturing

The large structures of the architecture, for example the main crypt building, was broken down into three main segments – the front arch, the corner detail, and the cap. This meant that I could add more detail to the texture map and sculpt and use the individual sections of the mesh, such as the cross and bricks, to add more detail to other areas of the scene. I was trying to be as efficient and non-destructive as possible in this project (such as using the Curve Warp tools earlier for the other structural elements) so using methods that let me utilize meshes in other ways was important to me! All the textures for the project were made in Substance Designer and Substance Painter.

The curved crypts at the back were created by stacking the standard crypt model on top of itself and deforming it with the bend tool in Maya – all I had to do then was some clean-up, reducing the polycount where possible and ensuring there were no overlapping planes in the mesh!

Regarding my color palette, I knew early on that I wanted to explore blues and greens. Initially, I multiplied the materials' Normal and Roughness with a base parameter in the material set-up so that while I was still figuring out the lighting, I could adjust and identify what color I wanted the stones to be and how this was affected by the saturated colors – all I then did was go back to my material graphs in Substance Designer and adjust the more detailed version of the Color Maps to be correct.

The majority of the scene was textured using tileable materials and one trim sheet, with unique structures having their own texture maps created in Substance Painter. My workflow varied slightly depending on what was needed – for the bricks and floor tiles, I created a tiling design in Maya and then brought this into ZBrush to add detail and sculpt in the surface information. I then brought the depth map render of these sculpts into Substance Designer, plugged them into a tile generator, and created the tiling materials' Albedo, Roughness, Metallic and Height Maps in Substance Designer, focusing on creating a Base Color and working up to add detail and paint strokes by filtering through a variety of slope blurs and warps. 

I then used vertex blending combined with decals in-engine to help reduce any visible tiling in the textures and add detail to some of the plainer areas. This helped keep the materials modular but allowed for some extra variations to be added and created.

Smaller props and assets were made in the same manner – sculpted in Zbrush, retopologized in Maya, and textured in Substance Painter. Most of the materials' Albedos were blended with a parameter so that I could lighten/darken them and add/reduce saturation in a Material Instance easily to add some variation to the scene. 

Assembling the Scene

Assembling the final environment took some time, and at first, I worried as I felt I was seeing little progress. However, once I imported the full rock kit and modular assets the scene started to come together a lot more. Once all my main meshes were in the engine and had a base lighting pass, I began to look at ways to begin to bring all the smaller elements together. This consisted of creating decals, vertex blending a variety of materials together, and adding general dirt and clutter to the environment with the smaller props (such as barrels and candles) into the scene.

One of the most effective tools I used for this project was the Spline tool in UE4. The Spline tool in UE4 was utilized for the vines that reach across the rock surfaces – to utilize this, I first created five segments of vines (four unique sculpts and one tiling mesh) in ZBrush, textured them in Substance Painter, and imported them into UE4. I then created a Spline Blueprint (after a bit of digging, I found this great thread where I got the information to create the tapering vines) that I used to decorate the scene with fleshy vines! This worked great to create lots of different vines using just one repeated mesh while being able to fully adjust them throughout the lighting stage and using just one mesh. 

I also implemented assets such as fog cards at this stage, just utilizing UE4’s basic fog card (found in the starter content) and made slight adjustments as I felt it was better to have more time to focus on polishing my textures and lighting.

The vertex blending helped to create more variation across the scene massively, and I used some of the rock kit scaled down to help create rubble and more areas of destruction in the scene. Finally, I went in and began to break some pre-existing elements like the banisters and balcony assets to help to make it feel older and more decrepit without having to create more unique assets. 

Rendering and Lighting

I began to render out my environment using some Cine camera actors in-scene. The lighting consisted of a main Directional Light using a purple tone so that it would tint the entire scene, and then I began to light the rest of the scene using smaller area lights and spotlights with limited Light Channels to highlight specific assets such as the altar and the crypt shelving. I tried to focus on working from the largest light to smaller lights so that I wouldn’t lose focus on the overall scene, pinning my viewport so that I could regularly check the effect the lighting was having on the textures and assets. I utilized some general lighting tutorials on YouTube for stylized lighting, but really enjoyed this one in particular! I also followed some tutorials for the fire VFX and dust motes as I hadn’t had much experience with these elements before this project. 

In post-production, I adjusted the strength and the bias of the ambient occlusion to really try and get that Overwatch lighting, as well as utilizing a LUT to adjust the final saturation and brightness of the scene. At this stage, I also got some brilliant feedback from some really lovely people, and it helped to elevate the scene a ton by bringing out a lot more color, depth through adjusting the camera angle and also helped to create areas of visual rest using some more vertex blending and decals. The final renders are below!

The scene would not have been the same without all the amazing feedback from my peers – I recommend joining some Discord groups, sharing your work, and reaching out to people for feedback often as it truly helps so much!

Conclusion

Such is the case for a lot of projects, I think the main issue I faced during this project was too many ideas, some of which were conflicting, especially as I wasn’t following a concept directly! This meant I had to spend a large amount of time exploring different compositions, lighting, and planning for key shots that I definitely got carried away with – I created so many blockouts that I felt lacked a distinct personality and it was definitely discouraging at first, and I feel like it was so easy to get sucked into the smaller details that I lost sight of the bigger picture for a little while!

Taking a step back and focusing on one or two key areas (in my case, the altar and the crypt shelves) really helped me cut the scene down to its core elements and focus on creating assets that would help support these main structures, rather than overshadowing them. Sometimes you need to just take a minute and remember what your aim was at the start of the project!

Lighting was also a concern as I felt I hadn’t handled darker interior lighting before – however, with the help of lots of references and research, I found that it was just another skill to develop, and not something to feel intimidated by!

I was sure to create a concise checklist of modular assets and stick to it, creating and checking off those before adding on any extra models and pieces – this was due to learning from my past projects to create a solid modular kit before you delve into the smaller details.

Overall, this project took a lot longer than I had initially planned, but that’s okay! What started as a three-week diorama extended to a full scene over the course of around 7 months. This scene was something I really wanted to enjoy, and I was conscious of spreading myself too thin over multiple projects and plans – I did however try to make sure I spend at least an hour every evening on it and did a lot of the work during the weekend while listening to podcasts!

I sincerely hope seeing some of the production behind this scene has been an enjoyable read, and I’m super excited for whatever project comes next! If anyone had any questions about any of the workflows mentioned above, then please do feel free to reach out on ArtStation or Twitter and I’ll try to help out wherever possible! Stay safe and best of luck with your projects!

Madison Riley, 3D Environment Artist

Interview conducted by Theodore Nikitin