LogInMajid Azim shared with us the workflow behind The Fallen Keep project, explaining how he used assets from the Megascans Library and Unreal Engine's features to create the elements of the scene.
Introduction
My name is Majid Azim, and I work at Epic Games as an Environment Artist. Before working there, I was at an indie game development studio working on my own game called Explottens, which you can find on Apple Arcade. I worked as the Game Designer, Artist, and Animator for the game.
At Quixel, I joined as a Material Artist, where I processed all the surfaces being scanned all around the world. While at this, I started exploring Quixel Mixer and Unreal Engine, and this is where my journey started to become an Environment Artist. Even back then, the Megascans library was so vast that turning your imagination into a scene in Unreal was very tempting. I started making different materials in Quixel Mixer, using its experimental procedural and taking them into Unreal to be showcased.
I have contributed to the early collaboration between Epic Games and Quixel when they made Rebirth. That experience was truly mindblowing. I worked closely with the demo team on the Electric Dreams demo. In this project, I focused on enhancing asset versatility and optimizing memory usage, which facilitated the seamless integration of assets from various biomes to create a cohesive and immersive environment.
Inspiration
The vastness of the Megascans library, with its detailed brick scans, has inspired me to create a castle ruin scene. I'm excited to leverage these assets to construct a highly immersive and visually compelling environment, focusing on the atmospheric decay and historical grandeur of a ruined fortress.
The newly released medieval scans were also very useful for enhancing the scene with intricate set dressing. I started gathering references of broken buildings and castles, along with post-battle scenes from the medieval era. I also wanted to try some new things that I had not dived into yet, like nanite landscape painting.
Blockout
This project started very differently. I had this image I had saved from Pinterest that I wanted to remake, and that was a portrait. So the initial work was all done in portrait mode. It was very far into the project when I accidentally switched to the wider lens, and the scene looked much better and way more cinematic.
Megascans
After the initial blockout was complete and I was happy with the composition, I started swapping the cubes with Megascans assets. Instantly, the whole environment started to shape up exactly how I wanted it to look. Using Nanite Vertex painting on the landscape was something I really wanted to try out, and it worked out magically. I followed some beginner-level tutorials to set up the materials and started painting different materials to get the look I wanted. It was so much that I spent hours just painting the landscape, only to hide a lot of vegetation.
The cloth simulation was an afterthought because the castle ruins looked very static, and I wanted to give them some life. I got this banner from Sketchfab, which I took into Substance 3D Painter to re-texture. At first, I thought I should make it torn up in Blender, but then decided to just make the banner torn up and battered using an Opacity Map hand-painted in Painter.
In the engine, using cloth simulation was extremely straightforward, and it instantly changed the whole look of the castle. To differentiate, I painted multiple Opacity Maps and imported them into Unreal just to make the banners look different.
All of the assets used in the scene are from the Megascans Library on Fab. I did tinker with the materials of the rocks and the brick walls to homogenize them a little. Also used some of the materials used in Dark Ruins to make the rocks look sharper and weathered. Decals from the library helped a ton to break up the bricks. The Medieval shields and arrows that were added to the library are top-notch. The Metallic Maps that come with them need little to no tinkering, and they instantly look insanely good.
A lot of time was spent on setting the scene, and even after hours, it still looked like more things could be added to it. All the arrows on the ground were painted using the Foliage tool in the engine. That gave the scene a very realistic look instead of hand-placing each arrow in the ground.
To break up the brick structure, I used a lot of leakage and crack decals from the Megascans Library. The versatility of those decals helped a lot in bringing more life into the whole ruin structure.
After finishing the scene in Unreal, I used MRQ to export an EXR image sequence, which went into Premiere Pro for Color grading and final exports. I used a random sound library to get the background music and adjusted my clips to match it with the different camera shots.
Before:
After:
Conclusion
The whole process took around 2 weeks from start to finish. I was using a lot of techniques that I had never used before, so I spent a lot of time looking for tutorials on YouTube, especially for the landscape part of the process. It would have saved me a lot of time if I had settled on the main camera beforehand because changing that mid-project probably wasted a lot of time.