[Halo Fanart Enviro] Not another scifi environment - Bros teamwork edition

EfilOne · Jan 2016

It's been a week now I've been working along with Nksilver5 on a portfolio environment, so I'm opening this thread to keep track of everything and for dem feedback bitsssss !

I'm gonna expose below what we had in mind and all the technical side of the project, with which we wanted to start with first, laying off the hard part and then get funtimes only heheh.

Project's purpose and main AD :

Having a project in our portfolio both showing our actual skills, getting them up to date, and achieving something that include all the kind of work an environment artist could be tasked to work on.

The AD is very simple : Some kind of outpost set up in a natural environment, SciFi stye heavily based on halo. The outpost would include an interior part. (Actually mixing together both Forerunner and UNSC's shape languages and Design)

Tasks repartition :

- Natural part is divided 50/50, both some trees, leaves, rocks and shit, and two set of textures each for the ground.

- Nksilver5 on the interior, and some of the substances

- Me on the exterior building, rest of the substances, and parametrization of them to get everything ready to use in UE4

R&D and technical constraints :

We have thought a lot on this part, and tried to come up with something a bit different than the usual "make some highpolys, bake down, repeat bro".

- First, we wanted to avoid any baking on the scifi part, except one or two unique assets for each, and thus it directly implies the heavy use of modularity and trims technique in our workflow.

- Second, go procedural whenever possible. As our choice of engine directly went for UE4, the use of the Substance plugin was also logical.

- Third, for the natural part of the environment, both use some bashing libraries at our advantage, but also make some organic models of our own to keep it away from the directly spotted on "UE4 environment in 4 hours yo" (It wouldn't follow the purpose of the project anyway hahah)

- And finally, finish it at the end of january.

Now, some more details on the tech side.

We heavily tried to get the trim technique at its best, and also get heavy optimization whenever possible. Thus, we came with the idea of using only one trim map and 2 details maps for ALL the hardsurface assets, that would be mapped in the UV channels 0, 1 and 2, so our UV mapping would be as follows :

UV0 : Trim Map

UV1 : Details Map 01

UV2 : Details Map 02

UV3 : Lightmaps

After searching over the interwebz, it ended up that we had to resync the UV1 & 2 with the tangent basis of each asset's normals, which is first got by the engine when importing. So we also had to came with a special shader in unreal :

Some words about our shading workflow now.

As we wanted to keep things simple and also use the substance plugin to get things procedural, the question of shader optimization was also in our heads. Of course, for this kind of project it's best to go for the beauty shot rather than the overly optimized with big tech constraints, but we thought it would be also nice to show that "hey, we can handle it" ! So we just cutted everything in half :

- All the shader part that is static, and not meant to change when the environment is done, is handled by the substance engine during loading time. Those shaders are calculated once.

- Rest that is likely to change (Albedo color, some emissives if applicable, decal colors, wearing, etc) is done directly by unreal's shader system, at runtime.

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5021068/uploads/editor/qc/eypwyhofvr5v.gif

We are also trying something that might be interesting, or not at all : including all the shaders of the same kind in the same substance graph. Literally instancing graphs in a master graph, and using switches and stuff at our advantage to only have to assign ONE shader per same-material-mesh (or ID), and directly change the kind of shader using sliders in the instance parameters of the substance in UE4. It might sound extremely weird so here is another gif to explain it better hahah :

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5021068/uploads/editor/qe/z187kl0huwqy.gif

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5021068/uploads/editor/we/qh2ppyz1qre5.png

You can also notice the huge normal blended over on the cube. This is one of the details mapped in the UV2

The more natural part of the environment will have more common shaders, and for the terrain, I'll just drop this link, because this is exactly what we're gonna use (Kudos to Rens's work on this btw, it's extremely instructional and helpful !) :

http://www.artbyrens.com/pages/tutorials/terrainshader.php

Only main difference is that we'll include one mask in each diffuses's alphas, to introduce even more variations in the transitions.

We're also gonna try to wear everything procedurally (each wearing will have it's own parametric substance), by generating curvatures and also getting the AO, as masks, directly in UE4's shaders.

Again, even if all of this sounds complicated, we are doing our best to keep it as simple as possible at application, so I'll end up this first post with a fancy substance screenshot to explain it more visually :V :