How does one get started with Environments, Vegetation etc?

CyrieN

Hi all!
I was wondering if anyone could give me any advice or pointers to my number 1 problem at the moment; I'm currently wrapping up the end of my second year at uni with only a couple of projects to go until summer, However.. shortcut to the juicy part: I'm a bit stuck to what role I want to focus on for the majority of my life in industry. It's a big decision for me and I don't want to be doing something that I may enjoy at the start for about a couple of years, and then later down the line get tired of. I've already had talks with my lecturers about what I want to focus on and I'm still unsure, which I know is bad!

The two (sorta) main things I'm really interested in are 3D Vehicle/Hard Surface art and Environments. I've already done a number of vehicle and Hard Surface projects and i'm enjoying it so far, however I've always had an interest in organic environments and am in awe when I see stuff like this on artstation: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/gaQoZ
I wanna give an environment project a try over summer just as a sort of test to see if it's something that I really enjoy or not as it'll give me a better understanding on what to focus all my efforts on when I leave uni.

So my question onto thee(if you've made it this far): How do I get started with environments and are there any good tools that I can try out or tutorials that will help me with actually making the assets and general vegetation such as Grass, Trees, Rocks, SDesigner Textures etc.? All i'm managing to find over the internet are time lapses or tutorials on how to make a scene in UE4 with premade assets, which is why I'm thinking that im searching either the wrong words or searching in the wrong places. Any help would be appreciated, Thanks guys!

JordanN

I'm still toying/playing with vegetation myself but making something like in your link, it would definitely help to model a bunch of plants and trees beforehand, and using an "object paint" tool, you can quickly populate your scene with greenery. But the benefit to having this tool is that you can make modular adjustments i.e change the scale, rotation, distribution patterns of your props so you don't end up areas that look like copy & paste but have variation.

While big environments like that are daunting, I think it's best to not overthink it and just simply work your way upwards till you have a complete project. For example, you can divide up your forest environment into 4 smaller ones. Work section by section with a unifying goal in mind. If you can complete a small campsite, you can move on to adding the mountains in the back, then a river and so forth...

Also gather a lot of references and focus on composition. I think an amateur mistake made by a lot of beginner environment artists is they create scenes that don't have a purpose. Random crates or caves that act as filler instead of considering how they got their in the first place or what use would they have in a video game/story as opposed to just taking space and being clutter. 

Tobbo

One of the best tutorials I found that has helped me in really understanding the creation process of vegetation is "Creating Foliage for UDK" by Damian Lazarski on 3D Motive. It is a bit older and he populates his scene in UDK, but the creation method of the branches, leaves, manually adjusting vertex normals, alpha cards, etc. is what really helped me. I've used this method in both 3D Studio Max, which is what Damian uses, but I have also followed along using similar methods in Maya.

http://3dmotive.com/series/creating-foliage-for-udk.html

Best of luck!

PS Don't feel bad about not knowing what you want to do yet. Explore different areas and then stick with what you're drawn to the most. But you will never know until you give each area a fair chance. Many environment artists are good hard surface artists too. Those disciplines aren't that different.

CyrieN

The idea of dividing an environment up into sections makes a lot of sense haha, Thanks JordanN! Really helpful advice! 
And thanks Tobbo! that link is really helpful, been looking for something like that but haven't been able to find anything like it.
Awesome advice and tips guys, really appreciate it! 

Ashervisalis

A lot of studios use a program called SpeedTree. It's used in both games and TV/film. You need to provide the textures, but the program creates all kinds of trees, their LOD's, and even adds effects like wind, which transfer over to the game engine. There's a few tutorials for it on YouTube (not really enough, though, imo).

If you also search on YouTube for creating grass for video games, there's a handful of cool tutorials which show techniques on creating grass and the like.

Alex_J

You're young and you've got time. Might as well try a little bit of everything before you settle. And I'm sure down the line, once you are comfortable in a career, you'll have time to start branching out into other things that interest you. 

I just started doing a little bit with environment assets for the first time and I'm really enjoying it. It's helped me learn a lot about the technical aspects of texturing and rendering in UE4, which even if I didn't stick with environment art, these skills help with other disciplines as well.