[UE4] Modular Ruins Environment

kimmokaunela

Hi all. Once again I´m making yet another personal environment project. I got this idea from my previous projects where I needed to make some rock walls. I really liked to make those and I never really did any ruins before so I wanted to weld all of these ideas into this. Also I want to learn more about static lighting because I only know the basics so I want to go more advanced level.

My style is going to be something similar to Uncharted games but I still want to keep my own style. Not photogrammetry level of realism so more or less stylized. Also I would really want to mix some scifi/alien ideas there but I´m not really sure about that yet.

Goal is to end up with a library of different assets that allows anyone to create ruins or similar. So LODs, colliders and good second UVs for every asset. Also I would really like to run this in VR smoothly so I´m going to keep shader complexity reasonable.

My tools for this is again 3ds max for modeling, Zbrush for detail stuff, Substance Designer for most of the texturing, Photoshop for different things like icons/paintings and Unreal Engine for everything else. I also want to think how to use Houdini for some aspects because I´m really liking it and messing with that.

This project will not be huge because I don´t really have free time because Planetrism game project is eating all of that but I treat this like an escape project to avoid burning out with that

I will keep you up-to-date with everything and I will also now stream this as much as possible here:

Also I will tell when I´m streaming on my twitter https://twitter.com/kimmokaunela

Latest:

kimmokaunela

Here are the latest shots. I´ve been making these assets for a while now. Things are just randomly placed so far and I´m going to spent more time later of for final placements.

kimmokaunela

Here is a shot about jars that I made during yesterday evening stream. Textured fully in Substance Designer with a generic graph I made.

wirrexx

folllloooow!!!

FreneticPonies

That is fantastic, aaawesome! 

arnov

Cool, is it possible to watch how you use Substance designer? Looks crazy

kimmokaunela

Thanks all! Yes, I will try to stream Substance Designer stuff too in the future.

wirrexx

Yeah, Substance is where my love is. The more i learn the more fun it makes !Please do

kimmokaunela

I started to make the final level instead of just randomly throwing assets there. I also added some background rocks from my Unreal Marketplace package (https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/complete-rock-pack) to have more interesting background. Also I made few more blocks that I sculpted during the streams. I still have a lot to do but its slowly coming together and modular blocks are working pretty well together.

lotet

daaaamn, that looks really good!

Ged

great work, the style is very clear and consistent. I love how vibrant youve made everything and the lighting angle just completes the look so well. The only thing that looks odd to me and this is very minor is those large background rocks(3rd shot down on top left in this latest post), they seem to have these large lines of AO or something running around them plus a texture that looks like its tiling and it just throws off the scale and realism just a bit for me, those same rocks look excellent in some other shots so thats why I say its minor.

oldmanboy

That is great work! How long did it take you to complete? I am just getting into Environment Art. Any tricks I should watch out for?

kimmokaunela

@lotet Thanks!

@Ged Thanks! Thats a good point. I think that rock is just too smooth and I need to tweak that material a bit in this case. 

@oldmanboy Thanks! I think I started this 1.5 months ago and I´ve been spending at least few hours every day. I made some of the assets earlier so that helped to speed up things. This is still work in progress and I have some interesting ideas that I want to try.

Stexara

Fuuudge it looks awesome, the green/red combination does not disappoint ! Keep it up

ionicotaco

This is insane!!!!!! Awesome work!!

Strkl

Looks amazing, love the vegetation ! any info your workflow ?

kimmokaunela

Thanks all!

@Strkl I guess its a pretty basic workflow where I model hi-poly models in 3ds max using just sub-d modeling and a lot of bend modifiers and instances. I place those into a square plane and bake everything in Substance Designer where I also texture everything. Then I make cards in max and all of that hanging foliage is hand placed there. Here are some shots of the hi-poly foliage models that I made for this project.

kimmokaunela

Small update again. I´ve been spending a little more time making bigger structures and once again tweaking lighting. I also added custom volumetric fog volumes to get more interesting local fog effects.

Sebvhe

Man, this is spot on, I like the structures a lot!
I'm slightly more concerned about the overall readability, the green-brown contrast is great, but you've got to add some more value contrast, this is how one of your shots looks like in black and white

See, it's very difficult to tell the wood, stones and foliage apart. I'd suggest darkening and lighting them to add more contrast in the values, here's a quick and very dirty paintover

It's only my two cents here, but now you can really tell the wood apart from the stones which was not so easy before.

kimmokaunela

@Sebvhe Thanks for the paintover. Thats a good point and I will focus on those aspects next. This is the part that I think I usually forget to spent more time on I think I´m going to first try to add few more extra lights there and then start to tweak texture colours more.

Jack M.

This is pretty great Kimmo. The only criticism that comes to mind is that your scene is a bit noisy overall. Try to make some space for rest to balance your images out a bit more. A good rule of thumb imo is 70/30 or 30/70.

Doxturtle

Those plant high poly look great, did you add any additional details in Zbrush?

Svyat

Amazing work

kimmokaunela

@Shaz_Snow Thanks! I streamed that but its was two weeks ago and Twitch is removing vods after 14 days so its gone In short my workflow was following. I made low-poly models in max, exported those into ZBrush where I subdivided them and I used radical symmetry to sculpt those details. Last step was to use some flatten and trim adaptive brushes to add some details. Baking and texturing was done in Substance Designer where I previously did a graph that allows to chip of some smaller details.

@Jack M. Thanks! Thats a good point. I guess I´ve been just throwing assets there to test how they look in a different situations. I need to start balancing things more.

@Doxturtle I didn´t actually use ZBrush for modeling. Those renders are from ZBrush because that was a fast way for me to take those shots I used 3ds max for all of that. I used bend, twist and displace modifiers a lot. Also noise modifier is pretty handy to add some extra details there.

@Svyat Thanks!

ionicotaco

Dude!! I love your work! You are awesome

kimmokaunela

@ionicotaco Thanks man!

I´ve been slowly started to make the nature that will form the borders of the scene. Also a lot of material tweaking and optimizing.

kimmokaunela

I´ve been tweaking lighting a bit and also modeled more trees and material tweaking. 

fredaxc

Awesome Work!

kimmokaunela

@fredaxc Thanks!

I´ve been spending some time to make different type of treasures. Here are few shots from those in Marmoset Toolbag 3. You can view Marmoset Viewer here: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/qg91N

AlirezaMorgan

the piece made me kinda speechless
how did you manage to make the environment so colorful and alive and yet so dead 
the attention to detail its just unbelievable

kimmokaunela

I´m going to call this one done for now. It ended up being a much bigger project than I first imagined.

My goal was to have a pack that could be useful for creating all sort of ruins. You can find more shots here: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/b903G

I also made this small video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ta3gaLhoB4









And then shots about some of the assets alone.