[FINISHED!] [UE4] Havana - Overwatch FanArt Environment Study [FINISHED!]
polycounter lvl 4
Hey Polycounters!
We are Arcane Owl peepz, a freshly formed 3D art outsourcing studio.
We have seen a lot of awesome Overwatch fanarts over they years, (mostly character-related) yet not that many complete maps/environments.
So! As our love and passion lies in the stylized arena, we've decided to take the challenge and create the fabulous, inspiring and juicy.. Havana!
Our goal is to create a part of the map, decomposing it whole, with a plan to figure and deduct how things were created. We have analyzed it quite a lot, including- what production methods did they use, along with which workflows did they incorporate, and where.
After a long time going trough and inspecting the scene, it seems that every single building (along with the other various parts of the map) was created mostly out of 1 trim. This does not include tileables like walls, floors, wooden parts etc.
Upon deeper inspection, it seems that they have most likely used a "special" kind of trim.
The trim was created in a way that it always follows the same rule: 45 degree angle on the bevels, so that there are no sharp edges:
We tried minimazing the polycount as much as we could (without losing our minds too much). An example of the wireframe can be seen here:
For the wooden parts, we used a separate trim:
Apart from the trimmin', we made some tilables too!
Some of them were made without a base color. It was made in a way to help us make materials in UE4 easily and more proceduraly. That way we can only export eg. curvature maps, and expose some parameters in the shader. It helps us create different variations of the same material.
As for the parts that do not have trims or geometry bevels, we think they pretty wisely and sneaky-peaky used some custom normal edge bevels.
These puppies are used to make an illusion with a normal map that the edge was beveled, which in reality is only a sharp/hard edge and a geometry with a simple tilable texture all across.
Here is a gif showing an example with/without the edge decal:
Also, we created some fast shaders in UE4 with vertex color painting enabled (R, G and
, along with splat-maps for more details. This way we can make stuff more interesting in the beggining. Finally, after a bunch of trimming, this is where we currently stand with the scene so far!
These are the comparissons in Overwatch, and our scene:
Some more single shots of the enteriours we just started:
Thanks for you time, and hope some of this has been helpful.
Arcane Owl Artists on the scene:
Aleksandra Milosevic: https://www.artstation.com/aleksandramilosevic
Stefan Stanic: https://www.artstation.com/stexara
Now... back to work work!
We are Arcane Owl peepz, a freshly formed 3D art outsourcing studio.
We have seen a lot of awesome Overwatch fanarts over they years, (mostly character-related) yet not that many complete maps/environments.
So! As our love and passion lies in the stylized arena, we've decided to take the challenge and create the fabulous, inspiring and juicy.. Havana!
Our goal is to create a part of the map, decomposing it whole, with a plan to figure and deduct how things were created. We have analyzed it quite a lot, including- what production methods did they use, along with which workflows did they incorporate, and where.
After a long time going trough and inspecting the scene, it seems that every single building (along with the other various parts of the map) was created mostly out of 1 trim. This does not include tileables like walls, floors, wooden parts etc.
Upon deeper inspection, it seems that they have most likely used a "special" kind of trim.
The trim was created in a way that it always follows the same rule: 45 degree angle on the bevels, so that there are no sharp edges:
We tried minimazing the polycount as much as we could (without losing our minds too much). An example of the wireframe can be seen here:
For the wooden parts, we used a separate trim:
Apart from the trimmin', we made some tilables too!
Some of them were made without a base color. It was made in a way to help us make materials in UE4 easily and more proceduraly. That way we can only export eg. curvature maps, and expose some parameters in the shader. It helps us create different variations of the same material.
As for the parts that do not have trims or geometry bevels, we think they pretty wisely and sneaky-peaky used some custom normal edge bevels.
These puppies are used to make an illusion with a normal map that the edge was beveled, which in reality is only a sharp/hard edge and a geometry with a simple tilable texture all across.
Here is a gif showing an example with/without the edge decal:
Also, we created some fast shaders in UE4 with vertex color painting enabled (R, G and
, along with splat-maps for more details. This way we can make stuff more interesting in the beggining. Finally, after a bunch of trimming, this is where we currently stand with the scene so far!These are the comparissons in Overwatch, and our scene:
Some more single shots of the enteriours we just started:
Thanks for you time, and hope some of this has been helpful.
Arcane Owl Artists on the scene:
Aleksandra Milosevic: https://www.artstation.com/aleksandramilosevic
Stefan Stanic: https://www.artstation.com/stexara
Now... back to work work!
Replies
We're back with an update.
As we are all aware, sadly, a lot of things were (and still are) going on, so including this and other client work we managed to get back to the scene with a bigger update.
Regarding the scene, a bunch of stuff was added:
- New juicy materials including some metal trims, bricks, tiles, walls etc. Upgraded the master material so that we could paint R,G and B vertex paint to almost every material desired.
- Different kinds of decals including dust, dirt, edge with normals, dripping and rust leakage, posters etc.
- Finished and made the ramaining buildings: factory, machanic shop, main theater building and more
- Made interior of other ramaining buildings too
- Some inside jokes, aswell
Here are some of the current in-game screenshots
- Examples of edge dirt/dust decals and how beneficial they are to the depth and livelyhood of the scene:
- The way we painted materials with vert colors:
We made some particles too!
- Theater ornaments:
- Doors!
- And last but not least, some new materials:
Be sure to follow our progress on instagram too:
https://www.instagram.com/arcaneowlstudio/
Thank you for your time guys!
...Till next update
A bigger update:
We finally added some foliage and with it added a splash of colors to the scene.
Next we played around with the lighting. We realized that earlier we didn't quite capture the right mood and atmosphere of the scene so we worked on it. We iterated a bit on buildings and materials.
It's still a long way to go, we still have a lot work to do and things to fix, so possible lighting and material updates to come.
We also fixed our light maps.
We added buildings around the scene to improve the composition. One of our favourite buildings was added - the parliament in the background.
Additionally, we added the remaining signs in the scene (more inside jokes) and added splats/drips and other decals.
We also created props and started adding them to the scene- lighting, pottery, instruments, cables and electric wall panels.
Here are some of the current in-game screenshots:
We also made some beauty shots of the instruments, lighting and plants:
More on Artstation: www.artstation.com/arcaneowlstudio
We're back at it again, this time with a smaller update.
We were busy with creating smaller sci-fi-ish normal decals that can, and are going to be re-usable throughout a bunch of the assets on the scene. Those include all of the cars, gas station, ticket booth and more.
- Firstly we went trough the whole scene again and noted down which ones we need. We created them and compiled into 1 single 256x256 texture.
- All it was left to do was create an asset to test it on, and what better candidate than the decal-rich gas station?
- On the image above one could see the placement of the different decals we created.
- Here is the pump with and without the decals material in UE4
- There was a cool effect going on on the pumps, where the texture was animated. We manage to replicate this effect by using a Panner node on the emissive inside the shader editor
- The speed and tile parameters were exposed for us to easily tweak the effect. This could be seen in the gif bellow
.. which brings us to our completed decal-friendly emission-animated Gas Station!
Off to the rest!
Can you give a brief overview of your approach to stylized materials in substance and how it might differ from realistic materials ?
Hope this helps or we managed to answer the question!
- We did some beauty shots for the Cigar Lounge room, and managed to complete the ticket booth as well.
- The ticket booth uses a 1k texture with the same details on top as the pump/gas station. (The posters are different small textures)
- One thing to note is that the normal decals are an awesome tool and are doing wonders for ading details, without the need for assets to be with a high resolution texture
- And the beauty shots of the Cigar Lounge Room, rendered in Marmoset.
Marmoset Viewer scenes on Artstation:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/28lLng
Next up:
- Market
- Vehicles
- Caffe interior
Cheers
@Lucas Annunziata We feel we shared a rumbotico-distilleric moment..? Heck, one could say that one walked a mile in your shoes
- We decided to firstly finish the Theater open "room", finish caffee exterior and start with the caffe interior and fruit market afterwards.
- Created a custom LUT (LookUpTable) for the scene to pop-up more, and to better portray the mood and atmosphere of the time of day and place we are tried to achieve
- Also, we made some animated shaders for the closed off areas.
(ps: planning on doing the animated healthing "potion" for fun as well ^^)
- For the theater room we crated couches, bins, curtains, some painting and a tileable floor texture.
- For the tileable textures we created and used R,G and B vertex painting, with some decals on the rims/edges of the tiles so it looks more natural
- The B&W mask determines where the dust/dirt/sand would go onto the tiles, as it could be placed and found in real life
- The LUT comparisson is shown in the GIF below, as well as the adjustment layers used to get the result
- We made a closed-off animated shader, so "players" would have a better sense on where to go, and what to avoid/what is off limits
- We did some exterior assets for the Caffe afterwards, including chairs, tables, and domino set
- For the end, with the added LUT's and some additional lighting and material tweaks, we are left with the current state of the scene:
Stay safe!
Lovlier compliment we could not receive, thanks
I really love this as well, masterfully replicated, for me however i feel maybe an original design would have gone a bit further than replicating a project. (Again however) since you are a freshly new studio group, its a great learning piece but i feel perhaps maybe just 1 building or two key buildings (or areas) to learn the techniques might've been better time spent learning and would've been a bit quicker. Leaving you room to create your own "map" having learned the new techniques, just letting you know this is coming from someone who does not do environment work. Another good reason not to replicate something 100%, you could've sold pieces of the work on stores, to gain a bit of profit from the time spent.
Take this with the grainiest of salts, just my probably unwanted .02's cents but maybe you all are open to alternative viewing angles, so hope it somehow helped and made sense.
Absolutely love the work, you nailed it as others have said, i just wanted to put a spin on all the praise and show a different thought process for perhaps the next learning project for the group. Amazing work never the less.
Hey @DavidCruz thanks for the comment.
The two of us started this project with the whole purpose of learning for ourselves, trying to get out of our comfort zones and at the same time post our process to polycount and that way try to give back to this amazing community.
We believe we actually learned much more by analyzing a bigger part of the scene, not some smaller chunks as this way we managed to get the overall feel of how the entire level was built. We tried to uncover the magical formula used by wizards working in Blizzard.
Next step we hope to do is, use all of the things we learned and make something of our own.
Our initial plan, when we finish the whole project (hopefully soon, as it took us a bit more time than expected xD) is to post the whole scene as well, to unreal marketplace for free. It’s a Blizzard scene made in Unreal engine. So hopefully, it would help someone learn through reverse engineering and help with technical stuff with creating shaders, blueprints and lighting.
@saleomkd Hvala puno!
We've been a bit busier with work stuff, but after some time are coming with a larger update.
Things we got our hands dirty on:
- Finished off the market
- Electronicy-Electricly-Hard-Surfacy props for the floors and rooftops
- Some simple animations for the roof props:
- Made a little scene near the factory, so it doesn't look too harshly cut-off:
- Gave more love and worked on stuff around the housing areas, caffee and cafeteria. Did some furniture, appliances, cans, mugs, plates and more. Also re-did walls for those areas to make them feel more natural and believable:
... Umbrellas!
- For the end, we also managed to do some jummy beauty shots, here's a few:
- Added some stuff to Artstation:
Market: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/68Nkar
Furniture: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/kDQaDl
Electronics: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/9mEkEy
.. Race to the finish line!
Thanks for the kind words @Djanki .
We've been extremely busy with a new project we started working for, but have gathered some time to slowly (but surely) get the scene near the finish line..
- We got to work on the kitchen, and finish all the props there
- Also we added remaining street props like garbage cans, hydrant, papers and magazines, junk etc.
- Not to worry, we did some beauty shots as well
We also have more shots on our Artstation page:
- Kitchen: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/kDLJXA
- Street Props: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/lxlAEO
As always....Thank you for your time!
We gathered some more free time and finally managed to slowly get back on the saddle... and continue working on the mapzz.
As promised, we worked on some vehicles as well (cool slick ride + awesome blossom bike).
With this, we think of concluding and finalizing the map with all of its contents, and hopefully bring it to you, the gang that has been following this intense ride, for a deeper inspection..
Highpoly's of the car+bike:
Animated? No probs
Al...most...there......
After so much hard work, research, ups, downs, lefts, diagonals and broken normals, we have managed to go through our envisioned finish line. We're calling the fan art of, the Havana Overwatch map, complete.
We have acquire so much knowledge and experience throughout this lovely experience. We hope that our goal to share the same with you, the coolest community in Milky Way, was reached.
Oh yea, one more thing... We uploaded the whole project to Gumrod to download for FREE (not commercial but educational purpose only, all rights go to Blizzard):
DOWNLOAD: https://app.gumroad.com/arcaneowlstudio#ncxhq
Artstation: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/XnZo8L
Video preview/trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yh8WSXqtGHE
Some preview images:
Dear Polycounters and Polycountresess, thank you for sticking with us.
Much love, Arcane Owl team.
@Ashervisalis Appreciate it!
Amazing work! Can you all replicate this Project in Unity perhaps? Are there any more continual updates planned?
I'm not an environment artist. But I'd say you did a great job replicating that area of the map entirely. If I was a project manager for a game or something I'd definitely hire you.
@BellBlitzKing Thanks man! It would be possible to replicate it in Unity no doubt, but would require a lot of additional work mainly regarding blueprints, lighting and other aspects that are different from UE4 :) We planned to have only a part of the map completed though ☺️
Thanks for the kind words @SgtHK 😍. PS: Annie is awesome! Like she is a real life actor playing the character from the Marvel universe or something, in a studio set with the super-hero clothes and wings
Whats your texture process ? If I may ask?