[FINISHED] Desert Town Environment

stefanWilliams_C

Hey hey everyone! For this project I am making a Desert town environment inspired by the Temple of Anubis map from Overwatch. Firstly, I found some really sweet concepts of similar environments on google images and artstation. So from here I decided to paint out some concept art in Photoshop to experiment with composition, colour and silhouettes etc. 
So next is blockout time. Everything here is simple blockout modeled in Maya and put into UE4 with some basic post-processing to get the correct lighting/mood of the scene. Some feedback I received from my previous environment piece was in regards to issues with scale, so at this stage I am trying to pay more attention to the relative scale of assets. 
I then started to sculpt and paint some of the larger and more important assets. This process has been rather grueling since I couldn't settle on a solid design for the textures and final look of the towers and wall assets. Through lots of iteration I've found a nice 'realistically-stylized' look for the larger assets. Next I shall rework the gate and wall asset to match the style of the towers. 
The workflow for these assets started with zBrush, retopology and UV correction in Maya then painting in Substance using smart materials and some trims I made a while back. This is the first project I'm using zBrush for (still transitioning from Mudbox), so I'm still learning the different workflows for baking the high poly etc. 

This is what I have so far! For the next stage, I will be reworking the walls and gate assets and I shall also work on more of the larger town assets. I'm also exploring some 'market stall' designs for the larger town center assets so as to populate the composition a little more.
Thanks for reading! Hopefully I can work on this project more and I will be sure to update as much as possible!  

Ashervisalis

Hey, I think you need to be using tiling materials in engine for meshes this large. Texturing them inside Substance Painter, I can see your pixels, as well as baking areas (white highlights in the inner corners of your mesh). For damage, use vertex painting, decals, and damage meshes.

teodar23

I agree with ashervisalis, but also google mesh decals and edge decals. Edge decals is a tehnique where you add wear and other stuff to the edges of big meshes like buildings. Mesh decals is what is called inside UE4.

stefanWilliams_C

Ashervisalis said:

Hey, I think you need to be using tiling materials in engine for meshes this large. Texturing them inside Substance Painter, I can see your pixels, as well as baking areas (white highlights in the inner corners of your mesh). For damage, use vertex painting, decals, and damage meshes.

Thanks for the feedback Ashervisalis. This was actually the method I had used for these assets to begin with but wasn't getting good enough results. That being said, I hadn't applied any vertex painting or decals, so I will explore it again today!

stefanWilliams_C

Hey again everyone! 
I've added some stuff to this project over the past few weeks. Primarily been working alot with Trim sheets and modular assets to set up a good base for efficiently producing the larger assets I need as well as squeezing out more polys, minimizing on draw calls. 
These trims are basically using the same geometry, thus the same shapes and splits. I used the second trim for my modular buildings set and the first for the walls and some instances of vetex painting. 

Here are the modular buildings I created with the trims and wood tile. Everything here is designed in a modular fashion so I can iterate. I researched this quite a bit over the past few weeks looking at how different artists handled environments with many buildings and it seemed very varied? Finally, I settled on separating the buildings by section (i.e wall, pillar, roof, door, window etc.) then using those pieces in a modular context. 

Of course, I re-did my wall, pillar and gateway  
 

This is where I'm at currently. I should also note I've been using decals to simulate cracks variation around the trim assets and edge wear for the buildings. Next I will be re doing the towers and stairs, developing a few market stall concepts and explore some hero assets  

Thanks for taking the time to read all of this

MattAllum12

What Texel Density are you aiming for with this project?

stefanWilliams_C

Hello everyone!
I've been working on this project a bit more recently. As per usual, I'm just looking to get some feedback. So, to begin with, I made some hero assets to be used at the main gates, kinda hailing the player into the tomb. The original concept included the anubis/dog statues as the primary assets here, however, I found that the Sarcophagi looked more imposing and also gave me a good opportunity to showcase them a bit more in the environment. 
Being hero assets, this is all Maya->Zbrush->Maya->Painter work. Pretty much everything else is now modular, using trims and various tiling textures.
 
Having already set up a base for buildings (see my last post), I then set about creating a tall building and another building variation that made use of multiple trims I was already using. Alongside these assets, I also made a market set with some of the banner and wood tiles. 

Having most of the large-scale silhouette assets now blocking out the environment composition, I moved a few things about to further populate the scene. In engine, I could cut and match existing textures I had made to add some height to the ground in the form of sand hills and slabs. 
A big part of the UE4 work here has been placing decals, which are being used to simulate edge wear and cracks on buildings. This, in conjunction with vertex blending is hopefully improving the environment
Thanks for reading! Currently my checklist includes: more clutter assets, various electrical items, modular tower set and scene lighting tweaking. 

stefanWilliams_C

@MattAllum12
I'm aiming for around 1m per 1024 texture. I will go over it all again soon to ensure everything at least looks like it's around that density

stefanWilliams_C

Hello again! 
This one will be a little shorter than my previous posts, since I've hit a stage of polishing geometry, populating the scene and post-processing. As I said in the last post, I wanted to get across a co-existence of ancient architecture and near-future tech, which is what Overwatch does incredibly well in Temple of Anubis. My solution to this was to have some ventilation units hooked up to the town electricity generators. Alongside this, I added a crane model to populate the background. 

Here are some screenshots of the scene. I want to use these cameras for the final showcase shots. In general, I think that most of the assets are shown off well in these shots. 
These shots also demonstrate more curvature to some of the modular assets. After getting some feedback from a few other environment artists, I found that the box modelling is too apparent in my modular assets. Adding a few more subdivs and smoothing out the silhouette of the geometry is how I went about fixing this.