[UE4] [WIP] Selesnya Guildgate fan art

Ozz14

Hey everyone,

After making my last scene from my own imagination, I wanted to tackle a concept and focus on asset generating skills instead of designing a whole world.

For this project I will be tackling trim sheets, which I have not yet implemented into a portfolio piece. The other main skill I want to practice is using Speedtree. I have a thorough grasp on making organic assets from scratch, but that's simply not always feasible, and being proficient in speedtree will add some more tools to the box.

I decided to make use of the treasure trove of amazing environment art that is Magic the Gathering by recreating the guildgate of my favorite guild from the Ravnica world. There is a guild for every combination of the 5 magic colors, Selesnya being green and white. (as a side note, would Ravnica not be an amazing setting for an open world game? Imagine a procedurally generated fantasy city, but the buildings and areas change depending on which combination of the 5 magic colors has control of the area.) I like to jump right into a project and get the ball rolling by just blocking out the proportions with grey scale shapes.

I will make a basic mood board for this project, but since I'm working from a concept, and the subject matter is already very fleshed out, I'm going to thumb through all my old Selesnya cards and see how different artists decided to capture the mood of the green and white guild, and maybe borrow one of those for an alternate lighting setup, probably twilight or night time. I want this scene to be a fairly true to source recreation, but I will use the alternate light setup as a way to practice lighting and bring some originality into the scene.

Timeline - 8 to 10 weeks - because of the holidays and general corona craziness, I'm going to give myself flexibility with the weekly tasks, allowing tasks to bleed over into the following week, with an initial deadline for the last week of January.

Ozz14

At the tail end of the second week of work and pleased with the progress so far. Using a tree I whipped up in speedtree as a general placeholder, can already tell I'm going to need to make them skinnier and adjust the albedo maps of the leafs to make them more golden. I'm approaching the head sculpt iteratively. Instead of getting lost in the details and staring at it for a whole day, I'm going to keep making passes on it each week. Making a 16:9 image from a scene based on a 375 x 525 playing card illustration is giving my brain some composition pains. The imposing shape of the central gate is getting overshadowed by the widening of the rotunda building on the left. Going to have to adjust the widths to compensate for the new resolution.

timeyful

Its looking great so far! Ive recently discovered that blocking out he environment actually helps alot, this is a very good example of that. 

Ozz14

thank you @timeyful much appreciated   yep, making a scene based off a concept at a different resolution forces you to answer alot of important questions during the blockout stage, but its important to get it all sorted out before you start making textures.

Ozz14

First of two trim sheets done, got in a matte painted sky off the unreal store, and did another pass on the head. I'm happy with the composition. Now I'm working on making sure the basecolor and roughness of the materials are reading well before I fully UV the assets and start to think about things like vertex painting or decals. I think that I've rushed this phase in the past and focused more on the "cherry on top" stuff instead of making sure my materials are really solid. Next thing to tackle is the gateway mesh.

Ozz14

Progress update-

A better version of the arch mesh (although it still needs a little more detail, maybe another metal fringe running through it), a first pass on the headdress, and just a little post process tinkering to start getting the thumbnail to look right. I'm excited to begin next week by bringing in vegetation from megascans. Since this project was mainly an excuse to practice trim sheets and speedtree I'm going to use mega scans for the vines, bushes, grass, and other small assets like that. I'll also need to tune up the trees and get some subsurface scattering in them. I'm using a light volumetric fog and the fog sheet blueprint from the particle effects demo to get some depth going. Distance field ambient occlusion and a stationary light are helping get the initial material reads I want to differentiate stone from granite from metal, but I still need to work on the lighting.

I was preparing myself mentally for the sculpting of the detail on the headdress before I realized I could make the whole thing alot simpler with proper use of an opacity texture. I've only put in the opacity so far, but will probably handle the metal/rough/ao and color maps with a smart material in substance painter.

Ozz14

I've finished what will be the last real big batch of asset production, and am now looking for ways to polish up the scene. I sculpted a new pass on the head, redid the arch that holds the head, and tweaked the bitmaps of all the megascans and speedtree models so that they have a more cohesive green. Some shadows in the foreground and fog sheets over the background buildings have really helped define the depth in the screenshot. I also made a mossy version of the trim sheets which I have subtly vertex painted into various nooks and crannies, just to hide texture repetition and give a little bit of wear to the architecture. Some particle effects to add little glowing orbs to the central trees and some falling leaves will hopefully add some life to the fly-through. And a little post processing in unreal just make it pop. I will make a LUT in photoshop and compare between the two to find the ultimate look I want. I know I can push this scene a little further.

Ozz14

Post processing and editing some shaders really helped here. First off I spent some extra time on the golden headdress to make to give it some more value contrast. Next, I made the static meshes stationary so I could manually adjust the amount of GI they receive. I also turned the static lighting level scale way down so the big meshes would have proper bakes.  There are also some light beam meshes placed (one right below the face, and one on both sides of the arch in the backround to give more of a sense of depth. Contact length shadows on the directional light and using world space AO in the post processing also was helpful for such a large scale scene.

Ozz14

Turned down the saturation and darkened the foreground. Going to take some time away from this project and put it up to publish. Thanks to everyone for checking it out

teodar23

Looking good so far but if i may there are some issues that stand out to me.
First, the meshes are very low poly and having the camera so close to them doesnt help either.
The stone looks very shiny in most places and seems unnatural. I dont know if raising the roughness or lowering the specular is the way to go. Maybe both...
There are some mesh gaps on the right and top left.
The golden arch thing is clearly 2d and it will help to give it some fake depth with a normalmap that follows the shape. Also, its current normalmap is very noisy and strong so it makes it seem damaged and distorted but that clashes with the actual lack of depth. I dont know if that makes sense but its more of a nitpick so maybe ignore it.

Ozz14

@teodar23 Thanks for the feedback! I'll definitely do another pass on those things and fix those mesh gaps. And you're right the stone material is worth revisiting. I unintentionally broke PBR and gave them a slight metallic value, and kind of liked it so I just kept it in there. I'm thinking I'll use a vertex mask to breakup some of that though as the stone is perhaps a little too shiny.