Lost Temple - Unreal Engine Environment

srinivasjlkm

I was inspired by an Environment concept I saw on Artstation and decided to work on a 3D scene in Unreal Engine to make it look alike. It does feel a little large scale for my experience but I did want to challenge myself and picked it and started working on it. So any help or critic  along the way is well appreciated since I do want to improve my skills and learn as well along the process. 

Concept Art by Vadim Koval : https://www.artstation.com/artwork/8eob1x


I started with the Blockout in 3Ds Max . Noticed a few modular pieces make up the entire scene. After modeling the base in 3ds max i will sculpt them in Zbrush. As for materials. I decided to create a PBR material in Substance Designer so I do not have to paint them individually, instead keep the mesh optimized for vertex painting inside Unreal Engine itself.

Gathering References:


I will be posting my progression along the way and would like to get feedback to learn and get better results.
3Ds max 

Unreal Engine

Modular Pieces

pixelpatron

Lookin' good so far, keep going.

srinivasjlkm

Pillar sculpt done , moving on to other pieces. Not going super detailed as most of the crack / pocket holes will be hidden or shown through the texture. Will try to focus on overall look of the scene

srinivasjlkm

2nd Big modular block done. Wondering for low poly of these is a Zbrush decimated version good enough or is there a need to Re-topo these?

Usually for static meshes, is re-topo necessary ? 

I tried baking the normals on the unwrapped decimated version and found no issues, that's why I ask.

Any advice?

Jean_Pierre_Varg

Hey! looks really really great!

teodar23

@srinivasjlkm my advice is: if it works, it works. Looks good to me

hublus

Great start. I think lighting will be crucial to bring it to full potential. 

teodar23 said:

@srinivasjlkm my advice is: if it works, it works. Looks good to me

I agree. I think you don't need to care about optimalization that much if it's only single scene for portfolio.

srinivasjlkm

Thanks for checking out my progress and kind advices ,will just use the decimated version then. Yes I agree and think lighting will be crucial. 
Might need more advice or help when I get to that part. Will keep updating.

srinivasjlkm

3rd Sculpt  progress: Im not exactly a Zbrush expert , so just doing the best i can.
I have one more block of modular pieces to sculpt, then  next decimate, unwrap

srinivasjlkm

Completed the last sculpt for the scene. Completed decimation and unwrap inside zbrush itself.. Finding it hard to keep myself motivated and getting easily distracted .. How do you keep yourselves focused and motivated ? Starting to feel like i've taken more than i can chew.

Only this pillar would be painted in Substance Painter, everything else would be using a Substance Designer texture I create.

Any advice or suggestions moving forward?

srinivasjlkm

Completed Unwrapping . Now just have to bake the normals for them. 

srinivasjlkm

Built a total of 12 Material Groups ,which means I will bake 11 Normal Maps inside Substance Designer  and one small pillar will be done in substance Painter for the entire scene . doesn't have to be detailed as that would be inside the temple, just need an outlook.

I hope I'm going the right direction. Any advice or suggestions are welcome.

srinivasjlkm

Created a Mossy Rocks Material following Javier Perez Workflow [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cr5xutRazB4 ]


Baking only Normals of 11 Materials groups inside Substance Designer. This is the first time I used SD to bake normals at it is quite efficient. Happy to learn some new techniques along the way.



Modifying and exposing few nodes to create a custom Substance Designer Material to be used inside Unreal Engine. With this material I would not have to create Textures for all the objects. Rather will just take this SD material inside Unreal Engine and create UE materials for all the imported objects using respective Baked normals inside Unreal itself.  By doing this , I can modify the material inside UE instead of having to recreate materials outside UE and re-import them for any changes.

teodar23

Nice, i like where this is going. Did you already test this out or are you just experimenting with this approach?

srinivasjlkm

Experimenting and Testing along the way and making necessary modifications. Seems to be working quite fine.

Since the scene has quite a few elements to it, I felt lazy to texture each object individually and I just came up with this idea if it would be possible to texture the entire scene just based on normals. So did a few experiments back and forth with SD and UE and am happy its sort of working. I thought this would be a common method but could not find any tutorials or anyone applying this method. 

Any links / advice available to help me through this step would be appreciated. Or ill keep moving forward and keep posting progress updates.

teodar23

Its not lazy, its efficient use of resources. I'm not sure if its actually more performance friendly this way but its definetly better than doing unique textures for every single assets.
A common approach is to bake object space textures (normals, ao, etc.) and blend those with tileable textures inside UE. What you are doing is kinda similar only you are using a SD shader instead of a UE shader to derive materials for your assets.
I am doing something similar in my current project but the difference is that its a single prop asset with multiple material layers.
I dont know of any tuts or articles that would help with this approach and i cannot give any advice cause i havent tried this myself so best of luck and hope you can do a "lessons learned" after this to list pros and cons.

srinivasjlkm

Importing Assets and Materials into UE4.
Now have to make a few material tweaks since it looks too harsh overall. I can make overall changes to the texture just by Editing a few nodes in SD and reimport that one SD material file and it updates all the textures and UE materials created from that single Substance Instance in the scene.  

Then  later will download Landscape material from Megascans Bridge and some free foliage from Unreal Marketplace.

teodar23

The albedo (base color) has some strong contrast in it. Have you tried the PBR validate node in SD?

srinivasjlkm

Which one is the PBR validate node in SD ? I never used it?
 
The intensity of contrast of base color is dependent on my normal intensity as per the SD graph i created. So I exposed the normal intensity node and just modified it in UE and the contrast went down.



Since I have these exposed nodes, I will tweak them until I get closer results.

srinivasjlkm

Imported Foliage and Character from Unreal Marketplace free assets.
Matching  Lighting and shadows


Imported Dead Tree from Megascans Bridge.
Modified LUT in Photoshop and used it in UE4 to match my reference, and getting very similar quality ....This is something new I learnt.

Will still tweak a little in post process volume.

I am really liking the directionality in the scene, with the lighting, shadows pointing towards the opening of the temple. Starting to look like the concept. Going to finalize soon and create a 5sec cinematic. Any Advice suggestions at this stage are welcome so i could still modify it before starting to take screenshots. 

srinivasjlkm

And I'm done.  Am actually in awe that i completed this and happy that i got the lighting close to the concept. If i wasn't posting my updates on polycount with regular feedback from the community ,this project would have taken me a little longer and my laziness would take over. I will be posting this on my artstation soon with a short cinematic.
Something new that I learnt from this project is :
-Scale and Proportion through Blockout .
-Substance Designer Material -Baking Normals and exposed nodes advantage 
-Unreal Engine Post process - LUT
-Some Zbrush Rock sculpting 
- Post process volume parameters in UE for overall look.

What I still need to learn is
- Lighting in Unreal Engine

Could have optimized the scene more by retopo the imported assets . But since I was focusing on overall look for the scene I had other priorities to focus on.

srinivasjlkm

Check out my Artstation for cinematic and final images.

Assets used 


Process: