Japanese Abandoned Village Environment [UE4]

dyceus

Japanese Abandoned Village Environment

This is based on a piece of concept art created by David Honz for an old Artstation challenge.  I made everything from scratch except the base normals for the water, which I just got out of the Unreal content.  I'll be adding breakdowns here later on.  Programs used: Unreal Engine 4, Blender, Maya, ZBrush, World Machine, Marmoset Toolbag 3, Photoshop, Substance Painter, and Substance Designer.

A link to the Artstation post.

Video of Motion and Effects Playing in Unreal

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbWnOEkgEWM

Process Video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxBbpBoTjWo

Some of the Assets

Link to the original concept art by David Honz

Jean_Pierre_Varg

Amazing work!!

Jean_Pierre_Varg

Are most textures created by you or did you also used megascans or libraries?

dyceus

@Jean_Pierre_Varg

Thank you!  I created all the textures myself, everything but the water normals which I just got out of the content already in Unreal since I was going to end up making something basically the same anyway.

dyceus

Here is a Marmoset render of some of the materials that I made for this.  A mix of baked models and emitters in Blender, Substance Designer graphs, Substance Painter files, and baked Zbrush sculpts.  I either used these methods independently or mix and matched them when appropriate (ie. the netting is a model of two cylinders twisted around each other from Blender that I baked to a height-map and brought into Substance Designer to arrange into the netting and add color/detail to).  The hay/thatch is a material ball under/inside another material ball that has an opacity mask.  Both the hay/thatch materials were baked to maps in Blender from an emitter.

Jean_Pierre_Varg

dyceus said:

@Jean_Pierre_Varg

Thank you!  I created all the textures myself, everything but the water normals which I just got out of the content already in Unreal since I was going to end up making something basically the same anyway.

I have gone through your Artstation breakdown, love the materials, how long have you been doing environments? I just started getting more into it and it's being a bit overwhelming, I'm amazed when I see works like yours!

dyceus

Jean_Pierre_Varg said:

I have gone through your Artstation breakdown, love the materials, how long have you been doing environments? I just started getting more into it and it's being a bit overwhelming, I'm amazed when I see works like yours!

I didn't really get into 3D until 2019 and I started getting more serious about environments about a year ago.  I do have about 5 years of more traditional 2D art experience from my BFA though.  This environment took me about a month if you cut out all of my procrastinating and moping about from the pandemic blues.

melviso

Great work. The composition is great as well.

simonBreumier

Really nice! Thanks for your detailed worflows on artstation, they are really helpful. I found interesting that you used blender for the thatch roof texture.

dyceus

simonBreumier said:

Really nice! Thanks for your detailed worflows on artstation, they are really helpful. I found interesting that you used blender for the thatch roof texture.

Glad they helped you!  Yeah, baking meshes and emitters with an orthographic camera from a modeling program is a super intuitive way to make textures.  I sometimes find it easier to get accurate height data that way as opposed to using Substance Designer.  But
Designer is also more convenient in certain cases.  Just depends on the situation.  I'm gonna be adding more break downs to the Artstation post when I get around to them.