[UE5] Lost Between Worlds

Sven_M

In this thread I'm going to document some of my process of creating a set of 3 thematically connected scenes set in a miniature world, following the footsteps of a small child. Originally imagined as a short film, for now I decided to only focus on 3 sequences that are already in an advanced stage of completion. I'm gonna publish them separately, as I finish polishing them one by one.

For now, I'll share a few screenshots of the first part. I'm currently refining the lighting, still deciding on some camera shots and I'm planning to rework a few more assets before the release. 

EDIT 1: First part is released! Check it out here: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/Qr4Pyl



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rexo12

Lovely!

Bedrock

Very nice, is the foliage all hard geo or still using cards and masking? 

Sven_M

Thanks guys!  It is still using cards. Only a few thicker ones are pure geo, but yes, 95% of the foliage here is made from cards.

Speaking of foliage, I made some of the textures with a custom SP template I'm still working on. Basically, it enables me to manually paint branches and leaves as masks, while it procedurally creates everything else from albedo, height, roughness, all of the variations and finally it processes painted masks to create the final opacity map. It is similar to procedural leaf generators made in SD, but here you're not creating initial masks with nodes, but paint them by hand. I'd say it is a bit more artistic approach, which I personally prefer.

I recreated some of my older plants with this method in a fraction of time. It is also very easy to just erase and redraw, which is great for fast blockouts with lots of iterations. I'll showcase a bit more with a gif in the ArtStation post soon.

jStins

Really nice execution of the miniature scale feel. For the substance designer foliage... You built something that lets you paint masks directly in substance or the masks are imported from Photoshop or similar?

Bedrock

I would be interested to see a small demonstration of the foliage painting, sounds interesting but hmm a little tricky to imagine the process exactly.

Sven_M

I still haven't recorded a video, I'm adding finishing touches to the scene before the final render and have started working on prop showcase scenes, but in a nutshell it's like this: on separate layers, I paint a branch and all the leaves with masking tools - completely manually, by hand. Then I use those masks as anchors in upper layers to create height, colors etc. It's still fairly simple atm actually, I've been playing with it and experimenting with histogram filters, leaf stencils and pattern brushes. But for now it's similar to how you would paint foliage in 2D, except you just paint the silhouette. So yeah, I'm pretty sure you can just paint it in an external painting program as well and bring it in Substance Painter. I'm still not sure how far can it be pushed, but it has already been good enough for me to use it in this project. I recreated this bush, some grass and seaweed with it quite easily, which took much longer with the sculpting and baking method.

And you basically paint on a flat plane, which acts as an atlas, so I can paint anything wherever I want to. As I said, I'm playing with stencil and alpha leaf textures now as well, so I can potentially just place detailed leaves on a branch with a single click per leaf.

So this is purely using Substance Painter, but the concept is the same as with foliage creation in Designer, except instead of creating a bunch of 2D nodes and positioning all the shapes with a Transform node to build the leaf, here you just paint the leaves by hand. I'll share a workflow example in a video as soon as I record it. This is how those masks look like:



Btw, a few screenshots of a small prop showcase scene, I think I'll stick with this concept 

carvuliero

Lol they look like real mini assets good job !

Ashervisalis

Damn, literally looks like a picture of a super cute miniature set. Nice job!

Bedrock

Appreciate the explanation  

Finnn

thats looking so awesome mate.

depth of field is just the best thing

Sven_M

Thanks for the support, guys! I just released it on ArtStation!



https://www.artstation.com/artwork/Qr4Pyl

Expect more content in this thread soon, as I'll start sharing another scene. 

Sven_M

Some renders from the train that is going to be featured in the second part. This wagon is pretty much done, but I'll create a few more color variations of it so I can duplicate it a few times.

CheeseOnToast

Material work is lovely, and that tilt-shift style depth of field is the icing on the cake. Looking forward to seeing more.

Sven_M

CheeseOnToast said:

Material work is lovely, and that tilt-shift style depth of field is the icing on the cake. Looking forward to seeing more.

Hey, thanks!

Here's a wip of another wagon.

RustedFaith3d

Excellent work! Love it!

Sven_M

Thank you! 

pixelpatron

Rad.

Cg_Creator

Amazing stuff!!!

Sven_M

Thanks guys. Here's a locomotive. 

Jakro

Wow!  

sacboi

Everything about this is amazing and trainz - hell yeah!

teodar23

Looks great but its not very convincing that these are small objects. What would really sell this idea is for the edges to be less sharp and small shapes to be thicker. If you look at most plastic toys, especially older ones, the smaller the toy the bulkier and "softer" it is. This is for 2 reasons: lack of precision in tooling and usually you dont want kids playing with really small parts that can break off. Your model looks more like a highly detailed large scale plastic kit.
Another thing that would help sell the micro-ness of it is the paint thickness. Smaller the object, thicker the paint basically.
But overall great screne, really looks like a diorama.

Sven_M

teodar23 said:

Looks great but its not very convincing that these are small objects. What would really sell this idea is for the edges to be less sharp and small shapes to be thicker. If you look at most plastic toys, especially older ones, the smaller the toy the bulkier and "softer" it is. This is for 2 reasons: lack of precision in tooling and usually you dont want kids playing with really small parts that can break off. Your model looks more like a highly detailed large scale plastic kit.
Another thing that would help sell the micro-ness of it is the paint thickness. Smaller the object, thicker the paint basically.
But overall great screne, really looks like a diorama.

Thanks for the critique! I agree the scale and softness is very important here and I'm trying to pay attention to it all the time. But also from gathering references I've noticed it really varies because there are many miniature scales, materials they are made from and the overall amount of details. There indeed are some toy trains that look very smooth like this one:



But also there is stuff like these, which is what I was going for. Some of them have even sharper edges, with more precise details:





I'll definitely continue paying attention to that as it can be a bit tricky when references have different scales.

Sven_M

New ArtStation post is out! Hope you like it! 

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/g2eANe

HatPoweredSpyCrab

this is dope!!! I love it