The Bi-Monthly Environment Art Challenge | March - April (77)
Happy New Year everyone and welcome to the 77th Bi-Monthly Environment Art Challenge for the months of March and April!
The challenge is a way for real-time 3D artists to test their skills and create a piece of work based on concepts provided. It's open to those of all skill levels and we do our best to provide meaningful feedback along the way so everyone can come away from the challenge with actionable points on which they can improve their craft!
Anyone is welcome in this challenge no matter your skill level! It's a test of your own ability not a competition between members. We're all here to improve as artists and learn from each other.
- ENVIRONMENTS -
HARD SURFACE ENVIRONMENT:
Watch Out! by Verena Lehner-Dittenberger
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/vJDDBY
STYLIZED ENVIRONMENT:
伊甸启示录-背景图2 by Kalen Tang
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/zDX8ZZ
- PROPS -
HARD SURFACE PROP:
Typewriter by Jean-Luc Sabourin
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/vJ42lE (Additional images available here)
STYLIZED PROP:
Stump by Dmitriy Stankov
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/oAxv5O
- RULES -
Please read all the rules before starting:
- Try to post at least one critique for every post that you make. This will make for a better learning environment and help us all grow as artists.
- Try your best to finish as much as you can in the time frame provided, but remember even if you don't finish by the end of the challenge we encourage you to keep pushing and finish your piece!
- Post what you are working on in this thread so that way it's a more centralized place for advice and critique. Please avoid creating a new thread as we don't want to spam out the forums.
- It is recommended to use a game engine to present your work. Unreal Engine, Unity, and CryEngine are very common engines that can be used but feel free to use any alternatives that you want. (Marmoset Toolbag for example.)
- Feel free to change up your chosen concept a bit if you want! Interpret these concepts to your liking, especially if your aim is to add storytelling elements.
- If you finish your project and decide to post it to Artstation, make sure you give credit to the concept artist in the form of a link to their profile. Additionally, it is recommended to ask a concept artist for their permission to post a 3D piece based on their work before doing so.
- RECOMMENDATIONS -
- When you are just starting out making a scene, it can seem complicated or imposing. Take your time planning and blocking out, it will set you up for success later on.
- Think about how you can re-use assets, re-use textures, break it down as simple as possible and plan it out. A lot of people will break it down in their own way when they start out their challenge. Gather some reference images as well for different parts of the scene, don't be afraid to make it your own.
- We strongly encourage you to go and look at other games and see how they make their assets as well as get concept art to give it your own feel.
The goal is to learn and grow both artistically and in your ability to both give and receive critique, but don't stress about it and remember to have fun!
Good luck!
Replies
The environments look fun, thumbs up from me.
The challenge is on! Excited to see how everyone tackles these concepts. Especially interested to see how people tackle the stylized environment as its got simple shapes but a higher demand on shaders.
Remember to start with a solid block out and work to get the perspective and shape down before moving to too much detail. It's a pain but it will make life so much easier once you're at the high poly and polish stages!
Made a very basic blockout to get layout and proportions outlined also wanted to test lighting and fog in unreal. Think I'm next going to try making a large texture that most of the textures will be based on and see how successful this can be before doing much more modelling. Trying to create it starting in zbrush and pulling the export to substance painter. If its large enough Im hoping to be able to scale uv's down for foreground models and avoid obvious repeating patterns this way, also needing less tiling for background models.
Pleased with the red squares in the background, took me a while to get the effect I wanted, though I may go in and add some red lights manually as I used emissive to get a flat colour across the models.
This is my starting blockout for the stylized prop.
Over the last year I've tried to learn how to model for games on my own, and to be honest more often than not I find myself frozen with analysis paralysis, not knowing where to go next, which tutorial or project to make in order to build my portfolio. So I remembered about these challenges, which are a great way of overcoming that. So... hope I can learn a lot from you guys!
Taking a crack at it. This is my first time doing an environment off of concept art like this, and my first time doing any kind of environment in, like... 6 years? Should be fun!
I'm done with the blockout. The rat is metaballs :P
Progressed some more, still got some placeholders that need replacing. Think I'm limiting myself a bit trying to copy the concept art exactly so I think I'll start deviating more.
Not sure about my metal texture right now, might try reducing the depth on the normal make and make it softer like the reference.
@jgarrison Any plans on which program you'll use for final renders?
Awesome to see such progress so early into the challenge!
@atunnard Can't wait to see what you're thinking of deviating on! There is tons of potential to really sell the world and answer questions of what the world is, why we might be here, and where those stairs will go.
Only note is make sure to watch out with the "rubble" you've got in front at the base of the stairway. It might just be the camera angle or the shape of the stairway but right now the "rubble" breaks the smooth line that leads the eye up the stairway and into the unknown fog above. The concept makes a point of never fully breaking that line, only obscuring portions of it.
Up to where I planned to reach, the left foreground area feels a bit lacking but I'm not sure what to add that wouldn't dominate the scene. Might make some changes but going to focus on some other projects first. Might have a go at the other environment.
@atunnard damn dude that looks really good, it's almost identical to the concept and you got it done so fast! Really impressed.
To answer your question, I'm planning on rendering in Toolbox. I'm also probably going to do most of the materials in toolbox as well, because I don't feel like paying Adobe 20 dollars a month for substance. 😅 Toolbox's material tools are pretty nice, but it's not perfect in places and maybe I'll try Blender's texturing options out finally.
Blockout pretty much done.
Hi, cool concepts and wips! I used the tree trunk asset to try a modular approach:
In the end I had strayed away from the concept, but it was a fun experiment. Model on sketchfab:
Hey, thanks for the new challenge. Here's my take on the stump. :)
Hey again. Instead of using my free time to work on this like a responsible adult, I got the platinum trophy for Elden Ring. 😅
I'm back on it again, but I don't think I'll be able to finish it by the end of the month. I'm confident that I will be able to make the rat, the teddy bear, and the birthday cake (three of the more complex objects in the scene) efficiently---the big things I'm worried about are the floor, the wall, and the train car itself. The train car just because it's big and complex, and I've never really done a realistic vehicle before, but for the floor and wall I really don't know how I would go about texturing it. Should I just make the UVs much bigger than the UV map itself, and use a tiling texture? I would know how to do it in a game engine with, like, vertex painting, but for making it work in Eevee or toolbox I'm stumped.
@Fabi_G Excellent work, the texturing it really solid stuff and I love how soft things look without losing their silhouette. If I had to nitpicked I'd say you could have given the top edges of the trunk a bevel just so those edge highlights you've got painted are really able to shine a bit more. Also, the fire particles in the area are a bit strange as just pentagons. Again, those are nitpicks though and it's really solid work!
@skyr3d Nice work on the stump! The roots are extremely well done, love the texture and life you were able to give them. :D
The grass and moss however seem much more rough. I think you could improve those areas by looking for some ghibli style grass tutorials and see if you could apply the techniques in them to it, I think it would really bring it up to another level as a whole.
@jgarrison You've got a solid blockout, would love to see you make it to completion even if it's after the challenge wraps up! Also, to answer your question about the floors and walls, you can do vertex painting in Blender so you should be able to use a similar workflow for it to what you'd use in a game engine.
Hey! First time taking part of a challenge! Pretty newbie still, but decided on a whim to participate!😄
Started on the blockout tonight, still not done but getting there.
@Pinkfox Hey, thanks for the feedback much appreciated! I added in a bevel modifier for the top of the trunk and it looks nicer with a bevel 👍️
@skyr3d Nice stump! My critique is that the grass blades look a bit different in scale and sharpness. And another pass on the textures would be nice to have them less flat, maybe some gradients and highlights.
@Gajhede Cool, keep it up! I think if you want to match the concept the trunk is bit wide compared to the mushroom (or the mushroom too small/thin?). To keep geometry easily editable, I would add the bevels either using a modifier or in the end. For trunk blockout, you could also create some vertical trunk strip modules and place them in circle shape (maybe use instances), merge them together once you are happy with the look. I like to sometimes draw over the concept to identify potential building blocks. And another thing to consider at some point is shading of mesh. Much success 🚀
Hey everyone, this challenge has wrapped! To those of you who are still working please keep going! It's always really warming to see people make it to the finish line regardless of how long it takes and we want to see those completed pieces.
The new challenge for the months of May and June is officially underway!
https://polycount.com/discussion/230163/the-bi-monthly-environment-art-challenge-may-june-78
Hope to see you all over there. 😀
So this is where I'm at. 😅
Thank You for the for the tip @Pinkfox, I did a bit of research into like splat maps and stuff in Blender, it's doable, but just using a tiling texture for the floors and walls ended up not being too noticeable. I would appreciate any feedback as I am maybe only 5/8ths done with this and will likely still be working on it through may.
Still left to do: Train Car, Rat, Birthday Cake, Teddy Bear, Graffiti. I'm also planning on figuring out some god rays and dust particles.
A bit late but I really enjoyed working on the hard surface environment, here's what I have :)
And a quick video showcase: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SC1hmPpnlE
Getting the lighting right was a good challenge for me. It was also a good occasion to finally move to UE5 ^^. Also a good occasion to practice trim sheets and modularity so thanks a lot for the concept 🙏.
I'll still be working on this for another week to get some things polished. Any feedback is more than welcomed :).
Love what you've got @simonBreumier! Excited to see that final look after the polish you plan to add. :D
The couple of things I'd love to see while you're doing that polish pass. (Sorry if I mention things you already intended to tackle, can't read minds. :P)
Some of the pieces feel like they're disconnected from the ground. What I mean by that is some dirt decals around things like the pillars where they meet the floor just really helps to make them feel cohesive. (Definitely doesn't need to be as dramatic as this, just wanted to show an example of what I meant.)
Color grading through your post processing to get more cold tones in your shadows could really help make that middle pop as well. I went a bit too far here as I also pushed more yellow into the highlights but hopefully you get the idea. 😃
@Pinkfox Thanks a lot for your feedback!
Having a better handshake between those pillar and the floor was definitely on my todo list but I wasn't sure how, so your reference will really help! I was thinking trying to get this handshake by adding some more AO between the pillars and the ground at first, but it seems like SSAO doesn't work in UE5 when using Lumen as the dev considered Lumen's natural AO was good enough. I'm guessing I must have done something wrong with my lights to get such a low occlusion between those two objects.
Finished the train and tried to do some of the graffiti/chalk. I still want to finish the rat and the teddy bear, and to see if i can get better render results in toolbag, and tweak some of the textures, but this is pretty close to finished I think.
@jgarrison nice progress!
One thing I would note is that the highlight on the doorframe, the trims and the floor seems curious, like coming from a non shadow casting source inside of the train? (red)
It would be nice for the narrative if you could accentuate the swing, and a light source inside the cart would be sweet (where the person is in the concept).
Keep it up!
@jgarrison I like the mood you got going there! I agree with Fabi_G to accentuate the swing and I would even add that it could be nice to accentuate the child's drawing on the floor a bit more, as they get a bit lost in the ground roughness now (maybe by giving the decal some roughness different than that of the floor, or a very very slight emissive).
I finished polishing! Added some decals to blend assets with the floors a bit more, changed the post processing colors a bit and made a few adjustments on some assets and on the lighting to make the focus point pop more and make some of the simpler assets look less 3D/flat (like the cables and the pillars)
I've put more details and breakdowns of the project on my artstation: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/EagYnN
thanks again for the nice concept!
@simonBreumier hey, nice job and congrats for finishing it!
My only nit pick is that the tubes in the foreground look a bit floating. Maybe some ao or dirt decals would help to ground them more.
Good luck with the next one 🚀
@simonBreumier Really killer work! Captured the feel of the concept super well and I like the breakdowns you did in your Artstation post! Excited to see what you tackle next. 😀
Hey, nice catch! I was having that problem with the front door and spent awhile fiddling with it, but I somehow completely missed the side door. I fixed the problem by fiddling with the lighting settings for Eevee. Getting some light to shine through the window was definitely on my agenda, and I'm hoping that the volumetric light between the train and the swing in my most recent render is enough to accentuate it, although now I'm thinking maybe I should have accentuated it a bit more. Thank you again for the advice as I would not have noticed that lighting issue otherwise!
Hey Simon! I was really struggling to get the chalk drawings to look right. Partially it was because I was using the same map for albedo, alpha, and emission, and so I would end up with either the chalk being non-visible, or the dinosaur and so on. Eventually I think I got a better result by 1. making a separate emissive map, 2. plugging the alpha into a bump map node, and then that into the normal, so that it would have a very slightly raised surface as chalk would, and 3. running the emission strength through a Fresnel node so that the emission strength would be relative to the surface angle.
By the way, I really like how yours came out! It's very interesting to see how our two interpretations of the same concept art are similar, and the ways in which they are not.
So anyways, I feel like I'm done, or at least that I've reached a good stopping point for the foreseeable future:
(Click to see full quality (the image is comically large))
I fixed up the lighting a bit, improved the chalk drawings and improvised some additional graffiti, set up a dust particle system and enabled a just enough depth of field to make a few of the particles do the bokeh thing, and did some final adjustments in Lightroom. There is in issue with the shadows underneath the cables, it has to do with the "thickness" value in the Refractions tab of Eevee's rendering settings, and it's impossible to fix without screwing up the way the glass is rendered or switching to a different rendering engine, so I went with the lesser evil. I decided not to include the rat for the time being, because if I'm going to make a rat I would like to take my time and go all the way with it. I'm talkin... hair cards, hair physics, full rigging, wrinkle maps, tension maps, muscle simulation... I'm gonna do for rats what Red Dead Redemption 2 did for Horses. (or not)
Oh yeah, I also might have overworked the cake a tiny bit:
So, like, everyone knows how to do the donut sprinkle thing, right? It's like the second thing anybody learns how to do in blender, right after making said donut. So you would think that someone would have tried baking the sprinkles onto the surface of the donut before and documented it. In case anyone stumbles on this thread years from now trying to figure out how to do that, this is how you bake the colors from a particle that has been assigned random colors with a ColorRamp node:
I posted the final render as well as some additional stuff on my Artstation: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/X1Ylvw I appreciate any comments or critiques that could help me to improve whatever my next project is, or to be able to do it more efficiently.
Thank you @Pinkfox for making these threads, it is really nice to have a structured thing like this to participate in.
@jgarrison hey, nice result and documentation, congrats on finishing the project 🍻
Wow, didn't realize you rendered the scene in Eevee, did you use light probes for indirect lighting? Would be interesting to see it rendered in ue5 with lumen 🤓
Much success for the next one 💪
@erikoss hey :) Some points on your scene:
I think you could use a directional light to make the scene more readable - like a value difference between horizontal and vertical planes (or do it in the material?). I can't tell if you use walls to close in the scene - if you do, it might read better without, having background blocks contrast against the fog.
With the trees, I would try to have thick shapes, getting thinner towards the end. For the "leaves" I could imagine a emissive material working well?
Some patterns (steps, background blocks) look a bit thick/repetitive.
I understand, if you wanted to follow the concept loosely, just some ideas.
Keep it up! 🚀
@Fabi_G Hi :) Thanks for feedback,I really appreciate that.My main goal was to just finish this piece :D and learn more about lighting in UE5 I will probably improve this scene in the future,I came up with some ideas that I want include in this project, but for now I happy with the results. Now I move to the next Bi-Monthly Challenge project :D
Red | Unreal Engine 5 - YouTube
@erikoss For your next project consider looking into fspy: https://fspy.io/
Basically it lets you match the perspective of a concept art or photograph and then bring it into blender with the art overlayed on top of the camera. This really expedites the blocking out phase, and you can import blender camera position and information into unreal with the rest of the scene.