Beginner's Guide to Stylized 3D Environments in UE4 - Full Workflow Breakdown

[Music] welcome back to stylize station a platform dedicated to teaching beginners how to create game art if you're a beginner or intermediate artist looking to learn how to create stylized 3d environments you've come to the right place today we are going to learn how to create a stylized environment in unreal engine we will cover concepting stylized modeling techniques creating stylized grass foliage in unreal engine and some stylized texturing speaking of texturing if you want to learn how to master stylized texturing using substance painter feel free to join our latest course where you'll learn how to create beautiful stylized textures from scratch including anime and studio ghibli style textures i'll leave a link in the description if you want to consider getting the course now let's get into the video [Music] hi guys my name is mauricio marcantoni and i'm a lead finishing artist in rainbow cgi in italy i currently work on a various tv series such as disney puppy dog pals and 44 cats today i want to share some of my knowledge through the breakdown of one of my latest project called dreamy house first of all i would like to thank you sarah station give me this great opportunity and then this video will talk about my creative process that can help you understand my workflow and the mindset that i always use to achieve a new project successfully i'm going to divide the video in different sections so you can reach the part that you need more easily don't forget also to follow me on my art station page so when i start a new project the first thing i think about is whether i like the subject or the chosen reference procrastinating in our industry is something that happens often and if you don't find anything interesting in what you do it's very easy to drop the project itself right after starting it so when you are trying to start a new challenge it is important that the subject you choose is interesting and that it gives you the right thrust to finish it as you know in our work it is important to always be up to date with the latest software or the latest workflow reason could help us through the production of a new project to learn new programs and new skills in this case i took the advantage to learn how to use the unreal engine 4. i have always used a non-real-time rendering like v-ray but with this project helped me to develop new techniques different from the usual one one topic that always interested me was the the environments an m that is able to immerse you totally in the scene and i felt that maybe i can achieve this effect more directly through a small animation rather than a single static image so i decided to implement this new workflow so i started blocking out the first shapes on maya blocking is really one of the most important thing to start with usually starting to model all the details right away leads you nowhere start from blocking to get a precise idea of the proportion and volume of the scene sometimes for my m i use a dummy for proportion every time you can download it everywhere i like to work with the the active wireframe to always keep an eye on the number of the polygon a very important piece of advice i would like to give you concern the randomness of the mesh and the variety above all in a more advanced state of work it will be more important to give the feeling of randomness in order not to make the environment too flat for an environment artist it is essential to give randomness and variety to everything around us because nothing in the world is perfect geometrically speaking another piece of advice i would like to give you is the importance of being precise and clean and modeling working over the years i realized the importance of giving the right namespace to each file before modeling it this will allow me not to find myself with a lot of files to rename not a lot of assets the same thing is for the uv for example i have uh i got a lot of tiles to the model so first i model one tile do the uvs and then duplicate it so after i need only to lay out the evs without wasting a lot of time a tool that i often use during the modeling phase is the lattice and the end of the scene to give that cartoony sense always to break the randomness and variety that will have made it seems too monotonous so i combine all the elements of the of the model all together and i apply a lattice to deform the entire modeling uh the entire model a little bit once the geometry is blocked out i can start defining the main details of the elements i try to leave as few sharp angles as possible in low poly modeling this will then allow me to have more base control with the eye poly in stylized modeling curves shapes are very often used to give more sense of smoothness to the scene so that the result will be more harmonic the shapes are almost never defined as for example in a hard surface modeling so we tend to use very often tools that deform geometry such as lattice that i mentioned before also the bend tool is very important which you can always find under the deform tab in maria it is a very useful tool to the cause but very simple tool but very useful as for the modeling of the tiles i prefer to take more time and model them one by one and of course duplicate some in order to then modify them one by one to create the variety i was talking about before in the scene so at the end of this stage i usually took different section of the model it in z brush and add some detail for example carve wood planks or add some cracks for stones and something like that so for this project i decided to add details directly on the texture and i decided only to do rocks on zbrush so i put the model in maya and then i exported in fbx so for texturing my model i use substance painter very important in this stage is to use the asus slot color you can find it on art station if you search it so this loot allows to have the same result in viewport from substance painter to unreal many of you will have happened to texturize and assets on substance export the textures and once loaded on unreal they all seems washed out thanks to this color loot you will be able to solve the problem because what you see on substance painter will be the same result on the unreal for viewport so mostly i use the same method for every mesh in the house just making all these small changes depending on the element be it wood or metal or fabric or any other material pay attention to never forget to bake the model before you start to texture the assets so i stay pretty basic with texturing i create a fill layer as my base color i remove the normal and i'd information i just set the roughness the roughness value depends on the type of assets that we are texturing and select the color after that i duplicate the layer to include some edges on my model add a white mask to each layer and then click on the generator to apply the mask editor just remember to use a darker color than the base in the section i'm going to tweak some of the mask editor setting such the global contrast it's going to set something like 0.22 the curvature set it around 1 then on the mask editor apply a sharpen filter and then increase its value after the levels and inverted once you invert it you can some you can see some lighter edges on the model so after that you can add different uh type of uh workflow so the goal is always to build up the the texture step by step like the modeling phase never overdo it just trying to play also with the blending mode of the mask editor to give better results i think that the mascara in substance painter is one of the most powerful tools substance so after i made the texture for the part of my house i exported texture with the unreal fur packed template and let's jump on a reel so first of all it's important to decide the position of the model and its location it is also important to choose the length uh and the position of the camera so i looked at the concept that i choose and i i choose the the position of of the camera as animation teachers never care of the element that you don't see so this save time and geometry so i place the house in a certain way where you can't see the the back part of the model where that there's no foliage and landscape i usually use two types of workflow the first one is to use a texture of a grass with the alpha channel you can find it on google if you looking for it and you can also create it or paint it paint it would be better because you have the more stylized [Music] effect on it so you can if you don't have you can create it on uh on photoshop just using the magic one and then apply the texture on the material in a reel and then use a mask on it for the modeling side i use really simple planes with some geometry because otherwise you're going to have problem with the simple grass node in unreal and because more geometry is better for the movement for the grass wind movement the second one is to model different types of foliage in maya very low poly just to create a little different templates and then use the linear gradients to texture it for example you can use the linear gradient with the minus x node just to invert the mask and control better the foliage movement because under roots the movement has to be very limited differently from the tip of the foliage in this case i use a mixture of these two workflow especially on the outside of unreal i purchased on a real lovely demo project that i like to study they like of course to study the node network and after that i make some tweaks to make it useful to my needs you can also find a lot of incredible grass tutorial on satellite station playlist on youtube so just be creative and get inspired by it so the final stage concerned the camera movement i didn't want to make a fast camera movement so this way the viewer would have time to enjoy every detail of the scene so i had a little camera movement just to feel the air that i was talking about as a final step i rendered the whole project on unreal via the movie render queue the setting i exported project was in axr then i added the anti-aliasing with values of 16. and that's all so i hope you enjoyed the video if you have any question do not hesitate to contact me on social media and or or on our station so bye [Music] you

Channel: Stylized Station

Views: 55,944

Keywords: unreal engine 4 environment tutorial, unreal engine 4 environment art, creating an environment in unreal engine 4, how to build environment in unreal engine 4, blender environment to unreal engine 4, unreal engine 4 environment course, unreal engine 4 environment course vol. 1 - the bigger picture, create environment in unreal engine 4, creating environments in unreal engine 4, 3d environment unreal engine 4, stylized texturing, stylized texturing in substance painter

Id: RC50l8KWkKo

Length: 15min 23sec (923 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 25 2021