Building Stylized 3D Environments in Unreal Engine

if you want to learn how to make ghibli style textures in substance painter the latest course from the 3d coloring book was made for you i'll leave a link in the description if you want to consider getting the course now let's get into this week's video [Music] hey hey hey everyone today i want to talk to you about my environment uh the garden which is on the screen right now i it is gonna be a breakdown tutorial of this environment piece i'm going to talk about stylization and just a broad range of topics of how i created this and what i think was successful and all that so let's just get right into it the five core things that i want to talk to you guys today about is first concept and ref composition lighting my approach to stylization and modeling and texturing i will go over all of these topics kind of briefly but i'll cover a lot of bases really fast so for concept and reference i want to start off with first off gathering a lot of ref before you start a project is very important for me it helps me flesh out an idea and kind of i take away a lot of things from the reference that i've gathered for example this i found this building when i was looking for reference and this is the one that's stuck and i try to make this building and also stop make it stylize and make it work with my environment as you can see here for the final shot you see the building that i captured in my ref so yeah that's pretty much it in terms of reference gathering for concept art it's really it's really beneficial to kind of actually make like thumbnail pieces and trying to render out a full concept piece but i personally didn't do this for a listen do that for this environment instead i just took a completely different approach something i don't really don't didn't really know if it was gonna work out or not but it actually ended up in my favor instead of concepting on photoshop or whatever digital uh digital concept thing software i decided to concept in unreal itself i blocked out the scenes and it's not such a crazy idea honestly but it's i don't think it's usually done often and for my scene i knew i wanted the building that that you see in each shot i wanted that to be the focal point so all my scenes kind of has that as the focal point and they're all kind of different concepts so i have pretty much one two three four five all right that's the same one five six seven seven so i have seven uh thumbnail sketches if you'd say and they're all made in unreal blocked out and i'm just trying to get the ideas flowing and this process is actually kind of uh a stepping stone for if you want to then take this the like whichever whichever block out that you liked and just going into photoshop and actually painting over uh the picture i think that's also a very good process but i was kind of just concepting as i went on with the project so instead i just picked the one i chose or picked the one i liked the most which was this one right here and i decided to just go with that one and so let's see we have we have this this is how it started out pretty much um in terms of the concept i wanted to make sure that i got the color palette from the start i went to coolers um which is kind of cool all right anyway um i went to coolers and uh i kind of just picked out my color palette i think i used one of these reference images that i've gathered i think it was this one and i put it into a color picking machine and came out i just started randomizing until i found the the right choice for me and so i think it's very beneficial if you actually nail that at the beginning so that you're not worried about it later on instead of having like for at least for this for stylized specifically i think it might be actually beneficial to plan out your colors uh because stylized scenes often rely on colors in a way having the colors pop and have like some vividness to them is actually really good so i click off there it is um so yeah so for for at least for the beginning i planted out my colors i just color picked off the the this color palette that i had and um made everything what i thought that like i mapped the colors to what i thought would be good so that's as far as it goes in terms of the concept i really didn't have any story to this until later the story kind of developed as i went and uh the concept also developed as i went so there is not like a lot of pre-planning or pre-production um in terms of that for this specific project i want to talk to you about the composition now because the composition is probably one of the most important parts of this piece or at least one of my focuses and i want to show you guys some cool things that i did to kind of help me change the composition and get it to where i wanted so usually i would take the my whatever progress pic i had of the environment and i would kind of bring it into photoshop and now i personally really like this beginning composition uh from the get-go because well one this leading line here is very nice for it's it's not only dynamic because it curves but it's nice because it leads you right to the focal point but also because there is a clear very clear separation of mid-ground or sorry foreground which is this uh mid-ground this thing here and then the everything else is the background background everything around this this piece here is the background so all that and uh i think that's really important for any composition is to have a clear distinction between those [Music] where you could even see it in like a thumbnail view you could see that it holds up really well you could you could really tell what everything is even this far away and that's a that's a key ingredient to having a nice spicy composition um so basically i took this into to every time i i had a new update on my piece what i would do is i would take it into photoshop and i would use the black and white which is in adjustments and then i would use posturize which is also an adjustment and this always helped me to kind of see where my levels were in terms of my black and white values and this is this is important to an extent i think it's it's kind of important for a you could see how your composition lines up when it's just two values having two values is really impo like seeing it in two values is really important because that's how most people start their thumbnails when they're concept darting um you wanna be able to have very clear distinction of shapes just in black and white and right here you can see that this piece has very like very successful areas where that's happening like the building is silhouetted in a very nice way because the light the light side and the dark side are just balancing very well together not only that though but there's a there is a nice triangle that's happening here which is really good with all the negative space it's really good um because it's kind of grounding the image uh it's like an arrow pointing down which even though the the focal point is here not here it kind of just encapsulates the focal point and that's really i think that that part that was not intended for me at the beginning but once i i saw it in this view and i've i found that it was there i just tried my hardest to keep it there and to like almost enhance it in a way i added some of this stuff here which kind of helped it a lot so yeah basically you want to go in with all your compositions and try this because it's super helpful it it really is it'll help you see the values and uh there's not only this secondary there's also you also go to the number three which is also really helpful kind of get an idea of how it looks with the grays once you add some grays in there and you can see these cool really cool shapes forming uh once you once you do that and if you if you just see the shapes i think it's very helpful for anyone shapes are really important in any like art piece uh it's one of the main fundamentals basically so yeah so that's something i did a lot and apart from that i would also go to the filter gallery um and used the cut out option and that is this is also something that helped me a lot like i would use this constantly just to see all my values in a very simplified way this helped me a lot because i think you know you get to see where all your values are it's really important to know what colors are in your scene and if they're harmonizing color harmony is very important uh especially in environments so right here i mean i think that this this is all working very well because of it like you could see you can see there's a clear definition of the foreground then there's like this weird gray mid-ground and then everything else is just a nice colorful haven and it's really good because i think like usually the rule uh is to desaturate the foreground so that the the background pops or at least wherever your focal point is you want your focal point to pop so in my case i really wanted to desaturate all of this so that the the building was the the thing that your eye was drawn to the most so yeah that this was really important in my process just going into filter gallery basically just me going back and forth between photoshop and unreal and trying to figure out what it needs and how how it's looking um you could also do this and see it in a gray and white black and white so you could see how your mid tones are doing and then you could use your the histogram to kind of gauge what it looks like or like how your levels are doing there seems to be like some spike here but yeah so that's pretty much in terms of uh composition and how i approach that this is this is pretty much it i made sure to just uh have a focal point made sure to that the foreground middle ground and background were all uh reading very well and just everything else is extra detail and um yeah that's pretty much it for the composition um so we've gone over two of these pretty quickly too um so yeah let's talk about lighting my favorite so this piece is heavily lit and it it's i think it's one of the the most um successful parts about this piece i think the lighting is um really good let's see so there are four things to keep in mind when lighting a environment or a ue4 scene so you want to focus on directional light you want to make sure that's that's uh really good and it's pointed at your focal point um you want your skylight to also have like make sure the values are good on that usually with uh let me go into lighting mode usually i like to um specifically for stylized pieces i like to uh make sure that it's colored like the lighting is colored um for here i took like a teal value but you know that could be anything could be like a purpley it could be more purple more green it all just depends on what kind of mood you're trying to achieve or convey so yeah so for this scene i went with the skylight uh 0.4 and as long as you're balancing that and your directional light you should have no problem these two are probably the most important to get correct at the beginning uh once you have these two like knocked out you could start working with stuff like post process and i'd say my biggest tips for post process um is to well make sure the exposure is at one obviously i kind of put it at 0.9 here and i think i did that for a specific reason because i was feeling it more but you know my biggest thing is to work with the contrast i think contrast plays a big role in stylized pieces and i think the more contrast with stylize the better because you want to have like a crisp clean kind of feeling to your environment with stylize and i think i'm kind of getting that in this like all my values are pretty much from black to white and everything in between now i'm not saying that there's complete black and whites because that's not ever good to have like this is like if i color pick this this would be like a a mid gray even my highest like point highlight here is probably not white like completely white and it's good to to stray away from having anything be in the darkest dark or the widest like the lightest light so yeah so in terms of that that's pretty much it i'd say mess around with everything in post-process to see how you feel about it because post-process is a very powerful tool um but never overdo it it could get really messy really fast if you just start tweaking everything and then you go back to directional and skylight and you start messing with that you know you want to have like a back and forth with these three tools and then the last one i'd like to talk about is exponential high fog now this this this will save your environment if it looks bad it'll make it look good instantly so this is how my environment looks without exponential high fog it's totally different everything's darker everything's a little bit more grungy and weird just doesn't look right but with exponential high fog it just it's perfect like messing with volumetric fog and the fog density and everything those are the key ingredients here you also want to make sure that your fog is colored uh for whatever specific mood you have for this piece i went with a yellow for the volumetric and a blue for the height fog the difference here is that volumetric kind of encompasses the entire scene and fills it with like a fog surrounding it but the the exponential high fog kind of is in the background and more like if i move this you can see it it's more in the background um and it encompasses like the sky and stuff usually so yeah so those those two you want to mess with a lot so basically yeah those four things directional light skylight exponential high fog and post process those three those four things are your main key ingredients for lighting a scene in unreal and just messing with all the values and trying to find what works for you um you can see here that i went through a lot of lighting passes and it's just it's just basically ideation at at that point you're trying to get the best lighting so you're going back and forth you change the lighting one day and you you say you like it right but then the next day you put in some models and you're like oh this lighting isn't that good anymore so i'm gonna change it again and you just keep going like that until you have something that's really good and you see the lighting changes drastically um the mood changes every time and that's just because i keep changing the lighting to see uh what's the best for me and i think when you're making a unreal environment especially when it's more conceptual like this where i'm not really following a specific uh concept piece uh environment art piece i'm i'm just i'm literally just concepting as i go so it's it's a little bit more just uh explorative i'd say um so yeah that's uh for lighting those are the main four and then there's one more thing with lighting that i want to talk about is basically when to put in point lights and spotlights for this environment i wanted to make sure that i i used the spotlights and the point lights to enhance whatever lighting i already have or had with the directional and the skylight so basically right here where the light is hitting the hardest my directional light i put like two spot two uh point lights just so that it gives it more of a realistic feel because the there's like a gradation that's going across uh the like hottest point where the sun is hitting so yeah you see that gradient from from this really highlight to all the way down and then there's also something i did here with the blue where it's kind of a little bit like unrealistic but it really works for this environment because it's stylized where i'm adding like a blue light here as rim lighting to give that kind of like to carve out the shape of the building and i think it really works i i think without it it kind of feels a little flatter and more boring and yeah so basically you want to look for opportunities like that and pretty much you know i have a spotlight here to highlight the character a little bit and the grass so that my grass kind of gets lit up a little bit and create like more opportunities for highlights and like avoid like distinguish the shadow shapes from the highlights so yeah that's pretty much uh as far as lighting goes i think those are the the main main ingredients to getting nice lighting um so yeah let's see how we're doing on time here ooh okay we're on 19 minutes we're doing pretty good so let's see so we've knocked out three things um which is really nice i hope that by now you guys have at least gotten some new information that you guys could use uh okay so my approach to stylization i want to keep this really simple really sweet and really easy to understand basically how i see stylized is the enhancement of shapes the enhancement of colors and the enhancement of anything that's out of the ordinary so when you're building a stylized environment or stylized piece like a prop anything character you want to look for points where you can exaggerate whether that be architecturally whether that be with the lighting whether that we with the colors how vivid they are how saturated they are how bright they are um stuff like that try to try to have purpose to your exaggerations when you're uh creating a stylized scene like for example for this scene i added a lot of bloom because i think sometimes stylized pieces can can benefit from having like this otherworldly type of like bloom to them so and that really works for this if i was making a more realistic piece i probably wouldn't add as much bloom or bloom at all so yeah you want to look for opportunities like that and that's how i approach all stylization the biggest thing with stylization that a lot of people miss and i think a lot of people don't understand is that they they make something and let's say it's like an error they just say it's stylized they they it and that's not really stylization it it should have purpose at the end of the day and it should also very important look natural it should really look natural it shouldn't just be like a blunder and you say hey that's stylized because you know it looks a little bit off from my reference image no it should be purposeful so yeah that's pretty much how i see stylize i like you can tell like i i the lighting is very stylized you could tell this fern obviously it was purposeful for me to make the cards and curve them in this way it wasn't just like a blunder that i some stumbled upon so um yeah that's pretty simple i think to understand and oh oh one one thing another thing that is very important with stylize i think the the best way to approach at least shape design and um and detailing is make sure that you're focusing on your big shapes and your medium shapes small shapes can still be incorporated like for this specific i have these really small textural details like uh the trim and the brick texture but it's not really you don't really need it to sell the piece overall holistically it's kind of more if you want to add a specific flair i don't think it's needed i think it's more about getting just the overall large and medium shapes and making sure those look good if your large and medium shapes look good in stylized pieces then your stylized piece will probably look good as well and um don't quote me on that actually you might still have problems but yeah so basically that's that's that so uh um yeah so i guess that's yeah that's my approach to stylization uh and let's see what is our final thing here modeling and texturing okay so for modeling and texturing i went with a pretty regular approach i pretty much just had this maya file and brought usually brought i brought in my my block outs from unreal into here usually uh if i wanted to replace something that i didn't think was successful in the blockout i would i would uh sorry one second i would make it in maya but uh most of the stuff i just brought in as a blockout and so like for this i i use this as size ref because that's i need to see like because everything was blocked out in a reel and not in maya which is also a method i kind of had to bring it in here for size reference and make the actual model over this piece because this piece is pretty broken and yeah that's pretty much how i approached that uh most of the things most of the models i made uh except for all the foliage were sculpted in zbrush so you see here i have my one of my tree pieces i also have the other big tree um here with with like how i made it and again this is all like you see i didn't really carve into this with smaller detail because it's in the background and i didn't really plan on you seeing any of the details so it was it would have been pointless of me to spend like three years carving like doing the same thing treatment i did to this one instead i just decided to leave it kind of blank and you know that works because you're just seeing the silhouette and all the shapes and my focus was more on that and you could see like there's some really cool twisting vines here that create a lot of cool silhouettes and that's mainly the point with stylize is just try to get those nice like crisp silhouettes so yeah we so yeah so after i took it into zbrush i would take it into sorry i have so many different trees but uh i don't i'm not very organized with like the uh my files so so yeah so i have um i have this tree here and this is this one right here my camera's fast this one right here and yeah pretty much uh how the approach to texturing is well one i have a very good crutch and you guys could probably find this um on gum road or just going to his channel this is a 3dx stylized material and i use this sometimes to kind of get a base for my stylized textures or style yeah stylized textures and then everything else i just do over it so kind of just add on to this i i treat it almost like a painting on photoshop whenever you're painting you know you're working with layers so you're trying to play around with opacity brush strokes all that and that's kind of how i got this uh final final product here again you could see that the fundamental that i talked about earlier about only focusing on medium and small is applying here like these large tree bark sections uh where the bark is kind of like splitting they're really big they're like big shapes there's no there's not really any small like um like chipped tree bark it's just really from a distance it should read but when up close it it doesn't really have to read um especially if your environment is not a close-up shot of any kind like here you see the trees from so far away that it doesn't even it's again it's the same thing as this you obviously you still see them so i have to make them pretty good regardless but not not to the extent of a realistic piece so yeah that's kind of how i approach modeling for all the all modeling and texturing for all the the pieces in this um i focused on color a lot and trying to make sure the color in the final was the same as the color from the beginning and you could see that it actually is pretty similar uh oh not to this one more to this one it's pretty similar um especially when get when i put the blue here you could you could see it pretty much stayed the same way like we have the yellow building still yellow the green tree is still green the green foliage for the ground here obviously i added a little bit more coloring and that's good because it actually breaks up some of these large shapes that i had at the beginning um but yeah uh you're it's just basically as long as you have a good base your the rest is just filling in the blanks you know it's like when you have like a good line art everything else is just filling in the blank you're just coloring and trying to stay inside the lines and that's pretty much how i approach this this piece as a whole um what else what else have i not mentioned oh yeah okay so i want to talk about foliage and then i'm going to talk about the clouds because they're really important and then um i'll wrap it up because we're we're probably hitting close to home here yep yep so okay so let's make this quick so for foliage i did not sculpt it um instead i just decided to make sure that the base color was good on all of them and it actually worked out pretty well i mean it's i would say to sculpt it if you have the time and if if you think it will look better in your piece because sculpted foliage always looks better than just like foliage that doesn't have any detail but again for this piece everything is kind of simple so i kind of ran with that the entire way and just let the base color speak for the entire piece um with this foliage specifically i'd use a color tree variation to kind of get different colors and and all and right here you can see i i just took this into substance painter and added a bunch of grunge noises to break up the the greenness of it all kind of give it like a yellow green you know gradation uh of sorts so yeah that's uh that's what i did with the foliage and finally a big big trick that helped out this entire thing um that honestly without it it probably wouldn't be as successful of a piece all these planes all of them and you can see them better when it's back here they're just they're just cloud alphas with depth fade and this really is like the making point for my environment and it really just tied everything together because without it let me show you real quick without it boom it kind of loses a lot you know it loses the uh the painterness painterlyness of it all it and the it had like this cool opacity to it but with it it's just it's just night and day honestly the difference is night and day um so using these these cloud mask alpha cards really saved my life and uh if you want like a full full full full um description of it basically what i did is first i had these clouds uh very very cute uh very quick cloud meshes that i made on zbrush um they're nothing too fancy uh but they add like this highlight definition that you really need for clouds and i then went to maya and used the vfx fluid sims a 2d container and messed around with the settings here uh the different the density and the velocity and the turbulence etc to kind of get like a a cloud shape and this is this is really honestly this is really cool for making clouds i know there's so many ways to make clouds but i really enjoyed this process um and it was kind of new to me uh to do it this way and yeah i would just basically let this simulate and then grab this and make it a cloud alpha by taking it to photoshop and adjusting some of the values and then i would just toss it into here onto my material again like i said with the with a depth fade it's really a simple material honestly it's it's just here let me show you quickly it's uh show you guys all right so yeah it's basically just a tint uh basically a three color with a multiply and then the alpha card then another multiply and some depth fade and then two parameters one for opacity and one for depth fade on the opacity mask and yeah that's all you need really and it's a really really extremely helpful for for just adding some fog in your scene fog is really important it's atmospheric you want to have atmosphere atmosphere is like one of the most important things in an environment and it's it's really good to focus in on that sometimes especially because you could have a lot of control over the color and over the values of your scene like like i said if i take all of these away again let me let me show you guys again it's honestly like night and day it really just look at how dark this is this becomes look at how in your face this this building in the back becomes it just all becomes too too contrasty and it's not it just doesn't work as well so yeah um yeah that's a really big big part of this piece and without it uh it wouldn't have been successful and so i think i've gone over everything i've wanted to go over thank you guys for watching this tutorial breakdown i hope you guys were able to learn something and thank you stylized station for uh allowing me to make this for you and uh just uh encouraging this thank you to all the fans and i hope you guys learned something peace out i love you all bye bye [Music] you

Channel: Stylized Station

Views: 75,037

Keywords: unreal engine 4 environment tutorial, making a zelda environment in unreal engine 4, 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

Id: OInMVJ7fY64

Length: 35min 28sec (2128 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 04 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/decypherme]

Holy crap that’s amazing! Thanks for sharing it

[u/ChrisP413]

The idea of blocking out in Unreal is a good idea. Guess I am using that for my next drawing.

[u/oasisisthewin]

The cloud generator thing is something I’ve been looking for forever