Goddess Temple in UE4: Iterating on an idea

JAKOB: Hi there. My name is Jakob, and I'm an Environment Artist for Quixel at Epic Games. This is the first video of small, three-part tutorial series in which we'll be looking at how I created this Roman-inspired fantasy environment. In this video, we'll be looking at using both Unreal Engine 4 and the Megascans library as a concept art toolbox, as well as the risky, yet satisfying and quite freeing method of winging it, and the topic of artistic adaptation, and why it is so incredibly important to not get stuck on one single idea. One quick note, the entire project is available on the Unreal Engine Marketplace for you to download and jump into. So without further ado, let's jump in. Something that I do on almost a daily basis is jump into Bridge and browse through the Megascans library. Inspiration in these days is not hard to come by. But I found that just looking through the assets actually oftentimes gave me an open idea for an environment, and it's the same for this environment. I was just looking through Roman assets when I stumbled across our head scans, and one in particular stood out to me. I was thinking about upscaling it and turning it into a massive carved rock face. From there, really, my creative wheels just wouldn't stop spinning. To visualize what I had in mind and what I wanted to build, I created a rough sketch using basic composition to try and get all the focus on the modified heads. Now, when it comes to concept art, I am not well versed. And I'm not an illustrator, so it takes me a lot of time and effort, and that is not ideal for concept art. You want to be able to create quick iterations on an idea. So what I opted for was to visualize the basic idea to communicate it to my leads and, really, just myself. Once I was happy with my illustration and what it was communicating, I decided to hop into Unreal Engine and grab a few Megascans assets to start blocking out the scene and start further developing the concept piece. Using actual 3D scans has the great advantage, in this case, of giving me an idea of how well detail reads-- how will the entire scene read. Is it doable? Do I need a lot of custom assets? How can I fill the space? And especially working in Unreal Engine in real time in 3D, it gives you a lot of opportunity to explore 3D space. Now, you can see that my scene setup is actually very basic. I try to keep it as minimalistic as possible so I can actually go in and alter things quickly-- try to iterate, try to make my idea on canvas be cohesive in 3D space. And this is what I ended up with. The first iterations looked like my illustration, and it looked kind of cool. But it wasn't as striking as I thought it would be. I had a lot of empty space in the middle, so this is where I started to iterate on my idea. And this is where using Unreal Engine and the Megascans ecosystem as a creative toolbox is so incredibly liberating. See, I was able to just grab a few assets from the Megascans library and play around. Maybe it would look cool if I had a hallway filled with old statues. And while I liked the idea of it, I knew that I needed to go back to the drawing board, try to over-paint a few areas, experiment with rough ideas, and just overall composition. And then it was back to blockout-- just use basic cubes, cylinders, scale them around, move them around. And the goal of that is just really to use Unreal Engine as your concepting tool-- block out shapes, block out compositions, see what looks good in camera. So here you can see me actually redressing the entire natural bridge that connects this ancient goddess temple with our cave mouth or tomb exit. And with this, I was able to quickly overhaul my basic idea. Overhauling an idea is a huge point. This is the artistic adaptation that I was mentioning. Because, you see, I was very married to keeping the lighting this searing orange desert sun color. But it was too monochromatic. I wasn't able to achieve color contrast. And it took me well into the end of the project to muster up the courage to completely shuffle my idea around and apply a different lighting scheme. Not being married to an idea culminates in you being able to take one single image that you created at the beginning and extrapolate an entire environment out of it. I created different camera shots simply by looking around my environment, finding interesting shots based on what I built, trying to meet my first idea. And this actually has the great side effect of you needing to properly set dress these new, more confined areas of your environment. Breaking down your scene from a macro level, this large-scale idea, to more of a micro-scale approach of more intimate scenes and new angles, you will suddenly be able to base most of your set dressing decisions on real-world reference, gradually fixing incoherences and actually populating your 3D environment. Now, last but not least, you should always think about moving pixels in these static environments. In this case, I used the opportunity to throw in birds in the background, have moving fog, and smoke, and embers flying through the sky, just to add that little bit of extra liveliness. Now, thank you all so much for sticking around. I hope you all enjoyed it. Make sure to tune into my next video where I will dive into remixing assets for this environment. And if you have any thoughts or questions, feel free to add them to the comments of this video. And I can't wait to see you in the next one.

Channel: Quixel

Views: 107,976

Keywords: Quixel, Mixer, Free, Megascans, PBR, Texture, Textures, Texturing, Stylized, Stylised, Materials, 3D, Sculpt, create, 3D art, ArchViz, Games, VFX, Decal, Quick, Fun, Time saving, Speed, Scans, Scan, Photogrammetry, Tutorial, Minutes, Beginner, Guide, Procedural, New, UE4, Unreal engine, games, cinematic, Xbox One, hard surface, modeling, hard-surface, hs, model, modeling 3d, polycount, artstation, quixel megascans, epic games, epic, roman, fantasy

Id: 6PVAa-BjBOY

Length: 6min 58sec (418 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 29 2020