How to Become a Professional Environment Artist. What programs you need to know!.

hello guys Henry here and I'm here today to try and give you guys a couple of tips to help out because a lot you guys are watching my videos now and my tutorials and I'm quite thankful for that and I just wanted to try and give you a couple of other tips that will help along the line and so it took me a long time to get into the game industry isn't a very noticed and one of the reasons that I recently within the past year figured out is because that my render room was horrible there's two reasons for that one I was using a blender render I wasn't using cycles or anything else and I would mainly just screenshot my images put them into Photoshop and play about of a couple of values so they were quite horrible of it I might actually have an old yeah okay so here you go so this piano you can see how bad the aliasing is on it and the ambient occlusion doesn't really work too well and the reason for that is that I was using screenshots and just Photoshop so it's quite horrible process and you can see the difference between a piano to my latest kayak it seems a different so the specular and the ambient occlusion sticks out more again my trees is such a great tool to use marmoset because you get such great detail is the same as pressing print screen except you press f11 and it comes out better if not better and you can also use glass really realistic as well and it just looks pretty spot-on so what I want to try and tell you guys you know if you guys are looking to get into the industry what you're going to need to do what you're going to need to know and how you need to do things one of my main things which helped me was to change my portfolio of albums and categorize everything that I have and that was when I was approached by Sony to work at guerilla games and they were like well if you put your environments here when your props here and your weapons and every other categorized area we can look at it easier and we can see you know where you're suitable because they were like ok well we want you as a latinized and all of my ret I just use lighting for rendering I don't use light in you know I don't focus on trying to work on light and I just use it to render and they looked at my portfolio and said we we quite like you work we want you to come and work for us as a lighting artist and I was like well you know I don't really do a lot of layton so it's not my finger I want to be an environmentalist so I had to turn them down obviously but what I'm trying to get out here is you know what once I put my portfolio into these categories makes it easier for everyone else to navigate and it also helps them look at what you're best at instead of just having to scroll through everything I've even had to reorganize this so many times because I don't quite like my PBR material renders at the top if you're a material or estimate extras you can have it at the top so yeah one of the the main programs that I use now I hated I didn't want to use it and I hated it I was just like no way in hell it was the same as Unreal Engine when I first got Unreal Engine I was like I absolutely hate this I don't want to use it I hate the user interface it just sucks especially because I had a really crap computer and I had to render everything because it the engine that I use is cry engine because of the fact that has real-time dynamic lighting which helps when you're trying to take screenshots in engine Sunset Beach this one here this is a screenshot from any engine as you can see it was on my old computer so you can see how bad the FPS was it was only 15 FPS that's just a quick screenshot just by playing about of a couple of lighting I didn't have to bake any light in or anything like that same with a dentist's room again across the side here that that was one of my main focuses because of the fact that in my reference image that I had to work from it was quite but I'm getting off-topic anyway though it was just that the CryEngine is therefore weal time rendering for me so that's the engine that I find is best when you're working on a scene instead of I mean you can put everything into marmoset and do it but I find the engine works relatively easy because one you're learning an engine which is always helpful because if you go to a studio and they decide to change engines which believe me does happen a lot you are going to be familiar familiar with the user interface whereas if you were to go to a studio and have any unity experience and they want to use unreal they want to use Unigine or cry engine or snowdrop or any other engine out there you're going to have to relearn that engine so one of the best things that I can suggest before even doing anything else is learn to import your assets into an engine learn to use and navigate the engine learning use the lighting the particles and the textures shaders and everything else within it you don't have to constantly use these aspects but it helps not only for your personal projects but one thing for me is I went into the studio where I'm at at the moment Jim craft as a environment artist and within a couple of weeks because I had so much knowledge on the CryEngine and I could solve problems relatively quickly I was given the opportunity to become a technical artist as well which is good because they're sort of like the go-to guys if anybody has an issue so it saves a lot of you know it helps you learn bit you can see how other people are doing bit you can learn more that way so it always helps to know your engines so this is marmoset toolbag and it's fairly cheap to buy you can buy a seat for 149 which a seat would mean one person using it so if you were running a small company and you wanted several people to use it you get buy four seats which is that for people will be able to use the program simple taneous ly on one ID so this is a really good program in terms of rendering because it's just it this is all it's real time as well I mean you do have to play about with a couple of seconds but in the long run once you learn this it's relatively straightforward to use and so that's the first product so we can close that now the next one is substance painter substance painter I implore you to get if you are doing any type of texture substance painter is the way forward because you can bake your high poly onto your low poly so much quicker and so much easier than you can with blender or 3ds max or Maya or Mudbox or even ZBrush for that matter so that is another good one to go for you can see here just the power of it is a great program to use and the PBR techniques and tactics on it are just top-notch they're the best that I honestly can't say anything bad about substance painter I can show you how quick it is to change things about if we wanted to add a pan onto the kayak it's just a click of a button we can change the UV which will sort of overlap it but not so we will still get the final bake this way we can also change the material so if I go into my small materials and I'm going to choose a fabric you see P so now when I place this in it should replace the whole kayak with a military sort of cover that's just that there looks pretty you know it looks unified it looks good we can then go in and further this more so we can add a mask and we can add a generator into our mask and we can select dirt and it will come up as just a dirty pattern on top and you just play the dirt levels and obviously you wouldn't used this pattern you use something else but you see what I'm getting at another good thing as well as we can add a mask and select the area I'm going to select UV because of the way UV this so if I select this bring this under my cryptic logo you can see how straightforward that was and then we have our plastic under which is the underbelly and this is the East ease of being able to use this program it's such good tools that use and learn you get instantaneous updates on your textures when you're finished you just export your resources choose a folder what type you want you can even select an engine so you have the CryEngine dota2 corona arnold lumberyard it did have Unreal Engine but I don't know where it's gone for some reason but again you can also select which textures you're going to get from it so you can get it you normal opengl which is the one that I recommend you use because the normal does not really a lot your height which you might use depending on what you're really working on if you're using the rocks you're going to be using height and then obviously we have a roughness metallic and base color so metallic would act as sort of a specular I'm assuming and the roughness works as it says it did a roughness so that's didn't have a good program there to use oh I was asked the question recently whether substance painter allows multiple UVs and the short answer is yes so a quick way to show you this would be that ugliness up there ah that's why it's because it's one of my older ones okay so a quick way to show you this would be to select this area here so I'm going to select rope on both sides okay now what I would do is unwrap this it's already unwrapped so I'm going to leave it and I would also unwrap this it's already unwrapped ctrl P to fill up my screen a little bit more if it wants to doesn't have to so with that like this is why you can then do is I would have this one here is the boat and I would name this material it's the wire and then when I were to export into here I would have these texture lists I'll do it now it's going to be ugly because I'll be messing about the topology and it will look ugly so we have or two here we have boat and wire these are two different shades and they will act as individual UVs so if we were to put a metallic texture onto our boat last one and you see the wire is left so we can put a plastic and that will act as a second UV so we can work on multiple UVs and multiple materials at once so the whole process of this adding the rubber and the plastic in the underbelly and the wire you can do that is one texture map or you can do that is several texture maps and if you add several materials you will then start to have different UVs and you will have to place them all together so if you want one final material for the engine it's best to work join everything together and just put one texture on it you can add several textures colorize them bacon color map and then export your color map to substance painter to use if you want to select individual areas but still have one material shader I'll probably go into that later on in a different tutorial because I'm blabbering on a bit now okay so that's substance designer substance painter done and out of the way great tool it will help you tenfold with texturing abilities and it will help you learn the process of baking the high poly onto low so our next one is substance designer and substance designer is the procedural texturing program so substance painter is an object texturing program our ultimen substance designer and i will show you how this one works okay so windows reset layout what I'm going to do is I am just going to in my graph create a new substance and we're just going to call this brick because I always work with a brick I don't know why but it's just one of those things okay so with this open we can use brick generator we can see here our texture you can see here our model and what we will do is add an output right click view outputs you can see it adds it on to the model you guys are probably thinking oh wow that's so great but don't need it unnecessary but just let me show you what else it does so this one I'm going to add and I'm going to change it to a yeah let's go over normal actually and then we will add a normal here this will convert the brick into a normal place that there now you can see a slight normal map on it so we want to add some color so the gradient map we're also going to add in a cloud so where's noise noises now we're going to go for fractal some base now this is a really good program to use because if I open up Google type in brick and you get this image I'm going to drag it onto my other screen but you'll see what I'm doing I'm selecting these colors I don't seem to want too low too quick okay so I've just dragged that onto my other screen and what I'm going to do is go to my gradient editor and pick gradient and I'm just going to left-click and drag across the image all that will do is select colors for me to work with so I can invert positions or invert colors so with that done move it over and we're going to add a blend I want this to be the foreground and we're going to add a mortar to it as well so we're going to add a grunge map another gradient map and this one is going to be the mortar so I'm going to pick color again and then I'm just going to go through the white areas like so just to get this rendered map add that into the background select the mask is an opacity and let's add that to our you can see how straightforward and quick is there's obviously a lot more to it all the things I would also suggest it's always using a grayscale on the side are the levels to that another output change that to a roughness you can see the dirt on top of the brick starting to react to the light more fluid in certain areas and obviously that can be changed just by turning up or down on the roughness I'm not going to go into the whole detail of creating this because it is a lengthy process but I will show you one thing is that we've used this texture this brick generator we can come straight in start to modify this instance have it blurred see we start to get our effect now we can also change the variation of bricks which will change the height if we were using a height also changes the color for you which is relatively beneficial so yeah this is why substance designer is a great program to learn as well just for the fact that you can create procedural stylized materials and it does it creates everything we have our roughness map on your normal map diffuse map we can also create a height map if we want so here's a little height and you can see how it affects so that is why substance designer is a good tool to use and learn and the reason I'm telling you this guys is because all of these programs will help you get into the industry learning them using them will create so much more ease of work for you and your modeling we just come with it one of the things I used to focus on was modeling and I would text as I modeled and I realized that just go nuts on your modeling bring it into substance painter and let it do the work for you so substance painter is substance designer is great one as you can see again to buy it for an indie license is what I would suggest to go for you just pay twenty pound a month twenty dollars a month sorry and obviously it's free for a thousand a year so as long as you create game where you don't get a thousand dollars a year you would then only have to pay twenty a month anything above a thousand a year it's sixty four a month now that is up until you release whatever you're working on if you release a game and this is talking for game designers and developers here if you release a game and are waiting on a substance live I do apologize I'm thinking of these two so they're five ninety which isn't too bad but if you release a game and you work on betas and updates for it this would still apply to you you would still have to pay until you'd finalized then you weren't working anymore betas and it was just in the background that's when you would stop paying the royalty fees so yeah that's substance designer bitmap - material this one you guys love now I use crazy bump at the moment however I'm a bit of a bit of a loss with crazy bump because I actually bought a version of this so it's only something like forty pounds it's not a lot of money but when my Judeo sent me my new computer I lost my license key and I've contacted these guys several times to get my license key back because I can't find the email and they will not even contact me back to say sorry no you're gonna have to buy again so for that reason I've gone over to bitmap 2 material which is another algorithmic program now this is a really really good program because if I open up my downloads I might actually use a leaf just to show you what can do we will use a rock to texture or a bark texture one or the other whichever one pops up first debris okay forget the right one okay so with debris you can change your size here as well so you got higher and lower so you have all your selection of your material Maps here so you have the ambient occlusion the height the normal metallic the roughness and the base color so what we can do is come into our global use a light equalizer this one will affect your base color sort of like a high pass you can also make it tile if it's not seamless you can make it tile save you I'm going to Photoshop and do it and trust me this is tile now you can change the transition position so you can see the blends of it transitioning or not relatively easy which is good you can also change the transition side so you can have it near the back you can have it further in and more debris but this is like a procedural way to be able to create the textures too you can bring them into here and work on them and then export when you're done you can right click and save the material of the diffuse so that's what global and then relief is for the normal map and this really goes to town or removing noise in recognizing shapes a lot easier mid frequencies I would put mid frequencies on and then you have your normal intensity here depending on how intense you wanted it and I will always select OpenGL for my normals you can also play with the relief pinch and what that does is it selects each individual object in the scene and adds a radius around it so it stands out more a good way to be able to show you this is the height you can see where it's just selected each of the rocks and just painted them white so they can work then you have obviously have all your other materials here you just have a grunge map which is pretty good to be honest I've not really used it too much but just lightens and darkens there is and IDEs desaturate colors and just goes nuts basically and if I go into my 3d view I just want to turn the height on materials shader tessellation you can see you know how the rocks stand out you turn the base color off slightly you can see it just it works so nice so that is another great program to use this the reasons why it just makes things 10 times easier then you can use in doing D do but it's a lengthy process and not one I recommend wasting time on when you can do this so again here's the tiling I was telling you about once you've made it seamless you can tile it this is good for like props if you were to do is skip you could add the debris into it and you have the material here for it so it's beneficial so that is bitmap 2 material and it is another one I recommend you get the next one I recommend that you do learn is welt machine and the reason why is because if you have a look at battlefield fours height maps you have look at the world around them all of these terrains are created with worlds machine it's such a good program they use such a good program to learn this mountains I created with world machine is really good hard to learn but once you do learn it you can get some really really good features out of it so this is how the startup look and I'll change my product project parameters to 1k resolution so you can see you've got your tariffs I would take out and I would add in a natural erosion you can see how the erosion has a better effect than the terrace which is what most companies are doing at the moment is taking advantage of this erosion and the realism you get out of it it's just beautiful so this is another procedural program where you can procedurally generate terrain and it works in two ways you can generate entire continents or you can generate just small areas now the reason why generate in the continents would be really good is because if you think about it a lot of the sci-fi games that the world is looking insane at the moment all we all we have to do is generate a continent go into our world editor it would help if we change the elevation it's got mountains for now select that and one of the thing that I'm going to do fairly quickly is I'm going to add in a macro just you can see where the contents would be so I'm going to add in coastal overlay look the preview and then you see here we can create entire continents set current scale it up we can also push a pin so that anything on the boundbox would it be rendered so when we were to finalize this we would have huge continents you can also just literally draw some stuff on a pen and paper put it in here as a height map and it will generate areas of words of work you can see how the continents works so there's a great program to learn use and it would help you next one is CryEngine now cryogen has just released cranium v which is exactly the same as unreal apart from the fact that it has the dynamic time of day everything else is now near enough the same is unreal which is another great product to learn so these are the last two that i implore you to learn because these engines are the main used engines what's focused on the most and this will help you get into the industry so hopefully this sort of little talk has helped you to understand what programs do how they work and why they would benefit you so if you have any questions leave some in the comments below anything else you want to find out from me leave questions or message me subscribe for more and thank you for your time check out my portfolio if you want to know and if it and I also do one-on-one tutorials tutoring so yeah thank you goodbye

Channel: Henry Kelly

Views: 48,021

Keywords: game, design, artist, environment, designer, programs, engines, studio, industry

Id: -uL2ak20CEQ

Length: 32min 9sec (1929 seconds)

Published: Thu May 05 2016