How to Create Stylized 3D Environments for Games

this tutorial is sponsored by the 3d coloring book a project specifically designed to help empower artists who are struggling with texturing a substance painter and to help show you that anyone can create beautiful pieces of art with just a little bit of practice and guidance to instantly gain access to hundreds of pre-made professional level models and hours of high quality tutorials click the link in the description and begin your journey today [Music] hey everyone today i'm going to be going over how to create a stylized look and feel for a 3d environment i'll be using my scene fish hunter to explain my techniques and what i've learned on this journey the original concept is by a very talented artist named elena ilicheva she's got so many cute stylized concepts please go check her out so for my scene it was modeled in maya it was textured using mainly substance designer which i'll be going quite a bit into the bits and pieces were textured using photoshop and substance painter there was some light sculpting done in zbrush and then finally it was rendered out in unreal engine i've always been really drawn to stylized art i love the exaggeration of forms and the fun colors that are normally used so when my friend sent me this original concept i was immediately hooked on the bubbly feel and i knew that i had to bring it to life in 3d so let's see how i did that so in this video we're going to be talking about four main areas that i feel are really important in creating a stylized look and feel for a 3d environment those four areas that we're going to focus on are going to be substance designer and how i created stylized shapes and forms within it how i created and implemented some of the fx and motion in my scene and how that really helped drive the mood how to create and push your stylized forms within maya and how much that really helps bring your scene to life and then the magic and wonder of a post-process volume and how much heavy lifting that can actually do for you in a scene so let's dive in so here we are inside of maya throughout all this i'll be adding in bits about my creative process and how i went from this block in to this fully finished model but for right now we're just going to be talking about shapes making things chunky making things irregular making things crooked and uneven and how that really pushes a stylized feel makes a place look lived in makes it look believable and just the difference it makes with your modeling so here i've isolated my dock and i'm going to show you the difference between a model that is just good enough and a model that actually has style and character modeled into it so here is my doc from my scene and let's just model a doc super quick so we're looking at that and that looks like a dock right for all intents and purposes that gets the point across you know you could say i'm done there but to actually make a doc look stylized and like it has character you have to do a little bit more work than that and so the things that i did differences here are you can see are all these pieces have like a slight bevel to them we've warped the geo in different ways we've added cuts to some of the planks so let's just go in and do that and see how much difference that makes so if you want to grab the posts nope just grabbing these and adding tapers it's really important to break the silhouettes on objects that's something that we can do that adds a lot of artistic feel to a piece without really sacrificing poly count so instead of going really hard on modeling details you know on the inside of things you can just grab verts and push and pull things and break the silhouette to add detail but you otherwise wouldn't have it so here we're just gonna grab all the edges a little bevel and already look at the difference between that plank and that plank it's just smoother it's rounder it's nicer to look at and then we can just you know grab the verts we can rotate the planks [Music] around different sizes we can i mean normally you would bevel this guy and then you would duplicate it all along but just for the sake of time i'm just going to bubble these two you can use this and add you know like a couple cuts and break and already that's looking like it has a lot more character another thing that you can add you can bake in our little bits like these screws you have them sticking out at all different angles do the same with the posts a little slight bevel nothing too harsh soften your edges as well that further make sure you soften your edges that also really helps make things feel more round and cartoonish like look at the difference between that hard edge there and now we have soft edges so yeah that is my technique for pushing stylization in my modeling how i refine a basic block in and then just have fun with it play around with moving vertices rotating adding bevels softening edges breaking silhouettes this ladder we have the same kind of like little kinks the same unevenness like tapers um just the way the planks they're not totally evenly spaced there's this one that's nailed in in behind just for fun same with all this as you can see on my original platform it's just a straight piece same with the roof and these boards so i went in and i just added some geo added some cuts and then i just pulled parts of it out as i saw fit to try to create like a random look and that really helped a lot like if you look this is my original block in an unreal super plain but we're just lacking a lot of that fun detail whereas this one has all that um so yeah just making things look chunky exaggerated another difference between these two is that this one is kind of smaller and more narrow and then i decided to make it wider just pull it out more same with the shark like this shark was super jagged and cut making things feel soft and rounded is also i think a great technique for making things look more stylized so this shark is a lot softer he has like more cleaner cuts to him that are smoother same with the planks like everything has a bevel to it everything has like a nice clean simple bevel nothing has to be like super high poly but it just really helps push that so a big thing for me when working on 3d projects is motivation i've recently learned a trick that helped me a lot in staying motivated and staying positive about my scene and that was once you're done modeling just get it into engine that way you can actually see how it's looking and there's two things that i like to do once i get it into engine so even if it's uh you know your ugly gray box and things aren't 100 there yet i think it's really good to try to nail down your lighting um the feel of it and the other thing is to just start creating some materials to throw on so once i was finished modeling i brought it into engine and this is what the original one looked like an engine super boring super plain and you know i was looking at this and i was like getting the water in was really important because i could see it it just really helped me visualize it even though this is not the water i ended up using and i kind of would just sit here and stare at the scene and be like what what does it need now and then i don't have all of my original ones saved so i'm just using the stripped down version of my final one to explain but so once i got the water in i was like well this is really dark so i went in and i started lighting it and getting it to a place where i thought it looked pretty and then i created some materials so i was like okay what are my two what are my two biggest materials in the scene and that was the water and that was wood so i was like okay so now that i have the model in engine i feel like i should start creating some models so let's start making the water and the wood and then once i was able to throw the wood texture on and look at it on my model and look at it in the water i was feeling really motivated about my scene i was like oh wow like this is starting to take shape and like this could actually be really neat so one of the first materials i made were these planks here and we'll get into how i did that big motivation for this project was wanting to learn and get more comfortable with substance designer i know that traditionally a lot of stylized props and characters and environments use one-to-one hand-painted textures and you get some really beautiful results that way but for this i wanted to see if i could create a convincing hand-painted stylized look using substance designer and kind of reserve the one-to-ones for my unique objects so because there's so much wood in my scene the first place that i wanted to start was to make a good stylized wood texture this was my final result i was pretty satisfied with it i think it turned out pretty well so how did i do it so to start off i wanted to figure out what makes a hand-painted texture look hand-painted and i looked at lots of references of stylized artwork and kind of what made up a stylized look and feel for wood and i think one of the most important things when creating a stylized material is that you have large clean well-defined shapes and by clean i don't mean very straight or like angular i just mean that there's not a lot of noise and not not a lot of super fine details that your larger shapes will get lost in so i started off by wanting to create the large wood grain that you see here that was my jumping off point so i have a large and a small let's look at the large so i started off with a noise and then to pull out some of those larger shapes i just uh leveled it i then sharpened it to even further get cleaner blacks and whites and then i threw a directional warp on it so that we would get that like natural flow that wood tends to have we want to avoid straight lines as much as possible to push the hand painted feel and the directional warp is a great way of doing that so just transformed it to get it going the way that i wanted and then i used a slope blur with a small purlin noise and the intensity is so low with slope blurs you don't really need to go that crazy or else you'll get kind of wild stuff like that just like that uh slipper is great for adding irregularities but in a tight crisp way and i think that's really awesome for stylized work so then again there's a lot going on here and we don't really want that so i use a histogram scan to further just isolate the larger shapes that i'm going to want to work with and then just again to further get rid of some of the noise i just leveled it out and that's how we created the large wood grain so if you want to see just that plugged in that is that is it that is your large your nice chunky shapes i think that's like was the best way to start off so then we have the large shapes but we still want some levels of detail to it so i decided to add a smaller wood grain i used a very similar method start off with a noise scanned it used a directional warp again just to get those waves and those irregularities transformed it scanned it just make it lighter leveled it and then we blended it together so at this point the wood is looking like this so now we've got the big shapes and we've got also just some really nice little lines running through it and i think that's a pretty solid base for wood but since this is wood that's been worn it's been out at sea um we need some more damage done to it so for that i decided to add some holes like chips and dents and termite holes and stuff like that so we just use a tile generator with a disc pattern in it and then you just want to play around with having your scale random set to 100 like to one your position random just you everything is totally randomized and nothing is is uniform we want a directional warp it just so we get some more interesting shapes and not just circles and then this is where the slope blur comes in again it just adds those nice irregularities it kind of adds like a gradient fall off to them so then like the chips look like they've like come in at certain angles they're not just flat holes in the wood and then from there i was like pretty happy with that they were doing exactly what i wanted them to do so now we have those so for the scratches i just started off with a bell shape transformed it a great tip that a friend of mine taught me was instead of using a transform to scale things uniformly you can use a tile generator uh you just use the intercise function and you just get really nice uniform scaling so from there i took a gradient linear i leveled it so we got this nice just clean lined with a gradient to it and blended it together with my bell and then from there just warped it because again we don't want any straight shapes because in hand-painted textures you don't really have a lot of perfect crisp lines that those like waves are what gives it that more painterly effect and then we just throw that into a tile generator just to get lots of randomness and again just playing around with having different scales different rotations blending that together and then we have the scratches then finally i thought it'd be nice to have some planks in some cases i wanted just the wood so from there that was great that was i was satisfied with this wood texture but in some places i wanted them to be planks the way i did that was just starting off with a square into a tile generator transforming it to get it going the direction i wanted it histogram scanned it i added a bevel because again we don't want harsh lines we want those soft rounded shapes that you find in stylized and hand-painted work you threw a directional warp on it again because i can't stress this enough you just don't want straight lines you want things to have imperfections irregularities that's what gives it character and charm and your best friend the slope blur comes in so this one is just set at 0.01 because you don't you only need a very tiny bit with the slope blur for edge work and then it all comes together i use a normal sobal i set my intensity to 2.5 a lot of times at 1 which is the standard i find that i just don't get as much detail as i would want that's totally up to you it's personal preference i have mine set to 2.5 just to really get those harder shapes so in the normal sobol use a curvature smooth a curvature's move is an awesome jumping off point if you're going to be using gradient maps to color or create your albedo maps it just gives you a really nice flat gray scale with all of your details so then i started to play around with different colors some green some blue white yellow red and let's just plug one of the colors in so i can show you yeah so when you do your gradient map just map it in a way that you know the colors make sense you have darker tones and shadowed areas and it looks like the wood is like a wood wash it's not totally painted everywhere it's kind of coming off in certain areas to do my roughness and height and ambient occlusion i just take that curvature smooth and i auto level it just to bring back some higher points in the whites and blacks and then i level them in different ways it's just a quick and dirty way of doing it and that is my wood texture another great way that you can breathe life and charm into your environment and really prevent it from being a flat 3d scene stuck in a computer is by adding effects to your scene and so once i had some materials in and the water in and that was a little bit of movement i kind of just sat here in unreal and watched it and was like well what would a scene like this actually have and there were some obvious ones like the duck needs to be bobbing um the lily pads obviously needed movement on them but then i added those things in and i was like oh it wasn't really quite enough so something that a friend suggested was that in a lot of games like the wind waker or like stylized pieces you have the wind lines and i was like oh wow that's a really great idea so i went about implementing that i found a really great tutorial on youtube i'm a method of how to do this and so they're actually geo inside of maya i modeled out three little pieces i kind of have this long guy a loopy loop and a swirl from there i exported my shapes and i created this material so i pulled them up side by side here's one of my meshes for my wind and here is my material see you can actually see what's going on here i learned about this node in this tutorial this generate band and that is your key to success here so we just have a panner and an object position that we're getting and it's going to the offset but what controls it is the width of the band so right now we have it set pretty small 0.15 so we get this nice smooth pan over top but if we set it to say 0.5 and save that right it's not panning is like the the band is much larger so we're not getting a smooth pan so let me set that back to 0.15 because this creates a nice smooth one these parameters depend on how big your mesh is as well on the sharpness if it's set just to 0.1 again 0.5 save that one you're just not getting as nice of a gradient off of it 0.1 and then this static boolean false because we're going in one direction and that just gets plugged into your emissive color and that is all you really need for this so once i got this wind the wind in i was like huh like i really like that and i came up with the idea that a little chimney which wasn't in the concept would be really cute for a scene like this um it would just add some nice detail to the right side of the piece so i went about making that and that's just a particle system with this is cute little smoke in it and it just puffs away and i think that adds so much character so now i had the water moving the lily pads moving the duck bombing some wind lines and the smoke i'm still like what else does it need so at the time i only had this crate here this crate didn't have anything on it and i was trying to figure out what would be really cute and i came up with the idea that have a radio there and another friend it's really important to get so much feedback from your friends like don't be scared show off your work they may have some amazing ideas that will really help push your scene and my own friend was like you should add a cocktail i thought that would be really cute and kind of add like a story element to who's living in this house so i made the radio once i had the radio in i was like well obviously now we need some cute little music notes so those were just textures plugged into a particle system and there we have it now we have lots of different layers of detail and motion to the scene and it really brings it to life another thing that i want to talk about is how much work your post process volume can do for you and if you're used to just modeling and texturing assets and not really getting into engine much or you know you're scared of some of these settings i'm here to tell you that don't be afraid and have fun playing around with some of the different effects you can get and different lighting setups you can get like really get stuck in and see what things can do obviously don't get too carried away because you can push your lighting or your post process effects in a direction that are no longer very true to your textures and that can cause conflicts but i want to explain a little bit about what i did here so with my post process and my lighting so to back things up i didn't really want to deal with light maps very much a lot of people opt for baked lighting and that's great but i wanted to be able to iterate with my scene really quickly just pull things in see how things were looking move stuff around and i didn't really want to have to worry about baking and re-baking lighting all the time so i went for a fully dynamic light setup you just have to set all of the lights in your scene to movable right here and that way when you move things around in your scene they will be impacted by the lighting in real time and there's no need to remake anything there is a drawback to this and the drawback is that you don't get any global illumination as this is calculated in the big light maps but you can compensate for that by adding ambient lighting either through a skylight or through an ambient cube map i went the cube map route because i could achieve a sort of softness with the shadows and i could fake a really nice bounce under lighting that you would naturally get off the water so let me show you what some of those were doing so if you go into my post process volume so here we go so this is my i have the this tropical beach cube map loaded in i just really like the bright colors and obviously this is a tropical scene so if you if we turn that off turn the intensity down look at how much that's doing so that is really livening up my shadows just making things look soft and smooth it's like night and day so i highly recommend if you do go this route to plug in a cube map another thing that i have done in my post process so let's just look at what happens if we move my post process all the way out of my scene that's really dark um there's a lot that my post process volume is handling it back it's nice and bright so i actually went in and did a lot of this stuff very early on in my scene i find it way more appealing to work on a scene that looks nice it motivates me to keep going it also helps steer the direction that i'm going to be texturing and who just doesn't want to look at something pretty so after i got in my block out i made my wood texture and i made my water texture so this scene had those two textures in it which were what take up a lot of space so i got those in and i started to light for the lighting i have a skylight and a directional light in the skylight i have that tropical beach map plugged in there as well it's doing a little bit it's intensity set pretty low so if we turn it down and see the difference it just softens out the shadows a little bit more again this looks okay this is a matter of personal preference i just like it to be about there the other thing is this directional light so if we look at its intensity it's doing quite a bit in terms of light in the scene so if you notice um the shark and the duck glow or remain lit that is because in their materials i have a slight emissive on them i found with the shark and the duck just adding that emissive into the material made them pop more with a with a duck like when you have like a rubber ducky the way that they kind of capture light like the rubber causes them to almost glow so that works really well uh the same with the shark and the shark actually has a little bit of a purple glow to him just to bring out different details so that's what my directional light is doing another thing that i wanted to get down early on was the sky colors so in the concept this guy is this very like tealy turquoisey color and that's super easy you just can go in here and you can set like the overall color anything that suits you same with the cloud color i opted for kind of these like darker clouds these clouds are just cards that i have faked in to add additional detail there is also these ones there's an overall color yeah so obviously if you another reason why you can kind of mess around with a lot of this stuff and it's no big deal is that it's super easy just to reset things to their defaults so once i had my lighting done and now i've imported almost all of my textures and the scenes really starting to come together i went back into my process volume because it is now kind of safer to play around with these things because again as i said before if you push some of the um like the bloom and like the temperature and tint too far out of whack too soon then you're gonna have conflicts between what your materials are looking like in substance designer or photoshop or painter like whatever you're using and then when they're coming into engine and you that can get confusing and we don't really want that so this is something that you should play around with more so when you've got everything else in so i went in and i added a bloom which really brightens things up again this is making a massive difference uh another thing that i did was i did some color grading so if we turn my color grading off everything is really blue which is fine but i think warmer tones look cuter and friendlier for stylized pieces like this so i went in and i did a slight temperature correction and i went in and i tinted it slightly warmer so that's what that looks like that's what that one looks like combined it just looks warmer and brighter so i highly recommend you playing around with these settings because they can really give you a level of finish in your scene that maybe you'd otherwise be spending ages trying to tweak textures or bringing things into photoshop and doing these kinds of adjustments like your post process volume is very helpful here one last and really important thing to touch on that i have going on with my post process volume is the cartoon lines that i have all throughout my scene another cool thing you can do with post process volumes is you can add a post process material so if you go into here under rendering features you can see i have this post process instance material that i have slotted in this allows you to add an effect to the entire scene as opposed to baking it into your textures this gives you a little bit more flexibility i wasn't quite sure how much of a line i'd want and what it would really end up looking like so this is why i went with the post process material option these are frequently used to create tune and cel-shaded effects in lots of games sometimes it's a combination of texturing and post-process volume for mine i did experiment with toon shading and some thicker cell shading but ultimately i ended up opting for clean kind of thin smooth lines and this is how i achieved that so here is my post process material i have parameters here that allow me to control where the lines appear their thickness where in the scene they appear so let me just show you so this is the just general thickness the boundary line here and we don't really want that too thick because again i think the thinner lines complemented my scene a lot more um this is uh the depth fade so that kind of controls how far back from the camera camera we're seeing the outlines and so there we can see now my background geo is getting highlighted and we don't really want to be drawing attention to that so we want to keep that outline free this is where it shows up in the model and so you can see now it's grabbing the interior geo which is very distracting and we don't want that so this was really the final piece of the puzzle with my scene and the last push that it needed to cement the cartoon feel once i added this in i was really happy with my scene and i felt like that was it thank you for watching my breakdown if you have any questions or just want to get in touch feel free to leave a comment or drop me a message on artstation i'd love to hear from you i hope you found this useful and maybe there's something cool that you took away from this video thanks again bye [Music] you

Channel: Stylized Station

Views: 45,084

Keywords: unreal engine, environment design, how to, game art, substance painter, environment art, low poly, 3d modeling, game art tutorial, speed modeling, concept art, step by step, game art portfolio, game art institute, speed modeling blender 2.8, game artist career, game art timelapse, game artist portfolio, zbrush 2019, unreal engine 4 tutorial, game art design, game art styles, game development, ue4, unreal engine 4, ue4 tutorial, unreal engine 4 beginner tutorial

Id: JGbFcGln5So

Length: 39min 12sec (2352 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 02 2020