How Video Game Environments are Made - Full Scene Breakdown

[Music] [Music] what's going on you beautiful people my name is tie-dye I hope you guys had a pretty awesome date today my name isn't pretty awesome so far so welcome to a new video I'm finally done school so the uploads are gonna be resuming once again hopefully a couple of times every single week and I do actually have a few planned I really want to do a new video later this week as well if you guys remember last year after my first year of game college I decided to sort of you know review it explain what it was really like for those of you who haven't experienced it before and I'm definitely planning to do that again sort of like was an updated view on my second year but anyways that's in the future this video right now what I want to talk about is that this scene right here so if you follow me on Twitter or even Facebook you've probably seen this scene a few times this is my 2018 submission for a Ubisoft competition called the next showcase Ubisoft Toronto does this every single year for students in Ontario and this is my entry I did the same thing last year it was a much different scene much smaller and that this year I think I've improved quite a bit so I want to do another breakdown of the scene explain my process how I got to this point from start to finish you know the pre-production the actual pipeline itself and sort of how I rounded it out so what we were tasked to do was make this sort of futuristic chai tea stall in India and there had to be a haunted VR pod inside of that it was a very very weird description we were given a story and had to make a scene off of it and this is my final result so just looking off of some of these angles here just showing off the the different stuff in the scene but as you can tell when I sort of pan out a little bit here it is very very um I don't know you could say that's messy but it's more or less sort of designed to be seen within certain camera constraints and I'll be talking about that later on but let's just sort of go through the entire process break down how everything was sort of done here and to do that we're going to start with the pre-production so I'm just gonna sort of close out of this for now and we're gonna dive into one of the mood boards that I made here so before we could dive into any modeling or anything you have to really understand what it is you're gonna be making in a previous year I did the Ubisoft um entry it was sort of a submarine interior and I still have the video up on my channel I'll put that in the description if you want to see how I've changed my process since then but I'm essentially one of the things that I really missed out on was the pre-production so this year I wanted to spend a lot of time really understanding what I wanted to make because the pre-production essentially if you trip up here your entire project is gonna sort of just tumble tumble downhill and it's not gonna end up very very good so this is just one of the mood boards that I made here and the point of the mood board is just to get the ideas flowing a little bit I just wanted to sort of understand um you know the textures in the environment and at the nightlife and things that they'd be selling in some of these tea shops you know there's some of the interiors and you know are they modern are they sort of dirty and grungy and you know after reading through the story that I was given in the source material that I had I realized since this tea shop is supposed to be I think it was 40 years in the future and India typically as you can see in these pictures has a lot of sort of outdated stuff what I wanted to do was have this sort of ground rule that every single thing in my scene was gonna be what we would consider today modern because 40 years in the future it would be very old so I'd have a bunch of modern stuff that we would think as modern today but sort of beat it up and make it look old and that's sort of the idea I went with and after I came up with that I decided to sort of sketch through a lot of this stuff and also just you know continue to figure out what life in India is like and help some people who currently live there or used to live there would find it to be in the future and and lucky from here I actually have three roommates who were all from India so I was able to ask them a bunch of different questions about it and get some insight on it and from there I just came with a bunch of different sketches here was the main image that I sort of you know liked and enjoyed and ran with I sort of wanted to have this big tree which was another one of the required things that we had to have in the scene this big tree underneath this Shack that's kind of like pieced together very um you know the bunch of sort of different objects holding it together I really like the idea of solar panels I thought in the future would make sense to have more solar energy in such a hot place it also have to be during the holiday of Diwali which is the festival light so I wanted to have lights all over the place you know the stereotypical lanterns that they have or the traditional Blanchett lanterns I guess you would say with a big sort of tea shop sign and a lot of things I did change as you can see here what I wanted to do is sort of have a tarp front that would close same with the VAR pot a tarp front for there but then I soon realized as I sort of blocking stuff out in 3d which I will bring up right now that a lot of that wouldn't make sense it wouldn't make sense to sort of have a tarp front because I have a lot of expensive equipment in here and who's to say someone wouldn't just slice through that and just go ahead and steal it right so once I started blocking things out I realized that wouldn't make a lot of sense so after the concept I moved into 3d space where I'm a lot more comfortable and I started doing what a lot of people call a white box or a gray box or whatever you'd like to call it and that's essentially just blocking things I've been getting the space and dimensions for how things are gonna sort of you know work with each other I have a character model in here as you can see just for scale and I decided to sort of get the scale and the references for all the objects I put in here I did end up changing a lot of things as I went into the engine and like as you can see these shelves are very generic like I have some some chip bags that was initially supposed to be there and just certain things on the tables I did end up going through him changing same with the whole design of the fridge and this roof piece here ended up being a part of the main roof as well so things didn't stay perfectly the same was the concept which is exactly why I wanted to do this whole white box phase and see how things worked in 3d space and from here once I knew where I was going to be making I made a detailed asset list now this thing saved my life meant Soho just to make make this very very clear I had no school time to do this this was something I had to do all completely in my spare time so essentially my life was complete chaos for the four months that this competition was going on for you have to know that like I have eight classes right and then I to just sort of like pieces together all in my spare time like every single asset here the ground and just sort of just the interior as well as the exterior I'd to put this all together in four months in my spare time and like I said with eight classes you don't really have a lot of spare time so a detailed asset list was super super important that let me just explain why so what I did was I made a list of every single object I needed to make or I don't know maybe like a particle effect or a texture or anything like that every single thing I needed to make and then I broke it down into sort of checkpoints so I wanted they if the the first checkpoints in use checks point I would have like do at the end of a week or something like that so each checkpoint would start with like the most important assets and go to the least important assets so the first checkpoint for example to make the actual building itself I'm look I could definitely do that in a week it would just be a bunch of different wall pieces with these pillars the roof and this sort of tarp over top and the tarp was actually kind of difficult to do I ended up doing it inside of Marvelous Designer which is a cloth based program and then just adding a tarp roof to it or a tart material and sculpting in ZBrush so it turned out pretty good I think overall pretty happy with it but yeah so that was like the first check point and then I have an image of the second one here so once I had that one done I'm like okay second phase for the second week and let's make the T sign the other sign here sort of the generator the tree and all that and essentially building upon it little by little and I wanted to have the most important stuff done first and then leaving things such as like the welcome mat or like the trash on the outside to the very very end that way if I do run out of time it wouldn't affect me nearly as much so prioritizing the most important stuff first and leading the ear leaving the least important stuff to the very end which is pretty common sense but um sometimes you get really excited to do something else like sometimes I was spending the majority of my time on the inside but I'm like god I really just want to work on the outside and sort of get the entire you know atmosphere down like this was a very very last step I did so um you just got to make sure you stay on track and also giving yourself those deadlines is super super important because I had tons of projects to do and all that but had to make sure I found time to do this every single week like there was a lot of sleepless nights cramming to get this done but I'm very happy that I did it and I definitely planning a schedule is the only possible way you can do this kind of stuff and expect it to be done on time so I continued along with that just you know chipping away at it working on more props like here was one of the later ones we read most of the stuff in place and I wanted to sort of fill up this sort of breaking it down into all the different objects I needed you know breaking this down and getting that done I think that must have just been like a single weekend just because it wasn't too many props or anything like that and if you are wondering the modeling applications that I used was I modeled everything in Maya and if I needed to I do a pass in ZBrush then out texture things either in the qixels suite or in substance painter and then this is the Unreal Engine obviously by bringing things together and render them so once all the assets were done which took by far the majority of the time I went and I started doing some of the more technical stuff such as this this was done with a blueprint essentially all it's doing is changing the texture I just have these as different albedo textures diffuse texture sorry and it's just cycling through that same width up here there's adding some basic animation to stuff this fan is rotating so just super super simple stuff as I showed earlier I have some basic particle effects with things like the fire I also have over here on the shrine with some smoke and then there's like smoke in the background and stuff like that just to add some like pollution to the air and whatnot so that was like technically I'd put that into with the modeling pipeline in the the creation process but then once that was all done obviously the lighting the environment making sure that was all done and I wanted to make sure that I had like two weeks at the very end for critiques like I kept showing this to him my classmates and and people on Twitter obviously if you follow me you've seen this a ton and even professors and stuff like that just getting their critiques on everything the entire time but we did have four months to do this but I wanted to make sure like I said I had the last two weeks to do nothing but go through and get critiques so I post us on forums on discord chats on a bunch of different places and get people's feedback so I can go through and I change the things that needed to be changed and I think that's very very important because you know I could have stretched out my checkpoint to the very very end but then I really wanted to make sure that time to change things because when you look at something for such a long time and I found this to be very apparent with that this scene you really lose sight of things that are good and things that are bad because you're so used to it you're so used to your own mistakes so there were a lot of things that I should have changed and I definitely got some great feedback from my professors especially and just people who even if you think someone doesn't know a lot about this stuff like their feedback can be just as important because for someone who doesn't know the technical they're just going to tell you if it looks good or bad without any biases or any excuses so getting feedback from anybody is um super important so that's that obviously then went in through with the lighting and what I wanted to do with this scene is tell a bit more of a story so the actual material we had to base this whole scene off of what the story so I wanted to sort of go through and explain that a bit more so I actually broke this into two levels so this is the evening and like I said this was during the night of Diwali which is a light festival so the action will return just sure hopefully that doesn't mess anything up so I made a second scene a nighttime scene and with this one I sort of want to continue along with the theme and I added then fireworks to this which once again it's like a last minute thing I actually didn't make these fireworks I bought these on the marketplace which I mean obviously it's weird to not sort of include everything that's your own but with something like this I think it's just more like icing on top I think it was really nice to sort of have those effects up there but I really wanted to break this into two different scenes two different moods and as you saw at the very beginning with the sort of mini cinematic everything is very warm and then once we get introduced to the Haunted VR pod things get very very cool and I thought that was a great way to transition because overall up to this point everything is very very uniformly warm and very welcoming and that's what I was going for because typically when you think of a Indian sort of marketplace or something like that it's very claustrophobic and this is a very open place so it stands out a little bit especially from the surroundings so I wanted there to be a huge disconnect once we enter this sort of mysterious room over here and I get affected by this haunted VR pod so that was sort of the main process with that it definitely took quite a bit longer than I thought this is to this day probably my most ambitious scene so far I was very happy with how it turned out overall but um that was sort of the main main breakdown I guess I could show you like the inside of Maya so this is um kind of how it turned out like let me just bring this up for comparison so this is the white box every single time I finished an object I would delete the white box and replace it with the finished asset so like I would go in I would finish sort of like this used to just be a cube representing the size with an outgoing head model it had replaced it and delete the white box and once I had all the objects and here completed or not all of them once I had the object itself completed I would import it into Unreal Engine I would have put it in its place out shuri-chan sort of move on so there's definitely some assets I've got a bit more love in here this sign what I did was I actually um I sort of drew it out in Photoshop and then I went over it with the spline tool just making these sort of neon tubes to sort of broadcast at a missive light out picnic benches so the exterior stuff is out here interiors obviously inside of here I tried to do modular when I could like let me just bring up my my layers here so if I put the roof on which was like I said done in Marvelous Designer so the wrinkles and all that was done in there and I put on these solar panels so the panel is a single piece the sort of connectors a single piece and the rails a single piece so that's how I went about doing that and then obviously I just turn these off when I don't need them just because it gets kind of a chaotic in here as you can see but I tried to lay it out in here just replacing it and that's why it's so important to do something like a white box just I get the sense of scale and see how things sort of interact with each other in a 3d environment because I just don't like a basic concept is super important as well like I'm no drawer so this is obviously it doesn't look that great I understand that but it was just as hard to get my creative juices flowing but this blocking it open 3d was far more important to me at least especially because a lot of the time in the industry you're gonna be just given the design to do and then you have to block it out and see how it works so yeah that's that's more or less it there was a few issues that I had likes fir for the most part the building putting that together was a little more difficult than I thought cuz I wanted to keep it as one main piece I mean typically if you're gonna be doing a lot of buildings you'd use March their walls but I want to keep this all in one piece of sort of figuring out how to separate the UVs into different islands and how to properly do that without losing too much resolution was um kind of tricky issues like how uh this place actually function was kind of difficult I wanted to sort of um drown this in reality a bit more so I can sort of take ideas from reality and what I mean by that is like I said before if this is a very hot place let's say oh we'll give it solar panels and if we give the solar panels I'd only need a generator if it needs a generator no it's gonna have limited electricity usage and stuff like that I thought the more I lent or leaned on reality the more I could sort of you know take ideas from that and um I wouldn't have to think of anything too too crazy because this is supposed to be 40 years in the future and 40 years and not a lot of stuff changes especially in a country where development is a little bit slower such as India compared to you know North America or maybe you know China or Japan or something like that so I tried to add some like Western elements as well from like a coffee shop like Starbucks or something so the pre-production was super super important by far the most important step if there's anything I want you to take from this video is spend your time planning things that do multiple sketches do a white box scene just sort of figure all of that stuff out but overall that is the scene I guess I could talk about the tree real quick this was done inside of SpeedTree which is an entire like entire program made just for foliage and stuff like that the particle effect is done in the Unreal Engine I sort of had just have some of the flower petals as well as the leaves falling down from there a light breeze in reality I should have the breeze effecting stuff like this but I just uh well one I don't really know how to I probably should have looked into that and to I think I didn't have enough time to do stuff like that breezes is just kind of affecting all the foliage right now I even have a lot of stuff in the back here but um obviously you're never really gonna see that kind of stuff and then the modular solar panels up here sort of just connecting with all these once again these are is all the same pieces just use a bunch of different times like you will see some variance in these solar panels but that's just because I have some decals on those which are just sort of projected textures just to break it up a little bit but that's more or less how I went through with all of this I pretty much modeled everything on the scene and that's why it took so long if I was using other people's parts it wouldn't take nearly as long like there were certain things that I used I weren't mine like um these buildings was from a free pack that you could find on the unreal marketplace as well as these trash bags I didn't make and these like just wooden things but these are all like minor details that I put in the background everything else I wanted like the main focal points all to be mine so I think every single item in this tea shop is mine yep everything in here that I will just everything in here I did create the benches the majority of stuff is just more or less these tiny details like with garbage bags anything that's trash related other than the cans or the bins themselves and then these buildings are from a pack but everything else saya I made so once again pre-production is super important work modular if you can with things like these solar panels and break things down into lists lists will they'll save your life man they really really will there's no way I could have done this if I was just chipping away at it blindly for a couple weeks especially because there was there was set checkpoints like if I didn't have checkpoints I didn't have like I need to have X amount done by the end of the week this would never have been completed and it's also helpful because if you rush and get it ahead or error get ahead and get all your stuff done for the week then you could sort of chill out for a little bit or focus more on your schoolwork or if you're being really really crazy like me you could get next week's checkpoint done in the same week so um that way you have more time off so I was pretty happy with this obviously there's plenty of room for improvement with this kind of scene but overall I was happy with the quality I made with the amount of time that I had and yeah that's pretty much the breakdown of this entire scene hopefully you guys enjoyed this hopefully you'll learn something like I said I will be posting more videos I'm gonna have sort of a review of my second year of game driven college sort of explaining all the things that I've learned this year and hopefully some advice for you guys who are trying to break into the industry just like me um but other than that more tutorials to come if you have any recommendations or any requests rather let me know with a comment down below but it's good to be back I will hopefully be posting at least one video a week this summer we'll see how that goes there's still a lot more projects like I wanted make another scene like this over the summer and I'm also going to be working full-time starting Monday so I'm definitely gonna be busy but um I I definitely need to be busy I'll explain that I'll definitely explain that in my next video I'm the kind of guy who needs to be busy all the time but um hopefully learn something thank you so much for watching everyone and I hope you have a great day so once again my name is Ben tie-dye hopefully enjoy the video like I said and I'll catch y'all later see ya

Channel: Tiedie

Views: 26,216

Rating: 4.9287958 out of 5

Keywords: game art, environment art, game, art, model, texture, unreal engine, maya, photoshop, 3d, modelling, substance, quixel, tutorial, how to, make, create, breakdown, tips, lesson, student, ubisoft nxt, nxt, showcase, work, real time, engine, low poly, high poly, poly, bake, zbrush, new, beginer, advice, polygon, mesh, lighting, artist

Id: sVbb765KMKE

Length: 22min 10sec (1330 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 27 2018