The 3D Artist's Guide to Modular Environments - Unreal Engine Environment Breakdown

[Music] [Music] if there's one thing every lazy 3d artist like myself needs to learn it's probably modular environments and trim sheets welcome back to the breakdown where we have talented artists take over the channel for the day and share some of their knowledge with the rest of the 3d community in this video the very talented thomas is going to break down his beautiful stylized environment and teach us how he created and utilized a trim sheet to create his modular environment now speaking of environments if you want to learn how to make environments like these in unreal engine you'll definitely need to check out my environment artists course where i teach you how to create beautiful environments like the one you see on your screen now from trees to rocks flowing grass and landscapes my beginner unreal engine course has it all so if you're interested i'll leave a link in the description if you want to check it out now let's get into the video [Music] [Music] hello everyone my name is thomas and i'm creating stylized art in my spare time and today i'm going to do a small breakdown of my scene called merchant in the valley first of all i'm going to show you how to set up a trim sheet and blender and sculpted in zbrush as you can see in the scene all the wooden parts and all the props are just using one sheet or one trim sheet after that i'm going to show you the modular pieces or the modularity of the house after that i'm going to explain how i created these flower patches and how you can easily change the colors and the shapes using a color atlas and lastly i'm going to show you how i created these trees and the foliage and the foliage shader inside unreal engine before we can start with our trim sheets we need to prepare or we need to know how we're going to tackle our uv space so for a wooden beam we will have six sides so four side pieces and two top pieces so the four side pieces will be tiling into the x direction and will be placed on top the two side pieces will be unique we can also add other materials to our trim sheet like a metal slab the stream sheet can also be used to texture other assets or props in the scene in blender we can add a plane to create a trim texture i'm going to change the dimensions to one by one like this as i mentioned earlier we need to subdivide this plane into six and two six pieces yes so the first four will you will be used for the side pieces of the wood here we'll create the top piece and the last one will be some kind of a metal slab so now i'm going to create um before first we need to make we need to check something so we must be certain that this texture is complete is completely covering the complete uv space so i'm going to uv editing i'm going to select everything with pressing a and as you can see it is nicely perfectly covering the completely uv space so that's okay it's very important that this is set up properly so we can go back to edit mode for the first side piece of the wood i'm going to add i'm going to create some geometry so i'm adding some i'm going to subdivide it i'm going to scale these edges into the y direction and i'm going to uh move the center face into the z direction and z brush we're going to sculpt on these edges here so this edge and also this edge and i don't want to have a perfect vertical edge but i want to have some kind of slope some angle here because the baking results will be much better when it's sloped a little bit i'm also going to do this for all the three different pieces and also for that metal slab for the top pieces i'm first going to separate this face with pressing p separating by selection i'm going i'm selecting only this part and going back into edit mode i want to add a subdivision to create two uh rectangular faces like this so this face we're not going to use you can add some unique textures here or or some planks or anything you like but i'm going to delete this for this tutorial i'm going to select these two faces inset these faces like this and again erase the center face to create the the sloped edges here all right in zbrush we're going to to add the wood grains on on this face but we want to have it dialing into the x direction so what we will need to do is we will need to set up the mesh firstly before we can export it into zbrush so i'm going to add a plane so the plane has dimensions 2x2 so this will be good for wrapping around the sculpt so in the in the mesh i'm going to scale this one into the x direction i'm going to scale it by two so it lines up perfectly with the plane so like this so now we will have our texture will be of one by one will be in the middle and the scope will be wrapped around the edges to get a tileable sculpt or a tileable texture before we can add this i'm going to explain this in more detail into zbrush later on before we can add this to zbrush i want to add some extra subdivisions to create some nice some nice rectangular faces like this and also for the metal slab what i forgot to do was i want to separate these pieces i'm sorry separating them by pressing p by selection i'm separating these because it's easier in zbrush to set up the polygroups and therefore splitting the mesh into different parts like this and after that i'm going to join them again but even after they're jointly going to stay separate meshes so i can with with l i can select them separately like this all right so now we have our mesh setup in blender we can export this as an obj so i already exported it but it's going to be wood trim sheet import and i'm going to export this selection only alright we imported the mesh into zbrush and in subtools i split all the mesh into different parts so we can select them with alt it's easier to sculpt i already subdivided the geometry using the divide and the smooth option for the sculpting the for sculpting the edge where or the damages on the edges i'm going to use the the trim dynamic brush what we need to do to get the tiling we go to the option menu brush and under curve we're going to set the wrap mode to 2. very importantly we need to do this for every mesh separately so we can start sculpting on this mesh so as you can see the uh the brush is styled into the x direction for the wood grains i'm using the orbs brush pack and again we need to change the wrap mode to 2. in blender we can import the zbrush file or the zbrush export so here's the wood trim sheets export it's like this so we can immediately export this as our trim sheet our high poly so i'm going to only export the selected one and for the low poly i'm going to export a plane just with dimensions one by one that that is going to be the trim texture so i'm going to export this as an fbx as the trim low in substance painter i baked the high poly mesh onto the low poly mesh or onto the texture plane so the wood it consists of just the base color with the roughness value of 0.9 after that it's a darker color with the with the dirt mask to create some color variation again i added some moss to create again some color variation after that i have an ambient occlusion layer for the large spots and some for the the wood grains and after that i also created an edge highlight layer that's using the light mask to create to emphasize the edge wear on the sides of the the woods for the metal one it's the metal parts it's the same setup so base color a dirt layer with with a darker color in this case some rust color to create some color variations the ambient inclusion layers and again edge highlight so we can use this texture and export it to be used in unreal when after we created the texture and substance painter we also need to uv unwrap some kind of beam that is that will be using the trend sheet so in this example i already created a wooden beam so i'm going to select a side piece so it will be using the wood grains but it's just overlaps with the edge damage or the edge where so if i select all faces these are uv unwrapped like this what you can do because it's starting in the the x directions you can also change the euvy in wrap if you have a lot of beams you can create some uniqueness by um by shifting this in the x direction direction so now i can show you some modular pieces that i or my build kit that i used to create the house in blender i started with with two different planes so a small plane with the dimensions of one by two and the large plane two by two and all the other pieces are following these dimensions for the plaster i created two different textures the first one is a very very simple or a very basic texture it contains some substance designer i stacked some noises on top of each other and i added some color variation by by scattering some photoshop brushes around the second texture is a brick texture as you can see here and i added some some wear and tear on the edges of the plaster using a slope blur and in my final piece i use vertex painting to create some unique spots in the plaster and i don't do it in the shader because it's a very small house and it's easily managed using or painting the vertex color manually here at the bottom you can also see some current spots so i did this in the shader by using a linear gradient i can i can quickly show you so here i use the linear gradient in the y direction i used a constant factor to control the hardness or the softness of the gradient then i used some some grunge textures from substance designer and i multiplied it um with the gradient and here you can see we get some some grinch spots at the the bottom i use the lerp to uh to lurp in the unsaturated dark green color at the bottom and i learned this with the basic textures and that i showed you earlier um then we can see we can look at the wall pieces and blender i created two very basic shapes very very small basic pieces and one large piece just a very basic one i also created five different beams with different sizes and i used these ones to uh to add some extra beams to the walls like this so i can can add some extra pieces here to get some some other variations these wooden beams are using the trim sheets that i showed you earlier but i created in substance painter i created three different color variations so this one are the medium colors so i also have a light a light variation and also a dark variation so i can quickly add some uniqueness to my uh to my structure or to my building by using this method here we also have a very small wall piece so i created i think four different bricks sculpt them and zbrush bake them onto a low poly and then also painted textured them in substance painter and here i can quickly make just a very small wall wall piece here you can look at the roof piece so the roof piece is one large piece because i made it a little bit crooked and blender and it's much easier to to to use to make it one piece the roof tiling are also nine different unique pieces that i sculpted and textures and textured in substance painter and then in blender i uh i randomly placed them onto to a plane and then i created this roof i want to give you a quick overview of how i created my landscape and also the foliage in the scene first of all the landscape just contains three different layers with with a simple color and they all share the same basic normal map the grass is created by following tutorial by stylize station i will put the link in the description that i can show you my grass mesh so i created a large one and two small ones but they have different colors so the large one as you can see it's a linear gradient with the green color at the bottom and a yellowish unsaturated color at the top in your modeling software it's very important to align the normals in the z direction or completely vertical to get correct shading to get some variation i also created some other types of of plants i use the foliage system to place all the plants in my scene even the rocks the small rocks here are placed using the foliage system i can also show you how i created divines on my on the house and these are not using the foliage system because i wanted to have control where where i would place these finds i can show you the material so in in zbrush i sculpted three different leaves and in blender i i stack them on top of each other to to create these uh these types of finds and i baked them in substance painter and these are all using planes with an opacity mask next we can look at our flower mesh so i will hide my grass mesh i will uh grab my flower mesh and put it in the middle um so here you can see our flower mesh so it's a small flower patch that contains a small plane at the top that will hold the flower and then a small triangle mesh that that contains the the root of the flower very importantly here is again is that we change all the normals um to point upwards so again i will select everything of the mesh and i will click on alt n and then i will click on point to target and click again somewhere above the target and pick a very large value here so now again we can see that the normals are all facing upwards for the flowers i i created a color atlas so it's something like this it's four different colors so the green color is for the root or the stem of the flower and then it's it's three different colors for the flowers so i will have a white flower a red flower and the yellow flower i also created an opacity mask for each different kind of color so the the white flower will have this shape the red one will have this shape and then the yellow will have this shape so you can easily change the shapes or the colors of all the flowers and you can easily manage and create all different kinds of flowers so if you go to to blender as you can see it's very important to do a proper uv unwrap of the planes to match the colors of the atlas so if you go to the uv editing so here i already unwrapped the planes onto the white the white plane and this one i can export it as an fbx to the flower white so i can export it again then i go back into edit mode and i can move the uv unwrap to the to the red space like this and then again i can do export fbx and then i can export it as the red i can export it as the red flower in object mode of course like this and then we can do it one last time for the yellow flowers we need to make it a little bit bigger like this okay export it as an fbx yellow then we can go back to unreal now we can import all the different flowers import all okay so we can test one this here we can click on the mesh we open the mesh so these are the the three different flowers so we first need to create a material so here is the the color atlas for the flowers and also the opacity masks so i created a very basic material with the color atlas and to the base color a roughness value of 0.9 and also an opacity mask to use the opacity mask you need to change the blend mode here to mask if we then click on the mesh of the red flower here and we select the flower materials you can clearly see that we have the the red flower so that's very nice if you go to the white flowers we select the material we will have the white flowers we go back to the yellow we select the flower material and now we will have the the yellow flowers okay so these are set up now we can add them to our foliage uh menu here we can select all the flowers and very importantly is to deselect the cast shadow options as we did before with the cross trans we can also change the density because we already have three flowers for one patch so it will change this to five and then we can paint in the flowers and we have a very nice flower we can very nicely create a flower patch in our grass as you can see here the flowers are a little bit raised below the grass so we can change the the scaling um inside the menu so scaling free and now we can scale here from one to maybe two and then we can try it again here and you can see that the flowers will be much higher and will be above the cross before we're going to start creating the trees in blender i'm going to show you how i set them up in the wheel so first of all the branch here is very low poly with it's just a noise stretch in the x direction so the branches or are using geometry so these are created in blender using plane planes and all these planes are using an opacity mask so um in blender i can show you how i create the geometry so first of all i started with a plane so the plane i'm going to rotate again i'm going to duplicate it and i'm going to rotate it in the y direction 90 degrees i'm going to duplicate it again and rotate it in the z direction like this alright so this this shape you will be scattering it around another shape so for creating the the branch i'm going to use an ico sphere so i'm going to scale it up a little bit every proportional editing i'm going to change the the shape a little bit just something like this so something like this could be a nice shape for a tree so i'm going to use a particle system i'm going to add a particle system to scatter around this shape so i'm going to use the hair one i'm going to click on advanced and as you can see now you don't have a very nice or very very uniform scattering shape of the hair so first i'm going to go back again to the modifier and i'm going to add a subdivision surface so i'm going to um move to first yes so i'm going to add some more subdivisions to the shape um i'm going to add it so now you can see that the hairs are are more uniformly scattering around the shape so that's much better so i'm going back to the particle system so here i'm going to click on advanced i'm going to change the number to something like 75 and then i'm going to choose change the render as path to render as an object i'm going to with the pin drop i'm going to select our object here and as you can see now these are all nicely scattering at the edge of the shape so i'm going to increase the scale so something like this but what we can do is this um this particle system is using this shape so i can if i change this shape everything will also change in the particle system so i can move this in the z direction so that our origin is at the middle of our cross here by default the orientation axis will be equal to velocity hair but as you can see here we have a very sharp corner or very very sharp shape and therefore no hairs or no particles will be placed at this side so we can change the orientation x axis from velocity hair to normal tangent so that all the cards will be placed perpendicular to the faces like this so we get a very nice shape here but here we get we have some blank spots and you can change the seat number um to get some some nice uh scattering or some some variations in scattering so i can change this to 11 looks also very nice or even uh 10 okay so this one looks okay um maybe back to 11 yes so as you can see here there are a lot of cards that are parallel with each other so therefore i'm going to randomize the face here a little bit so that all the cards will will change the in direction or in rotation so something like this that we don't have a lot of uniformity and we can also add a randomness to the scale a little bit like this so i'm pretty happy with this result i think you have to change this you have to import this into unreal and and keep changing it to get a perfect tree before we can export this mesh uh to unreal we need to convert this so i'm going to click on convert and then i'm going to duplicate the mesh with shift d and move it into the x direction i'm going to join the mesh together like this one so now we have a very nice tree mesh as you can see here but what we still need to change is the direction of the normals so in edit mode here we can see the uh the direction of the normals so you can click it you can activate it in this menu here i can increase the size to like this all right as you can see we will not have a very uniform shading if we will use this mesh in unreal so we will need to edit the normals so i'm going to add a modifier with a normal edit like this one so before we can use this we need to enable auto smooth and object data so we go to the normals click on auto smooth otherwise it's not going to work so for um editing the normals we will need a new object um which we can copy we can copy its normal information so we're going to add an icosphere and this icosphere needs to uh completely uh encapsulate the mesh the tree mesh so like this all right i'm going to back to wireframe i'm going to select the old mesh so here i'm going to at target i'm going to use the pinpoint to select the ico sphere or the outer mesh like this and i'm going to click on apply so we can delete the outer mesh and we can go back to here into edit mode and as you can see all the meshes or all the normals are facing radially outward so now we can export this to unreal engine export this as an fbx so i'm going to export this as tree test i'm going to export only the selected object export it okay now we can add our tree mesh to the scene here you can see clearly by adding or by altering the normals in blender we can see that we have an edge highlight at the top of the mesh by the sun or by the lightning and at the bottom we get our shadows here you can see all the cards that will be using the opacity masks the material that i created for the foliage so i created a master material in the master material i'm just very simple blending between two colors using a vertical gradient and i'm adding adding a very dark color at the base of the texture to create the shadow effect for the opacity mask i'm just using a very simple texture that i created in krita and i'm using a simple cross wind node to get the shadow or shadow effect for the mesh i created an instance of the master material so i can easily change the colors and also the intensity of the wind it's this material and i'm going to add it to the branch as you can see so it looks very nicely and i'm also using this one for the bushes in the scene so i'm just scaling them into the set direction all right everyone we are at the end of the breakdown i hope you learned something today and if you want some more information or if you want to ask a question you can always contact me on art station [Music] you

Channel: Stylized Station

Views: 140,621

Keywords: unreal engine 4, 3ds max, unreal engine, modular, creating environment art, modular environments, unreal engine 4 tutorial, game dev, how to, environment art

Id: dJnAuVtwxPI

Length: 30min 44sec (1844 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 27 2021