Collusion of the Sabbath - The Rise of a Witch in ue4

In this article we’re joined by Jake as we deep dive into the creation process for his environment, “Collusion of the Sabbath”. We find out how Jake planned his composition and lighting, used Megascans, created pockets of fog and much more.

Intro

Hey! My name is Jake Missing and I’m a Lighting Artist in the games industry based in the south of the UK. I work at Supermassive Games and previously I worked at nDreams as an Environment and Lighting Artist for 3+ years. My most recent shipped title is Phantom: Covert Ops for the Oculus Rift and Quest.

Before that I studied a BA in Computer Games Art at Sheffield Hallam University after getting a taste of making games at Confetti Studios College. I got into the industry in 2017 after winning the environment art category of the Grads in Games ‘Search for A Star’ competition. I have played video games for as long as I can remember and always thought it would be awesome to make them. Fortunately, all those years of work paid off and now I do!

This is a breakdown of my latest lighting art piece ‘Collusion of the Sabbath’ that was heavily inspired by the movie ‘The VVITCH’.

Using the Rule of Thirds for Composition

So, the main shot follows the rule of thirds pretty strictly. When I’m blocking out a scene and trying to find the composition I want for a camera I just fly round the cinematic viewport with the rule of thirds on in Unreal trying to find cool shots as I’m working. If I’m lucky it’s the shot I had in my head that I wanted to make to begin with, but sometimes it changes slightly if that isn’t the strongest angle or composition, and that’s fine too. It’s a good skill to learn when something isn’t working and not get too attached or be afraid to try new things. Its so quick and easy in Unreal to try out several iterations quickly, so take advantage of it!

When building the world, I placed the meshes whenever possible to work for the composition as well, drawing lines to the focal point. In this rough guide I’ve painted over the top, you can see the more horizontal lines follow things like the angle of the roofing, the fencing, the path and tree stump, everything is roughly pointing towards the witch that is the main focal point of the image.

Using Perspective to push Composition

The trees then do a great job of interrupting these horizontals with some vertical lines. This stops the image from looking like a complete vortex sucking you in and adds some balance. The two trees closest to the witch also frame her nicely and reinforces her dominance in the scene.

I also wanted to make sure the scene had a strong sense of depth and structure, so making clear foreground, midground and background elements was important so that the 3D space makes sense in 2D. This was really a job for knowing where and when to give more light to objects, for example leaving most of the foreground elements in shadow with the occasional rim light. Below you can see the red – background, blue – midground, and green foreground.

Using lighting and Color to focus objects

I think the answer to this question is more scientific than artistic. But bringing the two together, understanding the principles of art foundations and how the human eye reacts to certain colours and values can help create more emotive and impactful work.

As humans, our eyes are naturally drawn to light, or contrast. Whether it be a bright thing on a dark background or vice versa. Adding a light to the goat to change the value of his shape, brings him toward the viewers eye and separates him more from the environment, this effect is strengthened by rim lighting him to make him really pop. I’ve done this on a few other elements in the piece, such as Morigesh herself, or rim lighting things like the fence Using this tried and tested method on key focal points of your art helps the viewer read the image and hopefully, make your piece more successful.

There are loads of breakdowns online of how this is used in advertising, film, photography to make the viewer feel different things based on the intent of the creator. This is all well and good for a 2D medium, like this personal piece, but light plays a huge role in games as well. So much so that we could devote an article just to that. But essentially light is used heavily in games to guide the player’s eye and signpost objectives throughout as a subtle way of indicating where the player should go, rather than explicitly telling them. (As well as generally making things look awesome!)

Lighting Characters

I think a lot of the time it’s best to keep it simple. Sometimes after hours of adding and noodling, the best thing you can do is strip it back to maybe 3 solid important lights. If the character is good, you don’t want to add too many complicated light sources or colours that take away from it.

I tend to look at portrait photography, movie posters or movie stills of character focused scenes. Obviously, this is dependent on the type of mood you are trying to create, but typically you want your key light, some fill light and a backlight.

Here is a breakdown of the lights I used for Morigesh. As you can see there is the main key light, the contrasting fill light which comes from the spell she is casting, and a rim light. The main rim light is supported by some smaller ones to catch highlights on the arms and horns, aside from that it’s pretty simple!

Lighting and Mood

The vibe I was aiming for with this piece is horror. If I were to put 3 words to the scene it would be horror, gritty and ominous. Initially I thought about trying to replicate the colour grade and look of the film exactly but decided it might not be as impactful and I wanted to add my own twist and ideas.

I used the dense fog in the woods to create the ominous spooky feeling, using a cool desaturated blue palette around the red. This was to take something from the source material, in that the film is quite grey and desaturated. I loved the feeling of cold oppression that palette brought to the movie that reinforced the brutal and cursed environment they were living in. This also worked for me, because I knew I wanted to create something with a strong contrasting colour that steals the scene so to speak.

I took inspiration from existing concepts, stills from the movie and artwork that inspired scenes from the movie. This allowed me to turn an idea in my head to a more fleshed out approach by essentially cherry-picking parts I liked from other mediums. I like the motto that anything you make needs 80% reference and 20% ideas.

The red comes in with the ominous feeling, creating a sense of danger and upset in a natural world where punchy red lighting has no place, and so creates an upset. This is realised with the help of some VFX and the pose of Morigesh to make her look like she is about to unleash a spell. I added more of a green hue behind her to compliment the red and allude to a deeper forest path from where she came, as well as selling the dank forest atmosphere.

I added the grittiness to give the whole piece a cinematic horror vibe, partly in UE4 and a little in Photoshop afterward. I then added some chromatic aberration to the edges of the images to further hammer home the cinematography lens feeling that this was taken from a film or something.

Lighting Tips

Being subtle with some of the effects at your disposal is a big thing I feel. A lot of novice work tends to have really in your face god rays, dust particles, too much dark black areas of an image, overt fog and so on. Whenever you place something in a scene, I always find that even after initial tweaks, the next time I come back to work on it, I need to dial it down even more. Less is more so to speak and having subtle effects usually does much more to make a cohesive piece.

Going back to the point about too much dark black areas. Often you see work where you can’t make out what half of the image is because its just black pixels that are meant to be the darker/shadowed areas of the scene. It’s fine to have some things really dark and black, especially if it’s a stylistic choice like silhouetting, but you have to pay close attention to where this is happening in an image.

A trick I learned at work is to try zooming out and make the canvas small, look at it as a thumbnail, or get up from your desk and stand at the other side of the room and look at the image and properly review it. There is also the age-old trick of flipping the image horizontally or desaturating it to just look at the values. Looking at your work every now and again in ways like these can help you identify problems with your work and better judge it, to improve. It’s too easy to get caught up in small areas and focus on finer detail, make sure you take a step back and look at your art and what it’s actually doing.

Creating the Fog and Mist

I learned about the ‘BP_FogSheet’ asset from Peter Tran’s breakdown of his ‘Behemoth Ruins’ video. The asset can be found in the ‘Blueprints’ project under the ‘Learn’ tab in the Epic Games Library. It was great to learn of a free UE4 version that is flexible and useful and not having to rely on complicated VFX or anything. Adding fog sheets really help gel the scene together and add to the overall horror vibe.

The volumetric fog is doing a lot of the heavy lifting in creating the forest background. I was careful with placement of the trees to get the atmospheric stepping effect to really elevate the density of the fog. As well as where and when to delete trees to create some negative space to let the fog do its thing so you don’t just get dense black splotches of foliage everywhere.

Using Megascans

Here are the Megascans props I used highlighted in Megascans green! The ground materials were also Megascans. The rest of the assets were either free or paid for asset packs on the Unreal Engine Marketplace

I think being subtle and selective in the use of Megascans is key. Not to say that you couldn’t or shouldn’t use them to make an entire scene, it’s about what you’re trying to create at the end of the day. I think it works for this scene as I’m not trying to use any particular asset as a hero asset or key focus. I’m just using them to dress my scene and raise the quality bar.

Also, as high quality and great looking as they are, throwing them in to a scene with the mindset that it’s going to just make it amazing won’t work. Megascans take away the need to be really good at modelling or texturing or the time sink of actually making those assets, but set dressing, world building, lighting and rendering are all skills in themselves that you also need to pay attention to. You wouldn’t make everything yourself in a studio environment, so using Megascans and marrying your work with other work seamlessly is another skill as well.

How can lighting artists leverage Megascans to focus on lighting yet not feel like they just threw a bunch of Megascans together and lit the scene? 

Coming from an environment art background, I’m fully aware of the amount of work it takes to create personal pieces. If you’re aiming to model and texture everything yourself, create materials, foliage, etc… It takes months to get a personal piece you may or may not be happy with to post. The goal I set with myself for these last two lighting pieces was a quick turnaround of no more than 14 days. ‘A Lil’ Snack’ was done in 14 days exactly, evenings and weekends after work hours from start to finish. This piece was done in 7 days exactly, start to finish, but done during a week off work so probably on average the same amount of time dedicated to each piece.

That’s where the power of Megascans really comes in to play. Being freed up of the need to make any assets which is where the huge time sink is, allowed me to focus on world building, set dressing and lighting which is essentially all I’m wanting to show off here. As long as you’re not trying to mislead anyone online about whether or not you actually made certain assets there’s nothing wrong with it.

This is great for lighting artists that only want to showcase lighting skills, or even set dressing/ world building. I think to make it look like they aren’t all just thrown together is where the world building comes into it that I learned from being an environment artist. With both pieces I wanted to make sure there was an element of narrative and storytelling, like it was frozen from a cutscene in a game or movie. To me that just makes the scene slightly more unique, and more interesting than just a nice environment.

Growing as a Lighting Artist

Looking to cinema and photography for learnings, tips, reference and inspiration is a gold mine for me. They have been doing it for the last 100 years and gotten damn good at it. Video games are still in their infancy in comparison, though rapidly evolving and catching up.

I find watching cinematography breakdowns and hearing how lighters approach film is really useful from an artistic point of view. There are reasons to why almost everything is a certain way in films, for example right down to how clean or dirty an object in the scene is, so it lights and reflects a certain way. Learning why a cinematographer or director chooses to light something in a certain way is just another arrow to add to your quiver of lighting techniques.

I think also breaking down good art when you see it is incredibly useful, rather than just hitting the like button as fast as possible and scrolling on… look at it objectively. Why does this piece work? What isn’t so good about it? What’s the piece saying? Why did it catch your eye? Understanding why good artwork is good is key in you creating good work yourself, rather than just throwing something at a canvas and hoping for the best. This is useful for any discipline not just lighting art.

If you are an absolute beginner, there are so many tutorials out there to get you started. Grabbing some free environments from the Unreal Marketplace is a good start to see how they are lit, and then removing all the lights and starting from scratch to light the scene yourself.

Growing as an Artist

Lighting art mainly! It’s something I’ve always loved, ever since getting into the industry it’s been one of the most enjoyable parts of making games. Hence my new role at Supermassive Games as a dedicated lighting artist, I wanted to delve more into this world, focus on it fully, and create some stunning and emotive scenes and learn more and more about the medium. You never stop growing as an artist, especially with advancements in technology of games.

I’m still blown away by the lighting tech behind the UE5 tech demo. That could be an absolute game changer and if it lives up to the hype and delivers all the real time lighting goodness, we could start seeing some incredibly creative worlds.

Like most people who are probably reading this, I’m massively into games, movies, TV shows, art and so on. So really inspiration can come from anywhere at any time. I inundate myself with as many different types of media and art so that I can be inspired by different things. For example, the piece I made before this one, was inspired by some photography I liked, and this one, from Robert Eggers’ ‘The VVitch’.

I think having these different sources of influence helps create things that are slightly more unique ironically, for me at least. So, you’re not just inspired by games or any one thing. It’s also cyclical in that me watching a movie that inspires me, was inspired by something else, that was in turn inspired by something else.

Outro

I’m fortunate enough to live with two other environment artists, so we often work on personal work all at the same time, wander about the apartment and feedback on each other’s work, much like we would in the studio. During the lockdown, and how strange this year this has been, it’s great for us all to be able to riff ideas off each other’s work and motivate each other to crank out more personal work. Shoutout Toby and Jade! Check out their cool pieces from this past year.

As well as those guys, I show people at work when we are all chatting about what personal pieces everyone is working on to get feedback. Funnily enough artists are always up for a chat about art, and what they would do versus maybe what you would do.

I also cannot recommend enough art community discords like Experience Points. In my opinion even personal solo art should be somewhat collaborative in terms of feedback. It’s the best way to push your work to be the best it can and having a fresh pair of eyes look at your work every now and then is so valuable. If you’re looking to get into the games industry as well, this is the best way to get used to showing people your work, and getting good at taking feedback, as well as implementing it.

I think one last thing I’d like people to take away from this is understanding the importance and power of lighting. My art director always said good lighting can make an ok environment look great, and bad lighting can make a great environment look not so great. It’s generally that last stage at the end a lot of people don’t think about or give much time to, but it can take scenes to the next level. It’s essentially the final rendering and presentation of a scene that makes it what it is and sells so much of a piece in terms of atmosphere, mood and tone. Whatever the subject of your piece, environments, props, characters – spend some time giving the lighting some love at the end to show everything off to its fullest potential.

What can we be on the lookout for from you in the future?

I was thinking about doing another 14-day lighting piece to sort of turn the last two into a lighting art trilogy to round off them all being created in the latter months of 2020. If that isn’t on Artstation by the end of December, I’m either too busy with my new job or Demon Souls on the PS5 ends up being far too awesome (or both).

Could you please do a short outro, that would be perfect thank you

Thanks to Experience Points for liking my art enough to let me ramble on like this! If you made it this far it couldn’t have been so bad. I hope this article can help in some way, shape or form. If there is anything I didn’t touch on or if anyone wants any help or advice feel free to talk to me on Artstation or Twitter! Always happy to help.

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