Life On Water

Welcome to Life On Water in a world where humanity is forced to live on giant ships and all of the land is underwater. We’re joined by Anastasiya in this article as she breaks down her vibrant environment set on an overgrown sea vessel, Life On Water. We cover topics such as composition, lighting, foliage creation, material layering in-engine, decals, breaking repetition and much more!

Intro

Hi everyone! My name is Anastasiya Osichkina and currently I work at My.Games - Allods Team as an Lead 3D Environment Artist. I have an interior design degree so I was familiar with 3D since my university, though real interiors were far less interesting for me than game environments. I have been playing video games since the age of nine, but didn’t think about actually working on them. I saw game worlds as kinda magical entities created by wizards. And I think it’s the best part of games that stuck with me from that time: creating worlds and total immersion for players is my goal and what I want to do.

Composition

For the composition of the project I’ve used several classical schemes: rule of thirds (where we put points of interest on intersections of lines), use of similar (in terms of shape and direction) supporting lines (red colour) and using same objects at different distances for showing scale (green colour). To keep the viewer's eye on the main part of the composition(buildings and crane area) I made a dark frame (blue colour) using shadows on the foreground to keep attention on the lighted part of the scene.

Colours

My choice of colours is mostly based on my initial concept. I wanted this environment to be bright and vivid on the edge between realistic and stylized (mostly in terms of colours and day lightning). Upon transitioning to Unreal Engine I reduced the amount of different colours to arrange focus better and make everything less noisy (so buildings area on back mostly orange/yellow and turquoise/blue for example).

Inspiration Behind Life On Water

Project “Life on water” went through a lot of changes and iterations. Initially I wanted to participate in a contest with this environment, but decided not to and just kept working on it. The idea came to me after re-watching “Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet” by Gen Urobochi. It’s about humanity being forced to live and survive on ships when every piece of land went under water. This anime has beautiful backgrounds and I took some ideas from it in terms of colours and shapes. My biggest mistake from the start was overscoping the scale of the project, later I cut a big chunk of the environment to keep it smaller. I think it’s a common mistake when you don’t have enough finished projects behind you, so sometimes it’s hard to estimate the amount of work and time you will spend on everything.

Concept Art

I really like to create environments based on my concepts. This way I can control all processes from start to finish. In my case concept art is just a mix of ideas, choice of colour palette and mood and not a final composition shot for sure. Usually I sketch concepts in simple shapes inside 3ds Max + V-Ray and then do a small overpaint in Photoshop. My concept was simple and cubic-based, but that was enough to push the work further. I then exported all of the assets as one merged piece into UE4 and then switched it with a more detailed blockout.

Waterfalls

For waterfalls I studied a great tutorial by Tyler Smith “Intro to UE4 VFX: Waterfall”. He explains in detail how to make and prepare maps for VFX/material and how to set up everything you will need for your waterfall. I did a simple shape and then just used a panning texture made in Substance Designer from photos of foam. Later I scaled the same shape across the Z axis. This way, the speed and effect of the waterfall feels totally different (in my case I needed very high waterfalls, not very intense, more like water coming out of pipes irregularly).

Lighting

For the main light I’ve used directional light for sun (with light function on top for clouds panning) + sky atmosphere for those nice bounces in the shadows (settings below). Also I added a nice amount of coloured point/spot lights in several places. Lights on edge for better blending background with ship shape (also imitating water/sky reflexes) (marked as blue). Some more lights in the darkest places on ship, to balance out light values of front/back (marked as green).

I wanted my lighting to be a bright sunny day. Like when metal on ship is super hot, but you are having a fresh breeze from the ocean. So plenty of fresh blue combined with warmer ship colours. You even have place to rest and sunbathe! In general my goal was to imagine how summer can go in such an unusual place. So light, atmospheric fog, and colouring (LUT mostly) on post-processing were my instruments to achieve that.

Materials

Creating materials is the most fun process for me. For this environment I made a list of materials I needed and went down the list (in the end not everything was made, and not everything that was made was used in the scene). Mostly I made different variations of metals such as painted, corrugated plates, diamond plates and rust. Also it was important to me to have a fast variation switch inside the Unreal Engine, so most materials were made with the idea of multiplying colour over it or changing colour based on mask (I implemented both these functions into my Master Material). All materials are quite straightforward and made fast (not many close ups in my scene so I was able to afford that) and mostly leaning to stylized type.

Here’s some nodes from colourful plate material for example (2nd on top row). Usually I work from height to colour, but here because of intersections of plates I used Shape Splatter and Shape Splatter Blend Colour nodes.

Foliage

My foliage workflow is the same for every plant in the scene. High-poly for leaves and branches made in ZBrush, then bake and texturing in Substance Painter or Substance Designer, assembling the final plant in 3ds Max. For example ivy - sculpt is made for one ivy leaf that was placed on branches inside ZBrush (for easier leaf placing I made IMM brush from leaf). Branches are generated with ivy growing script inside 3ds Max. After placing I’ve added some natural flow with a move brush.

Colouring and bake for the ivy were then made in Substance Designer. I baked an ID map for random colouring of the leaves and for separating branches.

Here’s another plant - fern, same process with bake and sculpt, but here the colour map is made in Substance Painter using simple Fill and Paint layers.

Props

For the props I’ve used several approaches. I made a bunch of unique set of props (umbrella, chairs, barrels, windows, doors), but mostly I've used tiles and layered system for large buildings, construction pieces and cloth. Here's a breakdown of one of the central props as an example: big red crane. Modelling is pretty straightforward, I modelled all the pieces and wasn’t worried with the amount of polygons. This prop is large scale and takes up a big amount of screen space. I didn’t bake unique normals for this stuff: so it was weighted normals (in 3ds Max in modifier stack) I’ve used here. For the layered system I needed to prepare masks, so I’ve made them using Substance Painter smart masks + some hand painting.

Inside UE4 I’ve made a Material function for Mask and MM that I’ve used inside a layered system in Layer Parameters. For details on layered system you can watch this video and check out this Artstation post.

Adding More Life To Your Environments

One of the great ways for making your scene more lively is to provide surfaces with different properties. I tried to add variety to mine with materials with vastly different roughness. Also I used decals for water for adding extra reflections. In some places, for example on paint decals, I decided to push normals and gloss to higher level to emphasize a thick layer of oily paint on the surface and ended with result I was very satisfied. It’s a great idea to have such surfaces where light will bounce from it.

Optimizing Workflows

In terms of optimizing workflows my main goal was reusing a bunch of construction assets and ability to recolour everything on go. I’ve built my work around these ideas. For building up houses I’ve used repeating sets of windows, doors, trim meshes, pipes, fences, ladders, metallic supports/arcs. Some of them are textured uniquely but most of them were prepared for a layering system (UE4) for recolouring. I even used this approach even with clothes, umbrella and lounge chairs but with colouring it based on BW masks.

Advice For Students

The best advice I can give for students is: don’t drown in the amount of information that is around right now in terms of education. There are plenty of tutorials, guides and courses but not all of them are worth your time. Better get through 1-2 good courses, but with a fundamental approach to creating environment art. For me the best experiences of education were with CGMA courses and getting mentorship with amazing artists at Mentorship Coalition. I was lucky to learn from Jobye-Kyle Karmaker and Peter Tran, their advice was super valuable and opened my eyes to awesome approaches in creating environments.

Working With References

I always start working with a giant board of references. Recently I started using Miro, it’s very convenient and has more functionality then PureRef (I still use it though for smaller assets/scenes or when doing sculpts). For style and visual goal I was mostly looking at Apex Legends (colours, general style, using of sky/clouds). So most of my references were from there + some other games for assets ideas. Here's the final look of my board. It has such sections as games (game screenshots from games for ideas and style), my concept + colour schemes + cloud references, assets + houses parts, ships, greenery, materials, anime inspiration and the main part list of to-do’s and done’s. Also progress line on top really helped to move forward even in the worst moments of this environment.

Background Houses

So for building up the background cluster of houses I started with simple boxes decorated with trim meshes. Several sizes unwrapped and ready for switching tile textures on it. On top of the base I add smaller pieces of architecture such as balconies, windows, pipes, fences, roofs and supports making construction look kind of merged together but also very unstable. All combinations of assets are made inside Unreal Engine using blueprints and sets of modular assets I’ve prepared before. After adding architecture I add foliage on top and along the edges (idea was greenery grows here on roofs so most tops of buildings are covered). And finishing off, I add decals on places where probably leaks are gonna appear and places of intersection of geometry. For hiding repetitive parts I also used flags and pipes (in different shapes and sets) on top of buildings. It makes every piece of building more unique and interesting to look at.

Areas Looking To Learn

As an artist I have a lot to learn yet, I’m very interested in pushing my composition and general art direction skills further. I want every environment I made to be captivating and enjoyable for viewers. Also I really try to improve each of my new projects with new ideas I can test while doing projects. You know that satisfying feeling when an idea pops in your head and you start researching (with spark in your eyes) if you really can do that or if some artists already had a solution for that. In personal projects we have an amazing ability to be creative at our fullest, I think it’s amazing.

To speak about the technical side of things, I am really looking forward to switching to Blender and forcing myself to use more trim textures. I even had some future plans on making small dioramas based on 1-2 trims only.

Inspiration

My inspiration is usually a mix of games I play and movies/series I watch. Also I like to casually start my day from the twitter/artstation feed of my favorite artists and a bunch of ceramics/textures inspiration on Pinterest. For me it’s very important to absorb a lot of visual material, that’s the way to make your brain work and generate ideas (best ones are usually late at night, that’s why I always have paper or phone near me, so as not to forget ideas in the morning :D).

Feedback

While doing personal projects I try to search for feedback later in production (though sometimes you can miss moment where feedback would be useful). It’s hard for me to ask for feedback regularly. That's why the mentorship kind of education was very suitable for me. But in general there are many amazing communities of artists where you can ask for help and opinion. I think the best way is to ask questions, describe what you wanted and what you think you didn’t achieve in the current state of the project. (clear questions are the best way to get clear feedback).

Additional Advice

My advice is not to stop in the middle of any project and finish everything. Honestly almost all projects (like assets, environments, sculpts) look awful at the start and sometimes in the middle. I believe every art can be improved if the strong sides of the project are pushed and brought to the front (like an artist can be skilled in sculpt/light or texturing - show it). It’s useful to look at other people's WIP projects and read breakthroughs to see that not everything looks amazing from the start. I think a lot of people feel discouraged because they don’t know what hides behind that amazing picture you see on the trending page at Artstation.

Future Work

I have a lot of ideas for my projects, some WIPs and some reference boards ready to go. In future I want to add variety into my portfolio with different types of environments: mood variety and indoor/outdoor stuff. Looking forward to it!

Outro

Giant thanks for Experience Points for this opportunity, I hope the article will be useful for readers. You can find me and my art and WIPs on my Artstation and Twitter. Thank you!