FORGOTTEN LANDS - THE FUNDAMENTALS OF ART INFUSED IN UE4

Forgotten Lands demonstrates a masterful execution of artistic skills, both fundamental and digital. Alec Tucker walks us through his process focusing heavily on story, atmosphere, composition and everything in-between. With paint over analysis, this is a gold mine of knowledge.

Introduction

Hi, my name is Alec Tucker and I'm from California, USA. Since childhood I have always been into creative activities which started with drawing, coloring, and building Lego. These interests evolved into computers and computer games. When I was about 7 or 8 years old, my parents bought a Dell computer where I played my first video game which was Lego Island 2. I played that game for many hours due to the open world nature of it and how free I felt while exploring. This led to trying more and more games over time.

In high school, I discovered filmmaking and became immersed in video editing, cinematography, and visual effects. I decided to major in that once I went to college. This went on for several years and I started to lose interest. I transferred to California State University Chico to begin the Computer Animation & Game Design major. This sparked my love for game dev and 3D modeling/Environment art. For the two years I was there before graduating I spent most of my free time working on non school related modeling and environment art projects to hone my skills. In 2018, I tried out Unreal Engine for the first time and became addicted. Ever since then I have been making environments in UE4 and learning the program as much as I can to become better and make better environments.

Purpose of ‘Forgotten Lands’

I created this scene from an emotion I was feeling at the time rather than a core story or idea. I had moved to the opposite side of the country after being hired for my first full time job after graduating college and felt isolated and alone at times. I wanted to make something darker and moodier than usual work, due to that change in my life. This feeling combined with my urge to create something in UE4 to improve my skills resulted in this environment. I used this piece as a distraction to put my time into until I got used to my new job.

I have always been fascinated with the less explored areas of the world, often places that are forgotten or ignored. I wanted to make a location that felt like it hasn’t been visited or explored in a very long time. The idea of a chasm full of dead trees and skeletons combined with loneliness made for a very dark and melancholic mood. I haven’t explored creating a medieval environment before and wanted to test that out so I added the subtle medieval props like the chains and cage hanging to insinuate to the viewer what time period or genre this environment is. I wanted it to stay very ambiguous because I believe that leaving certain things up to the viewer makes it uniquely interesting to more people. Some people have compared this to Dark Souls and I think that is a very apt comparison. Although I am not a huge fan of playing those games, I still very much enjoy the atmosphere and mood that the environments of those games bring to the table.

Shape Language - Themes, Mood & Atmosphere

For this scene I wanted very obvious foreground, midground, and background shapes and light values to exaggerate depth. Adding the dense fog is supposed to help inhibit the feeling of not knowing what is beyond your line of vision, adding to the loneliness and uneasiness conveyed in the scene. I wanted the viewer to have questions after viewing such as, “Why are the skeletons down there?” or “Where is this?”. The location is intentionally unlike a lot of places in the real world which ties into the “less explored areas of the world” vibe I was going for. Additionally, scale was also a factor when placing the rock faces around the scene. I wanted to give a huge sense of scale to make the pit feel deeper than it actually was. The strong rock face silhouettes on either side of the focal point give a feeling of claustrophobia combined with that enormous scale.

Composition

One of my rules I go by when making an environment is to have strong leading lines for the viewers’ eye to follow as well as a path for a figurative player to follow if it were a real playable game.

The white lines show all of the leading lines I placed in the images intentionally. The opaque red path is what I set as the linear path a hypothetical player would follow.

This method makes my eyes naturally follow and eventually rest on the focal point or multiple focal points of the scene. The scene has very obvious rim lights and soft shadows which accentuates the edges of the rocks, making it feel less comfortable and more unwelcoming.

Another method I tried to make the whole scene feel more grounded is to emulate the look of an anamorphic lens and motion picture film. I have always found that most films shot on anamorphics feel much more organic and grounded than spherical lenses. To achieve this post processing effect I made a custom Bokeh texture to make the aperture oval instead of hexagonal or circular like most lenses. This method combined with keeping the camera angles to realistic heights and orientation makes the whole scene feel like someone is actually in the scene rather than viewing the scene from an outside perspective.

Technical Constraint - Epic Store Content Only

I chose to constrain myself because I feel that I make better work with at least one technical constraint. I chose to use only Epic Marketplace content because I was more concerned with spending time to knock the final image and composition out of the park in the final product than to spend a lot of time on the small details if I were to model and texture the assets myself. I went the route that helped me convey what I wanted to convey the quickest. I don’t always like working like this but in this case it worked well for me at the time.

I plan to make more scenes similar in scope to this one eventually. The countless hours I would have spent modeling and texturing or scanning every asset instead went into focusing harder on polishing my scene.

World Building

I wanted something gloomy and isolated feeling, and making it set in a desaturated, wet and foggy atmosphere made the isolated feeling feel stronger so I kept moving forward with that. It was originally set in a forest but I decided to exaggerate the symbolism of being isolated by making the scene set in a chasm that people clearly did not get out of or were banished to.

I stacked one rock mesh over and over again in different scale and rotation to give variety to the cliff sides. In the blockout phase, adding fog to the scene helped a lot because I could then determine how far away I wanted my focal points and how much detail could be seen from that distance. Once the cliff and atmosphere were set, I went further into the terrain sculpting and painting. Sloping the sides of the path upwards and adding water pooled at the bottom reminded me of a dungeon or being at the bottom of a well. After that, I did a foliage and grass pass, adding very tiny patches here and there to show that the area isn’t traveled through often. I chose dead or dying foliage to show that there is nothing alive down there, adding to the feeling of isolation. I went through several different color schemes in the tonemapper, some being on the cooler side and others more desaturated or sickly feeling.

After playing with this I settled on a warmer foreground and cooler fog to show the wetness and lack of warmth in the area.

Composition and shape language are arguably the most important aspects of an environment to get right. Making your brightness, roughness, and saturation values vary enough to make the scene less flat and more dynamic should be the goal.

I applied a threshold filter in Photoshop to identify the brightest parts of the image as shown above.

Thinking about how something would be in the real world is another method I use to make scenes feel more grounded. If water would be falling from above, there would be water dripping on the sides and water pooling at the bottom. I used only two lights in the scene, a directional light simulating diffused light from above and a spotlight to make the skeleton in the foreground pop slightly more than the rest of the image, bringing the viewer's eye directly to it. It’s all about tricking people's eyes into landing where you want them to land.

Making everything except your focal points slightly less saturated and slightly darker works wonders. Limiting your color palette also helps with reducing distractions for the viewer's eyes.

Advice & Tips

Get your composition nailed first before going too in depth with any other aspects of your scene. Solid composition is always more appealing than extreme detail in your models or lots of meshes. Pay close attention to what people notice or comment on when viewing your art, if it isn’t what you wanted them to notice or care about then it’s time to go back to the drawing board. Also keep working on projects even if they turn out bad. Be mindful of what aspects could be improved and focus harder on addressing those points every time you make more art.

Outro

Environment art is a daunting and complicated discipline to start with due to the many moving parts. When starting for the first time, focus on making one element of it really good and be mindful of how the other aspects of it could be improved. Hope you enjoyed this article and keep making art!