Iroh’s Bookstore - creating an organic fantasy environment with story and character

In this article Robert breaks down his environment piece, Iroh’s Bookstore, which also saw him pick up Rookie of the Year in the Games Development category of The Rookie Awards 2020. Join us as we discover how Robert approached planning the scene from a concept, set dressing and lighting to create story, creating foliage using Substance Designer and more!

Intro

Hi there! First off I just want to say thanks for having me on the website. I’m grateful that we as a community have all of these amazing resources, and I feel very honoured to be a part of it.

My name is Robert McCall, and I am a 3D environment artist, currently working my first industry job at Hellbent Games Inc. in Vancouver, BC. I’ve grown up gaming, watching films, creating art, and immersing myself in works of fiction. It’s always been a dream of mine to work as an artist, and at the age of 20 I decided to act upon my dreams, and enrol myself at Think Tank Training Centre.

Think Tank Training Centre

I found out about Think Tank through a family friend. After hearing about the school I decided to take a tour, and I was really drawn to how intimate and community focussed it was. I have always liked the idea of smaller classrooms, and more one on one time with teachers. I had no prior experience in 3D before starting a one year course at the school, so it was a pretty intensive and crazy learning experience. Although, with the great support I had from my teachers, mentors, and fellow students, I never felt completely out of my depth.

Think Tank also offers an amazing alumni program, where you are free to continue studying at the school after the one year program ends. All Think Tank asks in return is that you continue to work hard, and that you support new students entering the school. I loved this idea, and I found that it took a lot of the pressure off. I never felt like once my time was up, I would be booted to the curb to fend for myself. I ended up taking an extra three months to finish my project, which proved to be invaluable towards landing my first job in the industry.

Scene Planning and Blockout

Klaus Pillon’s painting really connected with me when I first saw it on Artstation, although I admit, I was a bit apprehensive to take it on. There were so many intricacies, and unique details within the concept that I knew that taking a modular approach was going to be difficult. Also, I knew that achieving the sense of scale, and grandeur was going to be a challenge in itself.

When deciding to take on the project, I had a few goals that I really wanted to achieve. My main objects were:

⦁ A feeling of scale and expansiveness to the world.

⦁ Dramatic contrast between the organic and inorganic aspects of the scene.

⦁ Lush and beautiful vegetation.

⦁ Detailed prop and material work.

⦁ Engaging and atmospheric lighting.

⦁ A feeling of motion, and life in the scene

⦁ A sense of character, story and intimacy to be experienced through the environment.

After getting a clear idea of what my goals were, I started right away on reference hunting, and my initial blockout. I found the blockout stage for this project to be quite difficult, given the organic nature of the concept. This led to a very iterative layout approach, where I would tweak aspects inside Maya and ZBrush, bring them into unreal, and then compare with the original concept. I think the blockout is one of the most important aspects of a scene, and that it's necessary to set yourself up for success with a solid foundation. You don’t want to be having to worry about layout and composition issues halfway through development!

Set Dressing and Storytelling

Quite early in development on the project I decided that I wanted to add something extra, and personal to the scene. This got me thinking about what kind of person would own a bookstore in this fantastical world. I then started to develop the character of Iroh, and I began creating a clear picture of who he was, what his hobbies were, and how he engaged with the world around him.

I found that answering those questions early not only helped me define what kind of props I would need to add to the scene, but also increased my engagement with the project ten fold. I wasn’t just replicating a beautiful piece of art in 3D, but I was building my own character, and I was putting my own creative ideas into the scene. I would recommend that when creating an environment, the characters who inhabit said environment should always be considered as well!

Prop Work and Modularity

Creating a modular workflow for this project was quite tough I admit, but I tried to optimize my workload wherever I thought that it wouldn’t harm the quality of the scene. I got a lot of use out of Trim Sheets throughout the project, but most of the props felt too unique and personal to be reused. This meant I had to become pretty quick at working through them, and by the end of the project I had become a lot faster in my asset creation.

Here’s a great tutorial by Polygon Academy, that breaks down the workflow behind trim sheet creation.

The elevator was my biggest prop challenge throughout the project, and it was my first time taking on a big hero asset. It took me quite a while in the end, but I learned an incredible amount, and every asset that I worked on after it felt like a breeze.

I started the elevator off with a quick block out for scale and some reference hunting. Then, after getting the major shapes and forms in, in my mid poly, I started working on splitting up both the high and low versions of the asset. At this point, I just started going through the prop piece by piece, while making sure that I was going to be able to get a good bake out of Marmoset. I found that for the ornate details, it was really easy and cost effective to just use cards on the low poly, and bake out both the alpha and normal information from my sculpted details. It doesn’t hold up so well once you get closer to the elevator, but I found that from the distance that it was going to be viewed from, it worked wonders.

Something I find really fun about environment art, is having to figure out how something will actually work in a three dimensional space. In a 2D concept you can throw in something cool like an elevator, without thinking too much about what’s powering, and anchoring it. Once you start building out the scene in 3D however, those aspects become quite important in creating a believable and cohesive world. Given that the concept didn’t give me a very clear understanding of what was actually going on underneath the hood in this instance, I had to do a little digging!

After searching around for some old steam powered machinery I stumbled upon this thing called a steam donkey, which turned out to be absolutely perfect for the scene. Not only did it fulfil the exact practical function I was looking for, but it also looked awesome and gave the scene what I thought to be that extra little steampunk kick, which is always a good thing. I would recommend digging a little deeper in your scene planning, and putting some good thought into how things fit together.

I ended up adding a sculpt pass on just about all of the wood in my scene, and it forced me to find a pretty quick sculpting workflow inside ZBrush. While researching some different techniques, my friend Hussain Dabhiya showed me this great video from Arkane Studios, where they touch on their approach to creating wood assets throughout Dishonored 2. I really loved the quality of their art alongside their workflow, and found that I was able to get pretty great, and speedy results by replicating it.

When creating assets, I made sure to not only use lots of real world reference, but also reference from artists I admire. This made it easier for me to see where my prop work was weak and where it was strong. I also got a lot of reuse out of my own smart materials, created in both substance painter and designer; while remembering to make significant changes across different props to help them feel unique. This could be something as simple as changing some of the colour values, tweaking the roughness, or increasing the intensity of my dirt and grunge masks.

Lighting and Effects

I feel like a lot of the mood and lighting was already taken care of by the concept itself, although there were some tweaks I wanted to make to emphasize certain aspects of the scene. I mainly wanted the paper lanterns littered throughout the environment to have a larger impact on their surroundings. I tried using them to create lines of action, and guide the viewer's eye to different points of interest in the scene. They were also my main tool in breaking up and contrasting against the environments overwhelmingly cool colour pallet.

I also ended up getting a lot of use out of Ue4’s spotlights, and I found that they were an awesome tool to create highlights and push certain forms past the limitations of my main directional light. A great piece of advice I received from a mentor around Think Tank, named Aaron Dodd, was to just be loose when lighting, and have fun with it. Push things like crazy, and then dial them back once it becomes apparent that you’ve gone too far.

While I was pretty happy with how my lighting turned out in the end, I still feel like I have a long way to go. Looking back at my scene now, I can’t help but shake my head looking at this little lighting blemish here for example. It’s a good example of pushing things too far, and then not dialling them back enough. I think I was just so driven to get that light punching through the Spanish moss that I let it cloud my vision, and sadly didn’t come to my senses until it was too late.

Also, a little not that these lightmass settings are pretty overboard. I wanted to squeeze the best quality as I could for my final light bake, but I would recommend only scaling them up once it you are totally satisfied with your lighting. While working, it's good practice to keep the quality low, and bake on preview.

Almost all of the lights throughout the scene are static, although there’s one instance where I decided to experiment a little bit with UE4’s ray tracing capabilities. I was having some troubles lighting the patio, and I felt like no matter what I tried, the lighting felt either too washed out or too sharp. After switching the lantern’s light to a moveable ray traced light however, I was really blown away with how soft the shadows felt, and how well it played off of the various props scattered around the table. There was a little drawback in regards to UE4’s inability to render translucent ray traced shadows, but I figured that the beautiful soft shadows were worth the hit to realism.

A great resource I used when lighting, is the Unreal 4 Lighting Academy series by Tilmann Milde. I found that his approach of fully going through the lighting process really helped me learn both the artistic and technical aspects of lighting within UE4.

For the Background, I used a lot of UE4’s default smoke particles, while making adjustments to speed and opacity to create a stronger feeling of rolling fog. All of the lights in the backgrounds were created by just scaling and duplicating emissive cards to create the impression of distant buildings. As for other effects, I knew I wanted both the fireflies and the birds in the environment, to help give the scene a feeling of life, and motion. A great way to immerse your audience, is to give your environments that little touch of movement, even if it's as simple a flickering light, some fireflies, or some cloth blowing in the wind.

Foliage

The Foliage throughout the scene was a really fun challenge for me, especially the large clumps of moss. This was my first foray into working with real time foliage, and it definitely took me a couple different approaches to get it feeling good.

My main approach to creating foliage started in Maya, where I would create blocked out shapes of the different leaves. After that I would bring the blockouts into Zbrush and get sculpting, rendering out my finished results. Once I had my various rendered maps, I would bring the files into substance designer, and use them to drive different procedural textures, based on the AO, height, curvature, and normal maps of my sculpted leaves. Once I was happy with the textures, I would bring my texture atlases back into maya and create my final plants. I also experimented a little bit with polypainting inside zbrush, and I found that to be a cool way to get a less procedural, and more handcrafted look.

While working on foliage, I mainly followed this lovely tutorial by Peyton Varney. If you read his tutorial, he goes more in depth with the methods I used.

The thick, overgrown moss on the left side of the bookstore proved to be another challenge. I couldn’t find any examples online for the effect that I wanted to achieve, so I really had to get out of my comfort zone, and find my own solutions.

After a lot of brainstorming, and trial and error, I ended up finding a result that I was quite satisfied with. To start, I downloaded a couple moss atlases from Quixel, and using substance designer, I scattered them with shape splatter nodes; creating a somewhat convincing layer of moss. After I had my cards, I used UE4’s foliage painting tools to spread them around areas that I wanted to feel very lush and overgrown. After they were placed, my mentor Stef Velzeboer, helped me create a world position shader to drive colour breakup, and world offset on the moss cards themselves. This gave them a far more natural and chaotic look, that really helped sell the effect.

For anybody curious about my master shader for vegetation, you can find it here!

Cinematography and Shot Planning

Starting the project, I knew that I would need to form a very clear idea of what I wanted to show, and what I could get away with hiding. Given the scale of the scene, and how open it is, I would have gone crazy if I needed to figure out nice compositions from every single angle.

This got me thinking about creating a strong, motivated series of shots that would show off all the different elements of my environment, while also giving the cinematic a direct and relaxing feeling of motion. I wanted the video to open on the bookstore and end on the patio. That way I could draw the viewer in with a strong establishing shot, but end in a more intimate setting. I found that nailing down my establishing and closing shots really helped me figure out the most natural progression between the two. I also tried to keep my camera moves slow and simple, to really let the audience take in the scene. I think if you try and do too much with a shot, it can quickly become overly complex and distracting.

Challenges

In the end, this project created so many different, and interesting problems for me to solve, that it's hard for me to pin down my greatest challenges. I think for one I would say the scale, and openness of the scene was quite immense; and it became pretty daunting for me in the early stages of development. What I found worked best though, was to not worry about the finished result, but to just put one foot in front of the other and keep focussed on my next task.

Vegetation was another significant challenge, and more specifically the moss cards. It can be scary when you run into a problem where nobody has a specific answer for you. However, I found that by trying different things and continuing to think of new solutions, I was able to overcome it as well; even if it did take me quite awhile!

Important Skills

Aside from the more foundational skills, such as materials, texturing, modelling, optimization, modularity and lighting; I believe that it's really important to build characters, and stories through the worlds you create. When building environments, I feel like it's a balancing act of so many different aspects, that it can be pretty easy to lose sight of your original vision. You can become too focussed on utilizing the newest tricks and techniques, while forgetting to create art that really connects with people.

There’s a lot of work that goes into creating environments, and it's important to develop things with an iterative mindset. Make sure that you manage your time wisely, work large to small, and spend the necessary time to build yourself a strong foundation. Try to avoid getting bogged down with detail and prop work too early in development.

I also think a good artistic eye, and the ability to be self critical are essential. It really helps to know when you need to push something further, and to realize what aspects of your scene are falling short. With that said, I believe it's also important to know when to leave something, and be proud of what you have created. Looking back at Iroh’s Bookstore, there are so many things I feel like I could have improved upon, but I am happy that I left the project when I did.

Advice

Be kind to yourself! It's important to be self critical, but it's also important to be patient with your progress. Furthermore, seek feedback from others whenever you have the opportunity to. There are an incredible amount of resources out there, so you should utilize them as much as possible. Work hard, and stay inspired!

Thank you very much for featuring me on the website, and I really hope that this is helpful for some of you out there. If you have any specific questions for me, please feel free to shoot me a message through my Artstation.