From Sea To 3D

We hope you’re hungry because this time we’re serving you a tasty article from Nimer as we discover how he crafted his life-like kitchen scene. We learn how Nimer utilized Megascans, created beautiful natural lighting and created a cinematic that’s good enough to eat. Let’s dive in!

Intro

Hello everyone! My name is Nimer Vohra and I am a Senior 3D Artist at Quixel - Epic Games. I started my career as a Graphic Designer back in 2012 and worked for a few years for local ad agencies. During that time I start doing Urdu calligraphy (especially for logos) and then I started doing web and mobile app UI but I like to think of myself as a “storyteller”. Art comes as an inherent hobby to me as I hail from a poetic family from the Indo-Pak period of the culturally rich sub-continent. As a result, poetry and music have had a huge impact on my artistic inclination and are something I’ve spent a lot of time visualizing through my art, whether inside the 3D realm or outside of it. Having said that, I have developed an interest in Western Culture & Art as well, and it has led me to some explored avenues I’m excited to indulge myself in. I joined a local indie studio here in Pakistan where I learnt a lot and officially started my journey as an Environment Artist.

Compositional Paintover/Analysis

In the beginning it was nothing but just warm up sketch that my friend Saad Irfan and I had created. Every other weekend we set up a call over Google Meet, pick one topic and do our doodlings around a topic. Similarly for this scene, the topic was fish and Saad sculpted the fish, meanwhile I made a fish scale material using Substance Designer and then after that we thought why don't we make a small scene around the fish. So the first idea was to make a bloody ice slab in which few of the fish were laying around as if it was in the market/bazaar but then we found this image and the whole idea was turned from the messy fish market to kitchen slab. The other reason we went with the kitchen slab was because we wanted to be quick with this exercise. After the images, Saad made a very rough layout /paintover for the composition and how we could set up things around the fish.

Colour/Material Palette

When we started this scene we knew what kind of look we wanted from this and that was a very food / kitchen chef vibe as if we were making some kind of food commercial so the main theme was to use a lot of yellows and reds with the balance of greens on top of a dark marble background. At the beginning, we were going for a more wooden feeling but that wasn't going very well with the look we wanted to create for this so we decide to use black marble as the base surface and build everything on top of that.

Lighting

I always prefer to use a physically based lighting setup in which I don't have to use a lot of fake bounces but sometimes you have to use some fake bounces to give it a certain personality. When you are using physical values for lights and exposure then the camera needs to be physical as well (ISO, Aperture, and Fstop) especially when you are creating the real cinematic look. The way I do my lighting for a realistic look is I set my light intensity unit to physically calculated values and set the exposure to manual in UE4 so that way I can adjust the frame brightness using the camera setting (ISO, Aperture, and Fstop numbers) I will start the lighting by setting the skylight first and add a directional light accordingly and then adjust the exposure and camera option and find the brightness of the frame and then add some fake light bounce if needed. On top of that I add a sky sphere using the same HDRI that I am using for the skylight to make it believable that this scene belongs to the same atmosphere. In UE4 if you are using manual exposure and your lights are dynamic Skylight capture from the environment doesn't work properly so I find the best value for my sky brightness in this scene the value was 1400 and then I use the same number in my sky and Directional Lights.

Collaboration

I was inspired by Saad's work when I was doing Graphic Design. I used to watch his spit paints on Vimeo, Saad is a mentor to me he teaches me the fundamental of art and anatomy. At that time I was trying to be a Character Artist he thought me a lot about shapes, forms, and composition. Saad and I did a lot of commercial projects together so we have really good sync when it comes to sharing parts of projects. When we share any project we know what needs to be done on each side and I believe that's an advantage to have such a good sync. We play each other strengths, I take care of the technical parameters and environment art and Saad is good at art direction, characters, colours, and forms. When we combine those skills results are often really good. This scene was one of the many that we did together and we will make more in the future.

Benefits Of Using Megascans

Well I enjoy creating everything by myself but sometimes it's not the case because of the time limit and your focus of the project is not to make a particular object instead you have to build the entire scene in the given time. That's where Megascans comes in great help its let you pick you thousands of photoreal 3D assets and 2D surfaces you will focus on more important artistic tasks like shapes colours and composition and you are not worried about creating all the assets by yourself while this scene is not big it's a very small scene so we worked on the custom models and materials that were not available in the library which was fish and scales it gives the time and opportunity to work on composition shapes and colours along with camera moves and all those subtle details.

Creating The Cinematic

I have done a lot of TV commercials in past and for this scene. I wanted to do something similar as if someone is shooting for the food commercial or restaurant kitchen tour in which the camera has the handheld feeling of using a gimbal which gives you subtle shakes in the camera moves and each shot is planned and it should fit the golden ratio but with some errors which happen in real life. I want to add all those mistakes that happen in real life to make it more believable because, in reality, nothing is perfect if the image is so perfect it will look too CG so I try to add movement errors intentionally so it doesn't feel so CG, for movement I use Unreal Camera Shake with very low values.

I prefer to use physical settings when it comes to cameras and lights, it all depend on the size of the object and where it resides in the scene that gives me what lens I should use. If the object is small, around 20 cm or so, I will use 85mm or maybe a bigger number but sometimes I use a very flat lens for bigger objects too. If you are looking for nice shallow depth of field I would suggest using a bigger lens. I use 85mm mostly for closeups. and also it depends on how big your aperture is if your aperture is very narrow somewhere around f8-14 you are not going to get the depth of field and if you want a nice shallow depth of field use a lower F-stop.

Interests

I love movies, poetry and music so yeah, storytelling is the way to go for me!

Inspiration

I love nature and quiet places so whenever I need Inspiration I took my camera and went hiking or somewhere quiet and close to nature. The best way to take inspiration is from real life and observe things around you for example how people talk, how trees look like around you, how things get aged or erode, and use those patterns and observations into your work mixing with your imagination as if you have to make these things for your self, I love taking pictures of clouds and skies I am obsessed with clouds and their beauty sometimes I look for hours and yet they are so fascinating. And Obviously, digital media is also contributing to the visual library and Pinterest is the best site for that on top of that paintings whether its from old master's or some great artist from today.

Feedback

Normally I post my work online on Artstation and Facebook groups but I share my work among my artist friends like Saad and they give great feedback and suggestions.

Outro

I would like to thank you all for reading this article I hope I didn't bore you guys a lot and I also hope you guys find something useful. If you have any questions feel free to send me a message on Artstation. Once again thank you so much!