Out of Gas - Frozen Beauty within a stylized scene

Out of gas? Fear not, we have the perfect article for you to read. Alex Beddows gives us an insight on how he built this beautiful snowy scene, from the snow shader to transitioning to Blender, to the skybox and working on composition. This piece really nails the fundamentals and you don’t want to miss out.

Introduction

Hi there, I am Alex Beddows, Senior games artist at Live 5 Gaming, Associate Lead Artist at Dekogon and the host of the GDD Podcast. I have been in the industry for 6 years at this point, starting at the age of 19 working in mobile games. Since then I have worked in AR, VR , app design, AAA and iGaming.

So what got me into 3D…well it was kind of by accident. Since I was a kid I knew I wanted to work in games, I remember playing through PS1 games with my sister, and I would imagine sequels and mechanics that never existed for them, so naturally I did a game design course at collage and this was my first introduction into 3D, the rest is history!

Inspiration & Planning

But anyway, the snow scene, why did I make it ? Well off the back of my Safehouse scene, I was looking at my ArtStation, and realised I hadn’t spent much time on outdoor stuff, and I was recently diving into the theory behind composition that Tjalle Keus brought up on the podcast. The way I approach every environment is I want to learn something from this, while also practicing a skill, so I wanted to take the opportunity to really learn snow shaders, while practicing my lighting and composition skills of an outdoor scene.

These where the images I gathered for my lighting and palette reference, I really loved the dramatic nature of the lighting, its almost unearthly, it also made the snow way more interesting to work with, as broad daylight snow can just look bleach white so this allowed me to do something slightly more stylistic with the snow.

I had the snow shader made, but at the time felt like I was struggling with a composition, so I decided to incorporate some hard surface into the scene to give it some frame to work off. Although this was a bad idea in hindsight as the piece was originally a technical exercise, but evolved into a full blown scene, which blew my original time frame out the water and really hindered my motivation on the scene…but lessons learnt.

With Blender 2.8 rolling out also, and watching Jeremy Estrellado also streaming himself learning it I decided to uninstall max and commit to learning blender on this project, which may not have been the wisest move to jump in the deep end, but I am certainly glad I did. I have to preference this bit with the fact I struggled with out the box blender 2.8, I was only able to really get to grips with it once I used Machin3 Tools free addon, it just made the whole package click with me and made it accessible so if you are looking to get into blender, it is worth checking it out. I am not going to preach that you should 100% jump on the blender bandwagon, I have not spent enough time in it to have an authority on that, all I know is I am enjoying my time in it, and at this point in time prefer it to max.

Composition

When I was hashing this composition there was 2 types of leading I wanted to explore, 1 to the central story point, and one leading the eye to the different technical details. Starting with the left example, the overarching theme I wanted to convey was the harsh contrast of the subject matter and the tranquil surroundings, the dead hanging bodys silhouette against the beautiful skyline was the focal point of this theme, so I tried to get the leading lines to all focus in on this area, the building angle, tree line, the road and the telephone poll cables all draw to this part of the shot, which is the most extreme example of the theme. That is the users ‘first read’ , the second read is when they explore the image, and I wanted people to explore the details naturally starting off on the ‘front’ of the image, in example 2 I drew the general journey I was going for which works in either order, the viewer goes between the focal points ending up each time at the focus of the scene from a technical view, the snow. The last aspect of the composition I really stuck with throughout the project was the harsh line between the sky and snow, the contrast of hot and cold colours was a really interesting element that I stumbled on when trying to get the gas station leading lines working, and stuck with which gives the scene a visually pleasing view when you only glance at the image, in a situation like Artstation thumbnails.

Materials & Shaders

The snow material, so this is a landscape material consisting of 4 elements, undisturbed snow, Rough snow, Snow tracks and concrete. I picked up a few pointers from the tutorials Jacob Norris released, but essentially, I set up the material like you usually would for individual shader, making sure there is instanced parameters to control things such as tiling, SSS colour or intensity or the roughness properties.

I then plug each of them into material break nodes, a tip from Jacob, to help keep the graph somewhat clean so that it can all plug into a material landscape node and then an output. Although the graph looks kinda crazy it is a lot of copy and paste. I then used this material on a terrain, to paint the height of the landscape and where the paths / road tracks where, which helped give the whole space a unique feel.

Another shader I needed was a triplanar projection, this was for all the building walls, rather than make a modular kit for this bit I used this shader with vertex painting implemented so I could use my cleaned up blockout model, and paint custom damage in where I needed. This one had 4 layers, Plaster, cracked plaster, mortar then brick.

The triplanar projection part of the graph is the key part of the shader to allow me to do what I needed to, this is the above set up, with a static switch to turn it off in the instance material if I need to, and this part of the graph plugs into the UV part of the input texture.

This is the graph using height lerp to blend between the materials, with control of contrast of the blend, with a noise mask that can be multiplied on top of the height to give it more disorder. I also keep a switch at the end for enabling tessellation and controlling it.

Day/Night Cycle

I spent a long time working with the day and night cycle, and I was struggling with this until I had a tip from a DiNusty member to check out GoodSky on the UE4 marketplace, I really recommend this, it allowed me to get a very authentic skybox with a working day and night cycle, this really allowed me to focus on refining the colours to match my reference so I really think this is worth picking up for some quick and effective results.

Advice & Tips

If I had to say one thing that really helped me on this project it would be consistently getting feedback, through the whole project I was showing multiple people and communities the project and getting their input to help me refine the project. I mainly interacted with the DiNusty community who I owe a big thankyou to for helping me tackle this scene.

Thanks for reading, I hope this helps understand how I approached the scene and went about creating the elements, check out the final project here.