A Run To The Warren

Hop into this fantastic article with EXP's own Tim Burroughs as we dissect his beautiful stylized scene, The Mega-Warrens, which saw him pick up an Honourable Mention in the Untamed Artstation Challenge.

Intro

Hi everyone, I am Tim Burroughs and I am a Level Artist at Rare working on Sea of Thieves. I have always been interested in art. When I was younger this manifested in drawing manga and painting Warhammer figures, but after a year off Civil Engineering studies that went pretty poorly, I realised I loved video games and 3D modelling (which had pushed me to engineering from CAD work at school). I then decided to study Computer Games Art (BA) at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge and got my first job in games working in QA at Frontier on Planet Zoo. After that I moved onto working on Kena: Bridge of Spirits as an environment artist and after the game shipped, I worked freelance on a few projects before starting at Rare.

Composition Analysis

I wanted to push my art fundamentals with this piece and explore a new style. I decided against using one of the environment concepts and instead looked at the props category for interesting buildings. Brett Billingham’s The Mega-Warrens concept stood out to me as an interesting starting point. I loved the shape and the colours and was excited to try to build the world around it.

I knew that the warren would be the main focus of the scene and used a few techniques to draw the eye towards it. I like to use a very wide 2.39:1 aspect ratio as it feels more cinematic and helps give a grand look to the scene. Using the rule of thirds, I placed the warren along the intersection of these lines and used my placement of the rest of the elements to guide the eye. I placed a lot of elements to create leading lines towards the warren including clouds, wind trails, posts along the road and even the shape of the landscape and treelines.
I made sure to frame the shot using foreground foliage and clouds.

Story Behind The Scene

Wanting to expand on the idea of a world where rabbits had evolved to the point of having working windmills, I tried to think about what would be important to them and how they may perceive the world around them. I added a road, a well trodden path, that they would use to get to the warren and used sticks as markers along the road to define the border but also to act as a form of signage that they would use to understand where the roads lead. To add to this, I took the carrot charms that were on the concept and extrapolated the idea out to them being worshipped by the rabbits as a symbol of food and safety with an almost religious feel to them.

The majority of the warren would be underground but they would still need to harvest food from above ground. This meant delivering the carrots to the warren, which gave me the idea to add the cart. With the cart, I then needed to add tracks to show it coming down the road. I also built the cart with a yoke to indicate how the rabbits would use it.

In the background, I used repeated warrens to sell the idea that this is a network that stretches across the field. I also kept the camera low to the ground to help make the scene feel small in scale, like we are a rabbit looking down the road.

There were also smaller details, like how I wanted to represent having wind to go along with the Windmills. I opted to for the wind streak lines common in stylised games and also to have pollen particles blow across the scene. This all helped to give a lot of life to the video.

Lighting

I like to work in broad strokes and try to not use too many lights. This helps me to iterate faster and play around with my set up more easily as I don’t have to keep track of too many things.

Starting with the standard sky light and directional light, I try to angle the directional light around until I get shadows that I am happy with. I found through some testing that, despite unreal telling you that it doesn't work, using both the sky atmosphere and the atmospheric fog created a much brighter sky that fit my scene. Adding some spot lights helped me to get the light hits on the warren to help pull the eye in.

I used a custom material on my directional light to create cloud shadows, this helped me to get some contrast and variation to break up my large flat field.

The biggest impact comes from the post processing and some choice console commands. Colour grading always helps to push the colours and contrast and I also used a custom post process material to allow me to overlay some colour in specific depths of the scene. This was used to darken the foreground to help frame the shot alongside a vignette.

I use the following console commands on most of my scenes to help push the quality of the rendering:

r.Tonemapper.Sharpen 0.75

r.AmbientOcclusion.Method 1

r.VolumetricFog.GridPixelSize 3

r.DefaultFeature.AntiAliasing 2

r.TemporalAASamples 32

r.forceLOD 0

If you want to learn more about what these do check out this fantastic guide by Daniel Stubbington!

Creating Feeling and Mood With Lighting

Lighting is one of the biggest factors when setting mood in a scene. Good lighting can make mediocre scenes look good, but bad lighting will drag down even a great scene. In my scene, I wanted to create a bright serene mood that was calming. It was still important to make sure the the scene wasn't blown out and the colours were popping where I needed them. Contrast can be a very important element of composition to help guide the eye.

Materials

For my tileable materials, I started with some tutorials from Adam Capone for the base. This helped me get a good start of understanding how to craft the shapes and how to create the painted brush stroke effect. I highly recommend these tutorials if you want to understand stylised substance better, as Adam goes into great detail on different techniques.

I want to highlight the brush strokes section which makes up most of my albedo map across the tileables.

With tilables, it is a good idea to keep them pretty plain and simple, this will make it easier to blend and recolour them in the engine. Most of the work goes into the material shader to make the landscape look good.

The landscape is fairly simple set up with the most important part being the use of RVT. Runtime Virtual Textures are a game changer for landscapes, they allow you to pull the colour from the landscape and apply it to your models. I use this to colour the base of my assets to help blend them with the ground so you don't see a jarring transition. Nina Klos has a great RVT set up guide on her AS blog which explains how to set them up.

I also layered over a variation texture in world space that would break up my large tiled surfaces and add to the painted look. Simon Verstraete explains this technique in his video. I used this on all my textures and just changed the overlay texture’s colours and hues.

Foliage

I took a lot of inspiration from the post by Kids with Sticks about their approach and highly recommend checking it out. The small foliage was all made from a single texture set that I built in Substance Designer. I selected the range of flowers and plants that I would want and assembled references for all of them. Using the reference, I started building out the flower shapes in Designer and assembled them into an atlas. Here is the graph for one of the flower types, they were all made the same way with some changes to the base shapes with different blends and warps.

I noticed that in a lot of my style references, the flowers were just shown as the tops without the stems and leaves so in Maya, I just mapped planes to the atlas to quickly assemble most of the foliage. The small ground cover plants and the nettles were built similarly but with the addition of the stems.

The material set up for these in UE4 is where most of the magic happens with the colour variation and wind movement.

VFX

The wind lines were meshes created in Maya. I gave them a bit of thickness to help them read from different angles. I then created a material that pans a white band across them with variables for width, speed and the sharpness of the band. I offset the UVs of the wind line meshes to make sure the bands would not all appear at the same time in the scene. For the still shots, I made a version where the bands were static to help me curate the image.

The pollen particles were a Niagara system, this was my first foray into Niagara as I had been using the old cascade system for years and needed to catch up. The set up for this is surprisingly simple, I took some basic setup for a dust type system and added some nice curl noise based on a tip from Andreas Glad. This gave a nice floaty wispy feel, like they were blowing in the wind. The rest was just tweaking settings until I got something I was happy with.

Optimizing Workflow

One of the most powerful timesaving techniques that an environment artist should get familiar with, is kitbashing. Kitbashing is a technique where you take parts from existing assets and combine them together to make something new. This is used all the time in games because it is fast, efficient and often more optimised than making new assets as you can reuse existing materials from the scene and save on draw calls.

I did a little breakdown of how the process was used on Kena: Bridge of Spirits over on my Artstation page.

On my scene, I used this technique to build out the carts. They were added about ⅔ way through production as a storytelling element and points of interest. I already had log meshes (Red), rope tileable (Green) and even the curved wooden pieces and stone wheel hubs from other parts of my scene like the windmill sails (Yellow). The only new element was the wheels (Blue). I took the low and high poly meshes for these pieces and moved them together into position to build up the cart. As I already had all the low poly UVs, all I had to do was a quick layout. I took some torus meshes and just massaged these into position with soft select to create the ropes holding it all together and UV mapped these to the tileable I had already made.

I then took the mesh in Painter where I had the low and the high poly to bake from. I was able to quickly retexture it using smart materials that I had built for the other wooden piece and add the cavity dirt and wear in places that contextually made sense. I then just exported these maps out and set them up in the engine and I had a whole new asset. To make something like this from scratch would have taken days, this way I spend a few hours on the whole thing. I then broke the mesh up a little to create the destroyed variant and just added dressing around it in the engine. This is a super powerful technique that we use all the time in games, it isn't cheating, it's just being smart with your time. I urge everyone to try it, can you make the asset you want out of parts you already have.

Tips For Those Learning Environment Art

A large part of my process is thinking about what I want to do, and then looking for articles/videos etc that show ways to do it. The ability to find information yourself and try it out is very important. Finding what you like and how to combine elements together is how to grow and develop your own style.
Always be looking out for cool things you can apply to your work, and just make sure you spend a bit of time upfront to get a plan together for your projects. That time to plan and test things early stops you getting too bogged down later on.

Make sure you utilise Discord to get critique from other artists as well, so often the online community provides you with cool ideas and super helpful tips, and getting more eyes on your work is always a good thing. You don't have to listen to every bit of feedback, but more often than not there will be some great advice.

Nailing A Stylized Art Style

Stylized covers such a large range of art styles, so to start with you need to nail down what the style that you are looking to create is. You may want to follow the style of a game or a film, or mix and match elements into something of your own.

It is important when you gather reference, that you analyse what you like about them. Maybe you love how some are lit or how some use colour or texture. If you decided to make something in a Ghibli style for example, you would observe that they generally use very realistic proportions with a lot of the style coming through in the rendering. Lighting is painted in and the level of detail is proportional to distance from the camera. For example, the flowers closest to the camera are very detailed, but background ones use silhouette and value to hint shape and form.

Looking at my own scene, I wanted to take the bright colour and vibe of the building concept and layer in some painterly detail. For my scene this meant using textures with simulated brush strokes and colour variation in world space to give a more painted look.

I started with the grass and landscape materials to set my visual targets and chose to push more of the texture work into the material itself, to allow me to make big changes on the fly in the engine. By keeping the elements simple and not spending too long upfront, I was able to revisit elements later on and make changes in an iterative and non-destructive way. I thickened the grass and changed the colours several times along the way to help fit with the style that I was going for.

To sum it up, instead of trying to make perfect benchmark assets, I took my assets to around half done and got them all in, this allowed me to know what needed to change and what was fine as it was. This led to very minimal wastage and was much easier to change or enhance assets rather than redoing them.

Time Management

When time is tight you need to reign in your ideas. Think of what you want to do and half it and probably half it again. The key is to think about what your minimal viable scene is and get there as soon as possible. This then frees you up time to polish, a well polished smaller scene will be much better received than an incomplete larger one. Check out my challenge blog to see how I progressed and my thoughts early on vs later into the project.

Looking to minimise the amount of assets you need to make is also a big help. I often tend to try to make too many things and it becomes a massive slog of making assets and you lose all motivation by the time it comes to get them all in your scene. If you spend a good amount of time on your block out and set up proxy meshes, you will have a good understanding of what will need the most attention in your scene and where you can save some time with something simple.

I found it helped to make sure I stopped sculpting at the point I thought it was like 50-75% done. More often than not this was good enough and if I had time I could come back to them later. Assets in isolation are only a small part of the whole scene and so rarely need to be perfect. Working faster and making use of smaller pools of assets and textures really helped to keep the project moving along and kept me motivated with bigger progress jumps week to week.

Any Part Of Your Scene / Career You’d Like To Highlight?

I have been asked about my clouds a few times so I wanted to quickly cover those. I started with the Skycard UE4 asset as a base, repainted the cloud alphas using these brushes by Kristoff Dedene and then plugged in the cloud movement from this tutorial by Tony Arechiga.

I also want to highlight how easy it is to add some movement to your scenes with Blueprints. Here is the graph for my windmill blades spinning. It takes 10 minutes to set things like this up with some time to tweak and it adds so much to the videos and makes the scene feel alive.

Something that I feel often doesn't get enough of a spotlight is how hard it is to get a job in a passion industry. There are always going to be super stars who walk into jobs with 10/10 work, but that isn't 95% of people out there, for most of us it will be a real grind and require a crazy amount of hard work.

I want to let all the students or self learners out there know that it is okay to not have a job straight out of uni. It is okay to live with your parents or get another job and work on your portfolio, it is okay for it to take years to be ready. Just want you to know that if this is really what you love and want to do, keep at it and you will get there.

I highly recommend mentorships for those out there struggling, it is so valuable to have someone with a wealth of knowledge helping you. It can be really easy to feel lost and not sure where to go or how to make better art, but a mentor can show you the path.

But whatever you choose to do, keep at it. It is hard, but it gets easier if you keep practising!

Future Work and Goals

I want to take time to explore more styles and do some studies. Making big, unique scenes is a lot of effort and really hard work, especially if you are learning on top of all that. I am hoping to put some time into smaller, more focused pieces where I look to work on specific skills. Like using premade assets to do a composition and lighting study, or a small diorama to practice some sculpting techniques.

I want to train my eye more to be able to look at art styles and recreate them, working on Sea of Thieves has been a really fun challenge to pick up a unique and well defined style that was outside of the styles I have been working in. Honing the skills to be able to decipher what elements are important to a style and how to achieve them is something that will make me a flexible and valuable artist in games. I love games and hope to work on many different games for years to come.

Inspiration

I am most inspired after watching a cool film or playing a really amazing game, which usually sends me down a rabbit hole of Artstation searches and another collection of concepts and references. I don't have time to make all the ideas sadly, but things I find cool tend to stick with me and make it into my future work.

Feedback

I have some close friends who I shoot work to on Discord to get feedback early in the project and then later on I open it up to feedback from people on the Experience Points and DiNusty Discords. The speed and range of feedback you can get on Discord is unmatched currently.

Additional Advice

You don’t always have to be productive, it’s cool to take evenings off and play games or have a social life. Smaller projects can be more fulfilling than bigger ones because they get done. It’s hard to come off from a full day of work and do more art, don’t beat yourselves up when you are tired but feel you need to do more. Less is so often more, try to reuse things, pull stuff apart, kitbash, anything you need to do to make your time go further.

What Can We Keep An Eye Out For?

Sea of Thieves has me pretty busy but I have a few things in the pipeline that I hope to have out this year. I never like to count my chickens before they hatch but keep an eye on my Artstation and I am sure something juicy will appear at some point.

Outro

I want to thank my friends at Experience Points for giving me the chance to share my process with everyone. I think articles are a fantastic way to share knowledge and I read them often for inspiration and to learn techniques. I am excited to be able to give a little back and hopefully inspire some artists out there to go make some kick ass art.