Shift’s over - guiding the viewer inside ue4 | lighting & atmosphere

Tima Renski is back again for his second article and brings even more knowledge for everyone. In this breakdown we learn about his process of framing the scene, set dressing and how it played an important part in guiding the viewers eye as well as tons of information on workflows, negative space and lighting. Dive right in!

Introduction

Hello, my name is Timofey Plesovskikh aka Tima Renski, I’m from Russia. I started learning 3D somewhere in 2014, but it was more of a hobby than something serious and I just fooled around with many subjects like character art, prop art, animation, rigging and so on.

Like I said in my first article for Experience Points : “I was amazed by films like Blade Runner and Matrix, I also fell in love with games such as Planescape Torment, Fallout 1-2 and The Witcher 1-2. After a hundred times watching those kind of films and playing those kind of games I wanted something more - being able to create something similar in terms of mood and atmosphere.”

This is how I did get into the world of 3D! If I remember correctly my first game was Outlive and I love everything in this game. Then I played games such as Half-Life 2, The Witcher and S.T.A.L.K.E.R - these games have really dragged me into the world of games.

Composition | Breakdown

I was partially working from the beautiful art by Andrzej Dybowski. I really love his concept art of interiors, it’s very easy for me to work with those. I started to analyse the picture - composition, colours, detail frequency, lighting, style of environment and of course the story of this environment.

I decided to make big changes in the composition of my scene compared to concept-art, I wanted to make the table in the centre a bit smaller and details on this table more concentrated - make it more interesting to “read” in my opinion.

I wanted to give viewers more story about place (I am talking about the area marked number on picture below) and catch viewers interest, so they will not leave this section right away, but explore rest of this part.

I used the rule of thirds with some additional things such as wires that lead the viewers eyes to the focal point or really heavy contrast in colours/lighting in some areas or you also can make some kind of light shafts from lamps that leading to focal point, so it’s easier to stick the viewer’s eye to this certain area of picture. 

I planned to make more contrast in focal-point-1 to make it more noticeable. Same for focal-point-2, but with a way weaker contrast and a way less details - it’s a good way for balance the scene, in my opinion. As you see, I pretty much saved all those thoughts until the final shot.

Detailed Areas | Negative Spaces | Resting Areas

It all goes from composition and “type of area”, also you should understand the mood and style of your environment. It is very convenient using floors for eye-rest, it’s very important. Or, for example, walls could also be the area of eye-rest. In my case I made modular floor pieces with very simple and repetitive patterns - I think those two parameters are the easiest for viewer’s perception. So, that’s my area of eye-rest.

There is more explanation in the picture below.

Red Area

Very high detail frequency because it’s the main focal-point. As I say, I made everything in this area the first thing that viewers will see in this picture. So I think it’s important to make this area very informative in terms of storytelling with a great amount of props. That way, I believe, I can catch the viewer's interest and they will explore the rest of picture.

Green Area

Medium detail frequency. Also very important areas, it’s basically continuing all your hard work on Focal Point 1. Also, the green area on the right is Focal Point 2, so it’s good choice to dress up this place that way. It’s okay for this area to put repetitive props or very similar props, in my opinion this area need to be more simple then red area.

Blue Area | Floor

Blue area has very low detail frequency. Usually it’s a background part or the parts that you can’t really see because of lighting or distance and so on. It also can be an eye-rest place, also contrast in "detail frequency" between this area and the other two might looking good. And the floor - as I said it’s a place for eye-rest.

Lighting

Lighting of environment creation is always challenging for me, but it also make a huge impact on the final result. I really recommend to dive into a bunch of tutorials about lighting in UE4 all over YouTube- spend as much time as you can on this. I’m still learning and there are so many things I don’t know yet.

Usually I work with static light, just for sake of all these benefits you get from static light. But also combining this with stationary and moveable lighting in certain cases. In this scene I also used emissive static lighting as one of the main sources of light. Big thanks to Tim Simpson for video about this subject.

When you work with static lighting in UE4 I can recommend a few tips to make your workflow comfortable and quick. In my case it’s approximately 80% of time I am working on preview lighting quality or medium lighting quality. Second - I always turn off auto-exposure, so you can see lighting as it is, and third - I change “indirect lighting quality” from 1 to 1,5 (a bit better quality, but don’t really increase the baking time).

I like to work with lighting step by step, that way it’s more understandable for me which light does what and how lighting may potentially influence the colours.

I like using contrast in colours. I use this trick all over the scene, here are the examples.

It also can give a nice transition of lighting like this one on the wall. I made the main focal point really brighter than the other parts of scene. I guess it’s really all about trial and error for me personally when I do lighting. Just grab a bunch of references and go try things out. It’s totally okay to delete all light sources in the scene and do all of lighting work from scratch if you feel like you need this! I did it about 3 times in this scene, heh.

Storytelling

This art was partially made from concept art for the game Observer. This scene is about the near future, it’s a laboratory that does research on bionic limbs. It’s the end of a day, shift’s over and people are about to go home.

I truly believe that the style of art is part of it’s story, so I tried to keep this style in every prop of this scene.

On the left side is a translucent emissive screen and on right side is just a simple board with blueprints and other assets.

Like @jStins from polycount said, “...a lot of the other tech in this world looks chunky (ala Fallout) and the floating screen feels a bit too sleek (Iron Man)...” and I totally agree. All those details tell you about the world that you are in, but it doesn’t mean that you always need to make the entire scene in a single style. Combination of different styles could look very interesting.

Inspiration

Inspiration is very important for me in any stage of environment creation, it also one of the things that leads me during my different activities, not only during environment art creation.

Usually I find inspiration browsing Artstation, looking at trending , being a bit jealous about how beautiful they are, but after a little time of weakness I feel like “If they can make it, so can I”.However, you can over estimate your capability. I fell for that so many times and it was kind of a negative experience, but after some time I realised that these situations are a great way to understand your weakest points and start working on them.

Of course many many times I find inspiration in such things like films, games, books, articles. Pretty often all those things were made with love and hard work, and you can feel it. This commitment and dedication inspires me a lot.

Also feedback from any place can inspire me very well, especially if the feedback comes from someone you trust. The last thing I guess that really inspires me is when I look at my progress since I started studying 3D and all of problems I solved along the way. It was very frustrating sometimes, also difficult to starting over and over again, but most of the time it also was pretty interesting and I don’t regret about any of my spent time on that way.

Feedback

If you seek for feedback I find very useful to dive into such communities like Polycount, Experience Points, DiNusty. All those communities helped me in different times and still help me now, they are all about sharing knowledge about art creation.

In my case I created a thread on Polycount where I shared my process of work. Polycount is one of the few surviving old CG-communities, people there are mostly very kind and want to help.

If you brave enough, you can try to talk to certain people on Artstation and ask for feedback. You should be polite with the people you are asking for help, they will spend their time helping you and it should be appreciated. But, of course, don’t expect that every person will respond. Not everyone has the spare time and the inclination for that.

I was really lucky when I was learning environment art - I wrote a message to one dude who was already working in the games industry as an Environment Artist, so I asked him about environment art, and my questions were really poor. They were very superficial questions, but he was a very nice guy and explained to me how started learning environment art. Later I also asked another questions and asked for feedback on last works and he always was very kind to answer, very big thanks to him!

It’s all good, but you also should see your errors by yourself. For example, I was doing this when I was working on my Shift’s Over project. From time to time I simply took screenshot of the scene with maximum quality, then I started to scan my screenshot pixel by pixel and highlighted certain spots that I thought needed to be remade/improved upon.. It might sounds silly but it’s basically asking feedback from yourself.

Bionic Arm

For hero-assets I have a very nice and easy workflow with boolean operations, but of course it has pros and cons. It’s a really big topic to discuss, so I think it’s better if I talk only about process of bionic arm creation without a wall of text. But I also can’t leave it like this, so I recommend to check out the best explanation about fundamentals of this workflow - Military Radio Tutorial by Simon Fuchs.

For the bionic arm I’ve got two main references. The bionic arm from MGS V and the Robotic Hands for VR by Adam Nield.

I started with a blockout of the bionic arm, at this stage I paid attention mainly on the big shapes. I made sure that all of the big shapes are correct.

Now it’s time to make all of pieces ready for export to ZBrush. I don’t really care about *nice* topology at this stage because I’m going to use dynamesh in ZBrush. However, it’s not a bad idea to at least clean up a mesh before export (look for Cleanup tool in Maya, for example).

At this stage I used boolean operations and a few scripts. They are all free and very useful.

• DcBoolManager

• ZenTool

• MoP’s Multi OBJ Tools

• wp Rename

The last thing before export is to create the UVs for every part of this mesh. I create them with this script.

It makes a planar projection with seams only on hard edges, I need it for using the “Auto Groups With UV” tool in ZBrush (you can find it in Polygroups tab). After I was done with that - I start to export everything to ZBrush and here is third stage.

This part is the high-poly mesh creation. I simply use tools shown below to create a nice bevel for every part that I exported. After all the boring work is over, I can relax and make manual changes to the high-poly model with different brushes.

That’s pretty much my different creative process for everyone. I can only recommend to use “Morph Target” tool in ZBrush. After I’ve decimated all parts(so it will be comfortable to work with in Maya) I exporting everything back to Maya. Done!

The next step is our low-poly mesh creation. I took my proxy mesh I made earlier and use it as a basis for my low-poly mesh. The main idea here is to reduce the polycount as much as I can with clean topology, but without any damage to main shape of this mesh.

Outro

I’m very happy that I had the opportunity to write this article, I hope that it’s been useful and interesting for you! Always try to learn new things, learn new better ways to do something, search for feedback and stay strong!