armistice 100th anniversary tribute - world war i trench

Lukas Stratmann did a beautiful tribute for the 100th Anniversary of World War I. This is a story about the war ending and the soldiers, all but one, having left and gone home. Dive deep into this breakdown to read how Lukas puts attention to detail and crafts over 50 unique assets to pay tribute.

Introduction

Hi! My name is Lukas Stratmann originally from Germany I am currently living in France working at Ubisoft Annecy as a Junior Level Artist on The Division 2.
Prior to this I spent the last 5 years working on, with and around the Red Orchestra 2/Rising Storm and Rising Storm 2 franchise. At Antimatter Games, Kernow Interactive and for Tripwire Interactive I was in roles such as QA Coordinator, Environment Artist and Art Supervisor. In my free time I have been working on my personal game project Sails of War.

How did I get into Environment Art? The honest answer: “I don’t really know. It just kinda happened.” And to be even more honest: I originally typed about two whole pages on my career path and how I just love making worlds and games and seeing awesome people make awesome things. 

The short answer is: I have always been a super creative person, problem solving and building things. No matter if it was paper, plastic scale models, wood or Day of Defeat:Source maps. I have a passion for making games first and foremost. As long as I can contribute ideas, learn and share; as long as I can help and be part of an awesome team I am happy.  

I did go to university, although I was already working as an Environment Artist and Art Supervisor. My course was called 3D Design & Management and I did mostly choose to go for the latter - Management - part. Even though I spent most of my time working in games during that time I somehow managed to graduated top of my class earlier this year reaching my goal of joining AAA prematurely even before my final thesis was fully finished. 

Upon joining uni I had set myself the goal to literally buy myself 3 years of time to become good enough to join AAA and in addition earn a degree on the way. Which worked out rather well - though be advised that I paid dearly for it: Regular weeks saw me working 80 to over 100 hours on university and work combined. In all that time I went to exactly one student party. (Which suits me because I prefer work over parties).

As my friends ask me: How do you have time to do all these things at once? 

And honestly. I just have an undying love of making. Doesn’t even matter what it is. Just something. Anything. Mostly games. But if it wasn’t games I’d make something else. And I want to manage and eventually lead people with the same passion for making. This probably doesn’t help you to get into 3D Art but my advice would be: Do what you love and don’t let anyone or anything stop you. And if you love spending 80 hours a week working on games and learning about leadership: Do it. 

World War I Inspiration

Inspiration is an odd thing for me. It usually only takes a random circumstance to get my brain going. A combination of thoughts. Music that reminds me of a documentary film. Strolling through the streets and looking at old buildings. Or, indeed, just browsing the web. But also calendar dates: It was around the end of October 2018 when World War One armistice day was a mere 25 days away. This and a picture of the Cheshire Regiment - laying in a trench in 1916 during the Battle of the Somme.

You have to know that I am a massive history nerd - something more important later. 

The inspiration here was simple. I felt the need to express … something… literally anything. I somehow wanted to do my part in the commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the armistice: The trench and Going Over where born.

Historical Accuracy

After working on the Red Orchestra games for over a half-decade you learn to do your research first.

I don’t know too much about the Great War and with most of my knowledge being held up in World War II I first went to visually inspect the photograph which was my base reference. On it you will see quite a lot of things. Each object has its own history - but even the earth itself. You can’t just make any trench! Against popular belief a lot of trenches were well built - expect that each nation had different standards and after fighting trenches would be conquered or lost. To my eye the trench in the picture has actually been conquered by the British troops. There seems to be a fire step on the left with the front being on the right. So it’s probably a German trench taken by the British - or a recaptured one which had previously been converted.

I will usually pick images apart like this to a point where I am satisfied - I am sure a proper historian will prove most my observations wrong but for game art it felt far enough. I also went and looked at uniforms, kit, crates, boxes, water and oil canisters, lamps and other details. All these can usually be found in collectors or specialist pages. And usually I find most of them can be recreated just by following the reference images. 

The British Imperial War Museum had some awesome high quality photos of the stretcher and other stuff like the helmets. Usually good enough for the accuracy I am after. I will try to figure out and reverse engineer how things were built and worked - which usually gives you a greater appreciation for the craftsmen but also their products.

It’s a good moment to note down materials and motions of usage - this will make texturing and detailing a lot easier. It’s also just fun to do honestly. Just get a large PurRef file going and really have a look at all the images you have gathered. 

The one thing I kind of failed at with this scene was a proper blockout. Because a lot of my ideas for personal projects are random thoughts with very specific shots in mind I tend to do a lot of research on props and buildings first. With the trench I had wanted to be done by the 11th of November and so I went straight ahead with modeling. In reality, I should have done a better blockout of the scene and organized what models I needed. I did end up using all my props but it would have been a lot easier to have all blockouts first - then model the finished pieces. The worst part about this is: I know to do this. I do it all the time. Blockouts are super important to understanding what work needs to be done. I do, however, seem to have a hard time with it whenever doing personal art. So be aware of your own shortcomings - even if they only appear in personal art and you don’t ever run across them during production.

Composition

The Trench itself was always going to be the main leading line. Shown in red are the tops of the walls converging in the back. The hanging tarp placed to support this. In a way I did not want the viewer to immediately see the body; I wanted the viewer to wonder down the deserted trench to find an empty dirt mount, only to come back and realize the full gravity of the image.  

There are two sides. The left, warmer and lit up, showing the soldier’s body and kit then the right: darker shadows filled with sandbags and rifle casings. 

These two sides are intersected by the foggy trench bottom which itself has water cans and boxes only on the left side. The trench floor starts right of the middle whilst some of the sunshine spills down into it on the left side. 

I will admit that some of this composition may be nontraditional - but the entire image is set up to reward those who stop and think. I wanted to quietly do my part for the centennial. Those who stop; those who watch and will hopefully linger and think. 

Think about the events 100 years ago.

The last year has shown that this isn’t necessarily the best attention grabber - certainly not in an age of scrolling feeds and seconds of viewer retention. But it was indeed important to me to not show some grotesque scene in the center of the composition. I did not want some specific person to have died here. The body - peacefully lying there - is one of 20 million. 

The longer you stay with the image and unravel the story of two friends - one of which will never return - the more you think of so many others. And then your eyes slowly wander back down the empty trench and you ask: “Who else was here”. 

In retrospect I would say more pronounced sun rays and a bit more contrast could have helped the piece and emphasized the feeling a peaceful goodbye.

Master Material

Originally the trench was part of a larger scene and as such I had made a Master Material for all Props. One that is using a lot of switches for quick adjustments. This isn’t the most optimized approach but having all materials be children of the same master also helped with the uniform look. In addition, all materials with the same switch settings are indeed better for performance - even when it doesn’t really matter for this particular scene. 

Has a unique and a tiling texture input, both receiving texture coordinates with possible multiplier for scale; both have a slider for intensity. Then a switch should you want entirely Flat Normals. Next, an option to Blend both normals and finally a “Two Sided” option. The latter is an expression which will flip the normal for all backfaces. 

Again nothing special. Mainly just options to use a UV 1 or a UV2 input. Some switches to use solid values for Occlusion, Roughness and Metalness. One important note here is the fine control over Roughness: using the roughness map input to drive a linear interpolation of two scalars. It’s a bit more expensive but gives you more control. 

Equally the additional Spec input. This one might be a bit controversial. In theory specular should not be touched, 0.5 is pretty much always good. Though even Epic themselves point out that for non metals at times changing this can give more control. I found that giving the specular a very slight range can help push roughness details ever so slightly more. This makes it more unrealistic in theory though. So watch out when doing this!

This one uses a couple material functions you can find in the engine content as well as an option to have a solid base color. Keeping in mind this Master Material was meant to work with pretty much all props the color variation was mainly meant for plants. (Though as a side note for a larger project I would recommend having a unique Master Material for Plants) This variation can also bring some, well, variation to regular props. The Metal Shading one is interesting. The comment itself reads: ”Apply to base colors of metal for more interesting shading.” So it’s used here and lerped with the Metalness map.

Finally there is some smaller nodes for simple wind using the SimpleGrassWind and other small pieces like Emissive also a potential setup for POM. The latter is pretty much copied from the UE engine content examples. A great resource and quick guide. 

The cool thing about UE4 - compared to UE3 (an engine I did a lot of work in before) you can actually now change a bunch more options of instances. For example “Two Sided”. This means you can have one Master setup with greyed out pins and they only become active when the Instance is changed to using these. This in particular was really nice! Having such a large Master Material was great for organisation. Though a lot of the small tweaks aren’t really needed for good results, especially the Roughness slider should be seen more as a luxury and quality of life improvement. Something which at the time made it easier to work with. Do keep in mind that some of this would have changed or grown had I continued work on the overall project. 
Terrain Materials

Because the trench was quite specific and its shape quite unique I went and modeled it in Blender. Simple geometry with a SubDivisionSurface modifier and some displacement - then a decimate to get a game ready polycount. There are 2 parts to the trench: the front part which is unique for the firestep and the back part (behind the tarp) which is one piece of trench copied multiple times. 

All pieces are sitting on a regular UE4 terrain with the same material. The trench material is a cheap triplanar blend with vertex paint for details. Blending two materials of photos I took in a nearby field.

All in all it blends quite well mostly because of the material and because I took care to avoid extremely steep angles. Having uniform and similar dirt on the props also helped blending them into the ground. 

I was actually surprised how well the duckboards and walls merge with the trench mesh. No tricks there, no blending. Literally just hard solid edges and models stuck into each other. Although I do think

Creating the Props

Going Over is made from quite a large amount of unique props. And again I want to pull back the curtain and say: The lack of a proper blockout did not help here either. Every prop, except some of the woods, is a high poly to low poly baked model. I ended up with over 50 unique assets for this project. On the one hand I REALLY enjoyed modeling so many details though on the other hand I did spend some 3 months of free time making unique props.

Ensuring consistency across a project can only be done with guidelines and rules. I made good use of this whilst working on Rising Storm 2. The only two rules I needed to set for Going Over were a Substance Painter Smart Material Layer of “Trench-Dirt” and the goal to work entirely in real life metrics. Most props are directly measured or uniformly enlarged to display better. 

The huge upside of unique props was all of them were textured in Substance Painter and thus used the aforementioned same Smart Materials for dirt and also some of the wood. Using Smart Materials is a great of quickly setting up a uniform look for all your assets. Especially for the wood where all granular detail is done with height and normal maps. 

A similar uniform look could have been achieved with Unreal Engine 4 Materials and custom dirt overlays. I did consider the option for dirt - but setting up Smart Materials seemed faster at the time. In hindsight the UE4 Materials might have been faster, especially if a lot of the props used Beveled Edges and Weighted Normals instead of unique bakes.

Capturing that ‘In The Trenches’ Lighting

I wanted to have a somewhat warm and peaceful feeling - the story here is of the war having ended and the soldiers - all but one - having left and gone home. I also wanted slight god rays from the right: shining on the last remaining body. A tranquil but also dirty feeling; something which shows a quiet after the storm. The dust has settled and it would be a wonderfully warm and pleasant day… if you weren’t sitting in a trench.  

A lot of the lightning is specifically angled to create highlights and shadows as well as volumetric scattering effect. This setup is quite simple but effective. The overall vibe and feel - both in color and atmosphere - is actually produced by post processing. Color grading and effects are really a key importance to any scene.

One important option you get in Unreal Engine 4 - one that is often quick to overlook - is Post Process Materials. Which I used for sharpening the image as well as additional depth of field effects. 

Quixel recently showed a breakdown of their Rebirth short film. In it Joe Garth explained how the built in Film Grain was not realistic enough for what they needed and how a custom post process material gave them more control and more realistic results. And I really think this is important to highlight: The Post Process settings might not always give you the absolute best results. Using Post Process Materials on the other hand is - as Epic warns you in documentation - possibly a lot more performance heavy but sometimes can push the scene a lot more. Especially for portfolio pieces and well calculated efforts such as Quixels short film Materials can make a huge difference in look and feel. 

For the trench it ended up a subtle additional sharpening as well as noise effect. Use your post processing wisely and make use of the materials - this combined will enable you to create the look you want.

Dropping Content & Ideas

The question of where the Camera Swing went and why the final post does not have a video is a simple answer. I did not feel like its quality was adding anything to my work. With so much detail in the Trench the camera swing started of well going along the floor and slowly rising up. But once the actual swing happened the rest of the shot was somewhat boring. 

So long story short: I wanted a camera swing but it looked cooler in my head and once I was finished I realized all my detail was in the trench and a video wouldn’t add anything. I am an Environment and Level Artist not a filmmaker.

Fundamental Skills for an Environment Artist

Environment and Level Art are in a very interesting position:

On the one hand as artists we are expressing ourselves and we are - especially for portfolio screenshots - following the traditions of photography and landscape painters. We have discussions on composition and labour over the perfect camera angles. 

On the other hand we are making a 3D space. A space the player is suppose to traverse. I would argue that a lot of our work is and should be more focused on interior design and architecture than on composition of that one perfect shot. 

Then again for a portfolio piece - such as the trench - no player will ever see it. It’s not built as a gamespace; it is built just for the shots you see.

Both sides of this coin are important. There is, however, a 3rd side to this story. And I think it is this 3rd side which really makes or breaks spaces. Yes: the composition of your screenshot matters (a lot!) but if your space isn’t logical it won’t matter how great the screenshot is composed. 

By logic I don’t necessarily mean the aforementioned design and architecture of your space I mean the bare bones reasons of why. Why is this space like it is? How did it come to be like this? How did every object in this scene get here? How did every object in this scene come to be? How was it created? What is the purpose of its design? etc.

I am of the firm belief that we as humans instinctively know and assume things. We walk into spaces and rooms and there are certain laws that govern our understanding of them. We don’t necessarily know or ever realize these but the absence of logic poses an obvious problem. I personally tend to overthink and be too subtle with this at times: there are two of every soldier's kit in the trench but only one body. It’s a story of a lost friend. A story of those who did not return. I doubt this logic is obvious to the viewer and as a part of my story telling it should have been more upfront. 

So in conclusion I’d personally say one of the most important skills you can have is logic and awareness of standards, as well as other skills. If you research how something was constructed it becomes more logical once you build it. If you know the average door and window frame size and know how a building is built then you will have a much easier time building your space and presenting it. For the trench this was mainly building out a logical replication of what I was seeing in trench construction across my reference images. I will add that my trench has some odd logic at times with the door being next to the firestep and with there not being a 90 degree corner after 15-20 meters. Yes: I did choose to ignore these in favor of composition - going back to the fact that it was indeed not more for a game but a singular screenshot.

Challenges

As I touched on earlier the largest challenges were self made obstacles. I struggle with personal art. A lot. I never like my personal art; I never feel like it’s good or finished. And I never feel like there is a reason to actually work on it. Give me a project to work on and I won’t have the same issues. To me a project with clear goals and plans - no matter if my private or at work, no matter if I or someone else makes the plans - is much more motivating. 

It’s something I have always struggled with. It’s a very personal fight I have each time. This piece was a particular struggle as I had just come from over year long cancelled work project and with it I had lost what I thought was going to be my primary portfolio environment art piece. So a lot of self induced pressure and on top a double hard drive failure right at the end - nearly losing all of the project had it not been for a USB drive backup. Sounds a lot more worse and dramatic than it was but it certainly wasn’t the easiest of art pieces to make.  

All I can say is: be self aware enough to see it coming. Once you know of the hurdles ahead you can take them and get over and on with it. Also: do make sure you are not alone. 

Final Advice & Tips

As final advice I’d say: join an online community. Get feedback, listen to people. Be honest enough to yourself - and humble enough - to realize when you need help and a supporting group of great people to assist you along the way. No game is made by a single person and neither should your personal art be. Making games is usually a huge team effort and making personal art should - in my humble opinion - also be. I don’t necessarily mean collaborations by this but active feedback and discussion. Kill your darlings. Other opinions and thoughts on your work will push it. And you still own it so if you disagree with peoples thoughts that's fine just make sure to consider them and evolve your own.

This would not have been the way it is now had I not shared it with multiple different groups of people friends. 

And at this point I want to point to the DiNusty Empire Discord server which has become a home to me. It was one of the main places that helped and pushed me a lot when making the trench. It’s a really great place to be. 

Full disclosure: I am partnered with them and am creating Blender 2.8 video tutorials on the Empire YouTube Channel.  

You can always chat with me on Discord (Lukas#4958), Twitter and even ArtStation. 

Don’t hesitate to ping me with any Blender related or general questions I am always extremely happy to help! There is probably a lot more things I could talk about but I’ll leave it at that for now - maybe once I get around to my next full enviroment I can return with new thoughts. Thank you very much for reading and see you online!