The Crossroads

Join us for an adventure to The Crossroads, a beautiful medieval fantasy environment created by Wouter. We discover how he build his stunning modular architecture with 1 trim sheet, how he setup his lighting, the inspiration and story behind the scene and much more!

Intro

Hey! I’m Wouter Gillioen, an Intermediate Environment Artist at Massive Entertainment. I was born and raised in Belgium. After my education at Digital Arts and Entertainment (DAE), I landed an end of study internship in 2020 at Massive and I have lived in Sweden ever since.

At DAE, I studied 3D production and VFX which is mainly focused on the movie industry but during that time, I also took a great interest in the Game graphics major and started learning those courses and practices in my own spare time. Since my main focus was going to be 3D environments anyway, I took the full turn and decided to fully focus on game art.

Composition

I’ve always been a huge fan of anything that looks and feels medieval and fits a fantasy theme. So I knew that at one point I was going to make something in this style and had the cozy medieval city vibes. I got the idea for this project back when I was still looking for an internship and wanted to show that I could do more than just the 1 frame that every other student portfolio has.

For this project, I really wanted to focus on creating a more 360 experience instead of staying locked within 1 camera composition. By doing this, I could still have my main shot align with the concept and build upon that to explore my own ways of creating compositions and extra smaller stories within the environment. This would bring the final piece to a more fully established environment instead of a single camera where there is nothing outside of the frame.

Ofcourse, having limited time, moving countries and getting a job led to the project being shelved for a while until I only recently picked it back up to finish it.

Going into the concept, it’s quite a straightforward composition with the usual foreground and middle to background elements with eye guiding lines (the bridges and the flaglines) leading towards the main center focus of the scene. While this concept is really detailed, I knew I could add some more depth and layering to it in 3D which was the perfect opportunity for me to go my own way and build upon the idea.

Translating this concept to 3D was actually not as complicated as it may seem. Since all the houses share the same tudor architecture, I instantly decided to just create a kit of reusable wall pieces that would create a building. With these, I could create any building I want, as long as I had enough pieces. These would easily be textured with a trim sheet to make texturing quick and speed up iterations. But more on that later in the article.

Once I was happy with my workflow, I started blocking out the scene in Unreal with some basic cubes and the meshes I was prototyping with. This is already where I started straying from the concept and going my own direction. My main goal with the concept was just to have an idea and a theme, once that idea was transferred in 3D I went my own way and added things according to my own creativity as I went on. That's really what made this project the most fun, just experimenting and tweaking things as I go when I get new ideas.

Story

To add onto the story of the scene, I started thinking about what could be found within a side street of a medieval city and what the civilians could be up to. Things like extra buckets, barrels, construction wood beams, tools for that construction but also spots to park horses, keeping pigs in the corner of a smaller market street, a shop that went out of business, …. A lot can be found within a medieval street and I tried to really explore that.

Lighting

The lighting in this scene is actually extremely simple, I’m no lighting artist by any means so I tried to keep it as maintainable as possible. And simple it is, all the lighting is basically done by 1 directional light acting as the sun combined with some fog, post processing and a couple of point lights to lighten up focus areas. Simply rotating the directional light so the sun was hitting the main building on the corner was enough for me combined with some tactically placed shadows from volumetric clouds. This is really where lumen came in and helped a lot.

Originally the scene started in UE4 until suddenly Epic Games decided to release the early access of UE5. Seeing the quality difference lumen could bring to this scene was the main reason I switched, combined with me just wanting to see what was up with UE5. Switching also brought its downside to the project such as the deprecation of displacement in materials and needing to learn the virtual heightfield mesh option instead, which is too complicated to set up compared to displacement maps in my opinion but I digress.

To further add to the atmosphere and bring some nice cloud shadows into the scene, I looked into volumetric clouds. Luckily there are a couple of great tutorials on this topic such as this one by William Faucher and this one by The Dinusty Empire. Both these tutorials really helped me understand how to do the setup and create my own clouds. Even though they might not be as visible in the final scene, they do bring some extra shadows in some areas and it was a nice side experiment to focus on for a bit because actually, that's what personal projects are all about for me: learning as much as possible in areas that I haven’t touched yet.

Materials

Quite early on in the project I decided to try to texture most of the modules with a trimsheet. Mainly because there is a lot of wood and some stone which could perfectly fit within 1 UV space. Doing this would also speed up my workflow since I only had to texture once and just lay out the UV’s where I wanted them based on the look I was going for.

I started the trimsheet in Zbrush where I sculpted all the details in the wood and the stone. Once happy with the detail, I simply export and bake it onto a plane. Let's first look deeper into the stone material. Since most detail was already sculpted in the highpoly, it was only a matter of getting the right albedo values and breakup to make it feel natural and worn. I started with a simple base color and kept layering some albedo variation until I had a nice stone look. After this, all I had to do was layer in some dirt (metal edge wear and dirt generators) and moss (based edge wear with grunge maps layered in).

Same process continues for the wood. Most of the detail was already sculpted in here as well. After creating and using the wood, I should have probably made the detail strips a bit bigger or just used less since they really get lost on the fine strips in the modules. Material wise it's pretty straightforward, I start with a basic wood material and some added fibers. After, I do a light grunge pass and add some more fibers into the material.

For the other tileable materials like the brick and cobblestone, I simply either used a Megascans texture or browsed AmbientCG. Once I had a good base texture for the bricks, I added some dirt based on ambient occlusion information (which became useless once I switched to UE5 but hey, I still made it). Since the bricks felt pretty flat, a bump offset was added to get some more depth out of the texture. To break up repetition, I also added a vertex paint option so I could paint in a plaster material and dirt where needed to get the right Tudor architecture style.

I also just went around my town and took pictures to use as textures. One good example is the door texture used in this environment, it's simply just a picture of a cool door I found from which I created a normal map and a roughness map. I also had pictures to use as a tileable brick wall but ended up not using it.

Optimising Workflow

To work as fast as possible, I decided early on to create a trimsheet for all my pieces. This would allow me to work faster by only having to bake my trimsheet instead of baking and texturing every mesh individually. To get the right amount of detail, I decided to texture most of the pieces with a more generic looking wood and stone (green and red) and add detail separation of the materials and through a small border trim (blue). I excluded the brick material from the trimsheet since it would be easier to play with tiling and add features on top of it through a shader instead.

Modularity

The best way to approach a big environment like this is ofcourse through a modular kit. To plan out what pieces I would need, I just looked at both the concept and traditional tudor buildings and combined that with the usual pieces you would expect in a kit (single and double doors, variations on the same pieces, …). I tried to keep the pieces as simple as possible and opted for adding small decoration pieces manually instead of locking them in the individual wall pieces. This would give me more flexibility on how I could combine the pieces together and add detail where I wanted based on focus areas. This, together with the vertex painting mentioned earlier, would help break up the repetition in reusing the same pieces.

Next to these techniques, adding the foliage would really help in ‘hiding’ some of the pieces and distract the eye from thinking about the repetition in combination with switching up the pieces for a unique element that breaks up the repetition as well.

Staying Organised

Organisation wasn’t always easy since I started the project and took a break right in the middle. The key to good organization is just a good folder structure and naming convention. The way I do it is simply first creating some folders outside of Unreal based on the software I use (so simply a Substance, maya, reference, … folder). Moving into Unreal, I try to keep it as logical as possible by just having meshes, materials, textures split and in folders based on their uses. It's simple stuff but it helps a lot if the project gets put on hold.

Areas Looking To Grow

As an artist, you’re ofcourse always looking to improve and be faster at your work. For me, I know I need to start looking deeper into more elaborate shaders. Next to that, I decided to switch from Maya to Blender so I’m just getting comfortable with the program first. And I have a big interest in photogrammetry as well, although for fantasy inspired environments, it's harder to find objects to scan.

Inspiration

I can honestly find inspiration anywhere, both in real life and online through discord communities or through media. I try to do some photography in my spare time which helps alot with composition, getting the right elements in the shot and color grading. But I can also find a ton of inspiration from movies, for example the new Batman movie looked amazing cinematography wise which really gave me a boost to create an environment in that style and do more street photography (of course finding time and energy to do this is a different story). Artstation is also a great way to find concepts and find ideas to pump into your own artwork. I try to be active in gamedev discord communities like Experience Points as well although I’d love to do more and be more active.

Feedback

For personal work, I always try to push my work to the furthest I can bring it on my own before asking for feedback. I don’t recommend this to someone starting out but I just like to work that way to push myself and my creative vision first. What usually really helps with resetting the way you look at the artwork is just taking a small break, either a week or longer, and coming back with a fresh set of eyes. This is how I made the biggest changes in this project and those always paid off and brought the entire piece to a new level.

Once I’m at a point where I do feel stuck or ‘done’, I would check in with specific friends who also work in the industry or post in a discord community to see if there is anything out of place or anything that looks weird.

Additional Advice

I see a lot of student projects overusing Megascans these days and while Megascans are amazing, they should be used more as a filler in my opinion, let me explain. As great as Megascans are, the way they are currently mostly used doesn’t really require a lot of skill. Artstation is filled with the same themed scenes with the same assets that you can just pick out when looking at the art. Of course creating an entire environment from scratch is a ton of work, but deciding where to put in time and where to use Megascans is crucial. For me, I follow a basic rule of 70/30 where 70% of your scene is self made and shows your skill and creativity. Those remaining 30% are just filler and where you don't need to waste time pushing around vertices for simple meshes, you can just tap into the Megascans library. That combined with still keeping traditional lighting workflows, leaving the single camera frame and creating more angles for your artwork can already push you above the usual student portfolios.

It totally depends on the intention of your project as well and what you focus on of course. If you’re going for a purely composition and lighting project, go for the Megascans. An environment artist job really differs from studio to studio, at some you’ll have to create your own assets while at another you might have a prop team supporting that. So show that you can create or scan your own high quality assets for your own scenes!

That being said, Megascans are of course an easy way into gamedev and creating your own art quickly. I obviously use them as well, mainly always for vegetation. This advice is mainly for students looking to land a job in the game industry and wanting to stand out a bit. Your project might take longer to complete but a portfolio is always quality over quantity.

Future Work

I’m currently looking into getting my foot in the unreal marketplace and just setting up a passive income through that. The original kit from this project got hit with a bit of a delay and I’m adding some new pieces to it but it's coming soon! Next to that, I decided to switch from Maya to Blender so I’m considering doing a full blender project as well, but only time will tell when that will come. On a professional side, I plan on staying with Massive until the end of my current project and will see what happens after and where I want to be.

Outro

Thanks for reading and making it to the end! If you’re interested in more of my work, you can find it here on my Artstation. My other socials can be found on this handy card so be sure to give me a follow for updates on future projects!