Serene Temple in unreal engine

Yinuo Chen talks to us about the production of her beautiful, tranquil environment, Serene Temple. Learn how Yinuo incorporated composition, colour and light to create a jaw-dropping temple scene as well as the benefits of working to a single camera shot. She also reveals her tips for students, the best advice she’s received from tutors and plenty more!

Intro

Hi! My name is Yinuo, I’m an Environment Art Intern at Ubisoft Massive and studied at Howest where I did Game Graphics Production. I never wanted to do 3D growing up actually - I always wanted to become a character concept artist - but after starting university I developed a huge love for 3D and never looked back.

Composition

The first thing that drew me to this scene was the pearl in the center of the tower and the large shadow on the building, so I wanted the scene to accentuate it and made the pearl bigger.

There are 3 main layers in this composition, I outlined the green area as the foreground. The foreground creates a contrasting shape to the main triangle and gives the scene a larger sense of balance. I made more use of fog to accentuate the midground from the background mountains.

 The entire scene is very triangular, even though there are mostly rectangular and rounded shapes. The silhouette of the building clusters create leading lines towards the top of the tower and the pearl, with the birds and rocks accentuating the triangular shape. The triangle pointing upwards gives the scene a large sense of stability, which is necessary because in real life this kind of structure would not be able to exist.

 The clouds break up the straight lines and create a circular flow around the buildings, they all ‘move’ towards the main structures to create another leading line.

Colour and Light

The thing I loved about the concept was the shadow going across the building, it gave the scene its charm - and seeing such a straight and undisturbed shadow on a large building is really unusual and interesting. However, although there was a huge shadow being casted on the scene, it still had a lot of warm ambient light, which gave the scene it's inviting and fantastical feel. The scene also has a gradient going from top to bottom, which works very well for a vertical shot like this. There are also no red colours in the bottom of the shot - and it naturally leads the eye towards the top.

Something I really pushed in the colour grade and materials were the blues and reds, they really make the scene pop and always look so good together. 

To be honest, this scene came together a lot faster than I expected. I think the most difficult thing was getting the light direction and shadows correct. When I work on environments like this I always start off with simple blockout meshes or downloaded assets, and then replace them later with better assets. This way, you see progression a lot faster and I think it can motivate you to finish scenes more.

Waterfalls

I had never made a material like this before, so I started off with a material by Kiven 7 from YouTube because it seemed like it would have the feel that I wanted. From there, I modified the shader and the instance to fit my scene better.

It is a masked material using vertex offset - there is a main panning tiling texture driving the waterfall look, and a normal map generated from that texture along with POM in the pixel depth offset to make a smoother water look without needing to tessellate the mesh too much. Some fresnel was used to give a feel of subsurface scattering in the water.

Benefits of working to one camera shot

I really like working on one shot scenes, I really do not like to give up on projects - so doing a scene like this allows me to not commit too much. It’s obviously less work, but also you can fake a lot more and really put everything into making that one shot look good - which is a process that I enjoy a lot more. It is a longer process to make a 360 environment and make everything match up to the concept shot. For a scene to make off-work I think it’s more fun to unleash your creativity and not care about the other structures around the scene. However, that does not mean you should not take them into account, as sometimes they can still affect the ambient light, shadows, and other details in your shot.

Straying from the concept

The original concept was very beautiful, but when I make a concept in 3D I’d like to think that I add something to the visual experience instead of having a 1 to 1 match. The sun was slightly more tilted in my scene because I wanted it to accentuate the structures more. I also wanted to make it look a little bit more realistic while keeping the fantasy feel, because I think the magic of 3D is that although the setting is unrealistic, you can still feel like the view might just really exist somewhere.

A lot of the differences in my scene just came from trial and error, I really believe in making ‘happy mistakes’, so I often start off trying to match the concept 1 to 1, but later not looking at the concept as much so I can make decisions based on what might look better, and not limiting myself to the concept art.

Tips for students

Make sure that you’re allowing yourself to take a break and have a life, it’s really easy (especially in school) to get sucked into a bubble and have 3D be the only thing happening, but as I learn more I find that hanging out with friends and taking care of yourself is incredibly important and something that people who are just starting to become adults need to learn and manage.

The other important thing when learning 3D (or anything else really) is motivation. When I began learning 3D, most of my motivation came from the fact that I wanted good grades and not necessarily because I actually had passion. Once I started having a passion for 3D though, I woke up excited to work on my projects and even now when I am tired after work, I still always keep working on environments. Unlike a lot of other career paths, everyone I know who does 3D do it because they have a passion for it, and although I am definitely not a professional by any means, I see myself pushing forward to improve in the far future because I just want to.

Best advice from teachers/colleagues?

There has definitely been a lot, but the most important thing I’ve been told and am working on is to not be so stressed. I have never experienced burn-out before and I honestly am pretty scared of it, but I’ve been beginning to relax and tell myself that I don’t have to work if I don’t want to, and do something relaxing when I need to. It has improved my mental health a lot, and it is incredibly admirable to see people being able to balance work and life in this industry.

What new things are you looking to learn?

For a small project I recently started I have been learning a little bit about cloth simulation and fabric materials. It is something I have never tried before, but it is really rewarding and fun!

There are so many more things that I want to learn, which is something I love about doing 3D - you never run out of things to learn about. Some topics that I am looking to explore more in the future would be writing a ray tracing program, proceduralism, and HLSL.

Clouds

With the cloud textures, I downloaded a cloud alpha from online. The main thing that sells the clouds is the POM, which I just plugged the alpha into. The movement from the clouds comes from a distorted UV, created via lerping 2 UVs together with a panning noise texture.

I created some additional masks for the extra colors in the clouds just by warping and masking out the original alpha texture in Photoshop. It turned out a lot better than I thought with some tweaking, the most important thing is to not overthink them.

Inspiration

I find a lot of my concept art via Pinterest, you can find so many amazing concepts there.

Feedback

I ask for feedback from my environment art teacher and via Discord servers, there are so many people who want to give feedback and help others become better.

Additional Advice

Be patient. I know it will take a long time before I arrive at what I want to be, but everyone needs to trust in the process and know that with effort, what needs to come will come.

Outro

Making the temple environment has taught me that it is a much more fun process to dive head first into making environments and not overthink too much. Making envrionments is not an easy process, but practice makes perfect, and never forget to give yourself a break. With the wealth of information online and new opportunities in technology, it really is such a great time to be a 3D artist.