A Home Up High: Modular Scene Production

Introduction

Hello, my name is Chris Lambert and I’m an Environment Artist at Counterplay Games. I first started learning 3D art around the middle of 2018, after a semi mid-life crisis decision to change my career.

A Home Up High: Start of Work

For this project, I had a tight time schedule (around 6 weeks) as I would be away for 3 months afterward, so the planning side of things was really quite important - I needed to get it finished!

I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted the scene to look like, so during the blockout I was just playing around with the arrangement of everything so that the light and buildings were positioned where I thought they’d look nice. 

I knew I wanted to dabble with baked lighting as I’d not used it before so I had quite a few test bakes to see roughly how things would turn out, and if there were any issues to look out or compensate for – luckily it went fairly smoothly!

Buildings & Props

Speaking of the buildings themselves, I wanted to go for a modular approach, as I knew there would be a few of them on screen. I collected lots of reference images of middle eastern houses for inspiration, then started creating houses with different elements so that I only needed a few that I could rotate around for variation. For things like the doors, I just created a single mesh, created some texture variations in Substance Painter, then used vertex painting in Unreal so that I could have different-looking doors without having to model anything extra.

I modeled everything in Blender, and really the best thing that helped me was creating a list of assets that I thought I would need, starting from the largest ones (buildings, walls, etc.) to small decoration props. I put them in the scene as soon as possible to see if they work then polished them up some more.

Having some rugs in the scene was quite important – if nothing but to add a splash of color! I knew about Blender’s cloth simulation but it was my first time experimenting with it. I didn’t know what to expect, but it was great fun and saved a lot of time over trying to model such things. It also came in handy for the cart tarp and the window covers. The simulation has lots of parameters to fiddle around with, so with a bit of trial and error, I ended up with something I liked.

For all the small props, I just made a quick list from looking at references of what kind of things would help tell a little story – like showing that the house was lived in and used. Again, because I was on a pretty tight time schedule I had to try and keep this list relatively short – which was not always easy! I’d seen a fair amount of pillows and cushions in images so I knew I’d need to make a few, luckily I worked on these after experimenting with Blender’s simulation tools, so using their soft body physics was a nice way to get some plump pillows!

Materials

The terrain and building materials were made with Quixel Megascans (and Mixer). They had lots of great mud and stone textures so grabbing a few of these and editing them with Mixer was super easy, and I got something I was happy with really fast. For the stone wall, I grabbed a nice chunky stone texture, changed the colors around, added some dust in the cracks using another texture and it was pretty much ready to go. I had also used quite a few different decals around the scene, and they have lots of great dirt and crack decals that were very helpful to add that little extra detail.

Here's the list of Megascans assets I used:

• Rock Pile
• Rock Wall / Scatter Rocks
• House Stone
• House Mud (was made in Mixer but mainly this)
• Ground 1, Ground 2   (made in Mixer but mainly)
• Decals 1, Decals 2
• Trash Piles
• Weeds

Lighting

The lighting was quite a challenge to get it exactly how I wanted it, there were lots of iterations and experimenting. The end setup was very basic, just a directional light and skylight. I could be satisfied with just the base lighting bake, but there were areas where I wanted something extra. For the house interior, I have a few point lights dotted around to help support the baked lighting and fake a few extra bounces. Overall, they’re pretty subtle, but when they were disabled it definitely felt that something was lacking.

For the shot above, I also added an additional point light for the red/pink bounce from the rug on the left. Also, I had a light function inside where the blue tarp light is bouncing around. The holes in the tarp weren’t getting picked up well, so a light function with a holey mask made up for this detail.

Conclusion

I really enjoyed making this scene, and I learned a lot from doing it. One useful technique I found was using prefabs/Blueprints in UE4. The buildings were fairly modular in design and contained many different meshes to create the entire house. To help with the speed of dressing each house I created some prefabs for the wooden roof beams and the window frames. This way, I could quickly copy over the entire window frame for a new building without having to singularly click on each frame piece. This also meant I could make changes to the prefab (for example, moving a log) and it would change globally rather than having to make that change to each instance. A nice time saver!

Chris Lambert, Environment Artist at Counterplay Games

Interview conducted by Daria Loginova