Creating a Fairy Forest in Blender, ZBrush, Substance 3D & Unreal Engine

Introduction

Hello, my name is Laima Vaitkus. My first profession, in which I received a Bachelor's degree, is academic music. But visual arts have always fascinated me as well. I've made simple posters, CD covers, and billboards in Photoshop for friends. I have been in the world of 3D since 2018, and then I decided to connect my future career with game art.

My first project as an intern was a VR game called TowerHex. I was introduced to modeling and level design in Unity. Then I worked for several years in the development of mobile games on project CoinTrip in a small outsourcing studio. There, every 3D Artist had to be a Generalist. I had to do the background landscape, props, characters, shading, lighting, and sprite rendering in Blender.

After work, I always tried to learn new tools and pipelines on widely available resources like Udemy, CG Cookie or online CG schools like CG Tarian, Smirnov School, VFX Lab. It was an exciting and interesting experience, but the downside of this is that for an awfully long time, I could not decide my main direction: the environments or the characters, because I really liked both. 

After much deliberation and doubt, my choice has been made. I decided to specialize in environments with a focus on nature and organics. I have found the course Game Location in Unreal Engine taught by Sergei Panin provided by Smirnov School and have applied to it. This led to my Fairy Forest scene as a course project.

In the project, I wanted to use my own concept ideas to adjust them to my goals: stylization, vegetation, and resource management in a large scene. To do this, I chose an exterior with a lot of greenery, ruins in the background, and various small props in the foreground. The vegetation and style were inspired by the game Kena: Bridge of Spirits, and for the content I wanted to borrow some elements from the movie Alice in Wonderland by Tim Burton. The rest of the references were taken from Pinterest.

Blockout

According to the standard, everything starts with a blockout. First, I look for an organic scale and balance in the composition between free and filled space, creating it from the most basic primitive forms.

When the scale blockout is ready, I make passes for detailing large objects. Sometimes you must make changes to the concept because not everything that looks good in 2D references will also work well in 3D space. After achieving a harmonious composition, it is possible to proceed with a detailed blockout of small objects. The final stage of the blockout is coloring.

Assets

I started with the largest objects such as trees and stones. I made the trees by sculpting trunks, branches and roots in ZBrush.

Then, according to the standard, there was a retopology and a test bake. For retopology, I like to use the Quad Draw tool in Maya, and for the Normal Map and AO inlay, I used xNormal. Later, these maps were used in Substance 3D Painter.

To assemble the custom tree and its variations, I assigned some parts to the curves, and with the help of the curves, I created the bends that I needed for the branches and roots. Then I made two versions of the stones in ZBrush.

All smaller props were made according to the standard scheme: high-poly and low-poly modeling or sculpting, UV, baking, and texturing using the same tools: ZBrush, Blender, xNormal, Substance 3D Painter.

Ruins

I planned the ruins to be far away in the background. I wanted to include them in the scene to practise making modular assets, tileble textures, and trims.

All modeling and texture mapping was done in Blender. And for destruction, I used a very handy plug-in that allows you to quickly cut off a part of the mesh. In fact, this is a Bisect tool with additional settings. Here is a ruins trim sheet made in Substance 3D Painter:

Vegetation

For all the plants, I decided that I would use one texture atlas. Since the foil plants would be quite small and in large numbers, the sculpting could not be done in Blender. I made the Normal Map and AO using xNormal and then continued my work in Substance 3D Painter.

The next step was to cut leaves from the plain. This was done in Blender with the Knife tool. Then it was only necessary to collect the plants and bushes themselves.

For the crowns of large trees, I used the model of the bush and simply copied it. Usually such things are done procedurally, but I did it manually, because it didn't take long and it gave me more control to create a simple stylized shape for the entire crown. I made the main material for the vegetation according to Tyler Smith's tutorial "Stylized environment in Unreal". 

Landscape

For the terrain, I used some very simple nodes in World Machine to take the Height Map from there and import it as the basis for the landscape.

For the landscape material, I used the tutorial "Unreal Engine 5: One Course Solution For Material" by Vince Petrelli. 

The material has quite a lot of settings and it is not the easiest one to put together with tutorials. Plus, it is designed for a more realistic style, not stylization. But I had several reasons to choose this particular material:

• I wanted to learn how to make automaterial and use it in some of my projects, and not just go through the tutorial.
• Paying closer attention to the references from Kena, I noticed that they also use quite realistic landscape material.
• I liked that it uses Cell Bombing, and it looked good in my scene.

Here are some graph functions and nodes:

I got the texture sets for the landscape from Substance 3D Assets. I added the same moss as on the main layer to the large stones using the World Align function.

Light

After trying different lighting options, I liked the sunset soft backlight for this scene the most. I used pretty simple settings. It was 1 Directional light, Exponential Height fog, Sky atmosphere, SkyLight and SkySphere mesh to use custom SkyBox material from Unreal Engine Marketplace. I set the rest of the accents and ambient light with Point lights without shadows.

There are some screenshots of the post-process. As you can see, I used standard basic settings mainly to even out the exposure, add bloom, vignettes, and lighten the shadows a bit.  

Conclusion

This is my first environment of this size in which I tried to make it with the correct pipelines, considering that it should be real-time, and not just a visualization for rendering.

The most difficult thing was to consider all the points in advance and strictly follow the plan. Because at some moments in the subsequent stages, it became clear that this or that asset does not look good in the scene, and it needs either to be redone completely or to change something in the silhouette or texture.  

Many thanks to my mentor on the course, Sergey Panin, who gave very valuable feedback and advised me on some additional tutorials where I could peek at the material I needed. Thank you, 80 Level, for interviewing me. I am very grateful for this opportunity.

Laima Vaitkus, 3D Artist 

Interview conducted by Arti Burton