LogInMaterial Artist Jake Lipelt discussed the creation of materials in the Wizard Tower project, a large-scale environment primarily built using the layer system in Unreal Engine. He focused on the texturing workflow and explained how to achieve good natural variation.
Introduction
I am a Material Artist specializing in making blends for environments. Since my last interview, I have been continuing to study and apply for jobs where I see them. I am currently looking for opportunities to gain experience and break into the industry.
About the Wizard Tower Project
After some time of hoarding inspiration and getting lost in ideas, I decided to try having my own take on an established concept rather than inventing something from scratch. Once I started to trim the fat off of my Pinterest boards and reference links, I was left primarily with works from Frank Frazetta and Jim Henson, who are both very inspiring artists with great work regarding wizards.
When I land on my idea, I create a new board for references to keep the style consistent once I start working. I really make an effort to pick references based on history and classic examples. I especially stay away from recent media and ArtStation for reference because I want to sample where my favorite art comes from, not the art itself. This allows me to find interesting things I have not seen before, learn a little something, and stand out among the crowd.
Composition
For this project, my composition revolved around my three separate shots: the main being large shapes and silhouette against the background, followed by the medium shapes to show off the tiling/cohesion, and finished with a closer shot with a more detail-focused look at materials and blends. I prefer to work with orthographic camera views to make my composition easier to work with and keep the focus on my textures, but sometimes, I will add a more dynamic shot to add some character in the end. I try to keep my scenes well-lit and easy to read so as not to distract or hide the work I have put in.
Modeling
In my texturing projects, I only model what is necessary to show off my textures and break up the empty spaces. For the more complex props, I will follow tutorials or clean up/add to models I find online. The “Green Man” pillar capstone is actually a sculpted-over bust of the 19th U.S. president, Rutherford B. Hayes, that I grabbed from the Smithsonian website. I sculpted the arms from scratch and had no plans to move the models around, so a quick decimate, UV, and bake of one side worked perfectly. I was able to create variations with the RGB masks from Substance 3D Painter to keep it from looking repetitive.
Texturing
There is a lot to get into with this part, so I will break it down with some screenshots and videos to make things easy to apply in your own projects.
I have to keep in mind this is a large scene, and getting some good natural variation by hand would be very time-consuming, so I like to start things off with a procedural world noise layer before I start adding the specific details.
After this, I add the first paint layer. Before I start painting, I try to figure out a way to add structure to the process. In this project, having a layer for water runoff made it easy to know where I would need to paint. This layer usually consists of a color map and a brush mask.
You may have noticed the first paint layer gets this nasty green element where the mask is more absolute. I added this piece to preserve my paint channels and kill two birds with one stone by only needing to paint once for effectively two layers worth of detail. I use the power node to drive the strength of this secondary layer, making sure this second layer only affects the color and roughness to get some nice context.
I have not mentioned this piece yet, but here are the layer settings I use to control the displacement for the height blends.
Summary
From the research phase to the finished renders, this project took me about two months. I would say the most time-consuming part was getting the blockout and composition right. At that point in the project, it could just go so many different ways; it was tough to set something in stone so early on my own.
I would highly recommend reaching out to qualified artists who can give you some direction. You would be surprised how many people are willing to give advice — it never hurts to ask!
My favorite part of any project is doing the research. I find this stage to be the most important because it really adds structure to my projects going forward and helps give context/purpose to my artistic decisions.
As a primarily self-taught artist, I rely pretty heavily on tutorials for learning, but it is important to make sure you pick the ones that teach you how to use the tools. There are a LOT of clickbait tutorials out there that promise these awesome results in a short amount of time. You might end up with the scene from the video, but you will not learn how to make a new one on your own.
I recommend looking at Peton Varney’s YouTube channel to get some high-quality overviews on making materials in Unreal Engine. He works at Naughty Dog, so you can trust the advice he gives, and he is just a cool dude who is looking to help out other artists. If you are more interested in the Substance side of things, you can’t go wrong with any of Javier Perez’s demos. He does not have his own channel, which I’m aware of, but he does some nice in-depth collaborations that you can find just by looking up his name on YouTube.