Creating a Mysterious National Park in ZBrush, Houdini & Sustance 3D

Juliette O’Leary has shared the breakdown of the NQZ project, spoke about the learning process at Ringling College, and told how the Game Art course affected her workflow.

Introduction

Hi there! My name is Juliette O’Leary, I’m currently a Senior in Game Art at Ringling College and will be graduating with a BFA in May of this year. I’ve been creating 3D art projects since my sophomore year at Ringling, but I’ve always been passionate about games since I was a kid.  

Game Art Course at Ringling College

I decided to major in Game Art at Ringling about a year before I got accepted. It was the perfect location for me, the number of grads in the games industry was impressive, and the curriculum for Game Art seemed like the right fit for me. At this point in my life, I had no clue what I wanted to do specifically in the industry, but it seemed like Ringling would help me find it.

Learning Process

My freshman year at Ringling was mainly focused on the fundamentals of art and design. We focused on color theory, figure drawing, perspective, and 2D Design. 

Then, my sophomore year was focused on learning the fundamentals of the industry pipeline; we created concept art, learned the basics of hard-surface and organic modeling, Modkits, sculpting assets in ZBrush, texturing in Substance 3D Painter, and created fully playable games in Unreal Engine, with cinematics and basic VFX. 

The first semester of Junior year was then focused on creating a level based on a real-world biome, building an explorable workshop, and also developing the VisDev we would follow to create our biomes. Then, the second semester was dedicated to pitching and developing your senior thesis.

We had 16 weeks to pitch multiple projects to our entire faculty, complete with concept art, story, isometrics, top-down maps with a walkthrough, asset lists, mood paintings, and grey box maps in UE4 with a prototype of the main mechanic. Then faculty would vote yes or no on the idea, and whichever pitch was approved, you would spend the last few weeks of the semester developing your final pitch, which also served as a style bible that you would follow in senior year.

Finally, the first-semester senior year is completely dedicated to executing the entire environment. 

Also, we were able to choose an alum mentor that is currently in the industry to help guide us in our thesis! My mentor is Zachary Schlanger, who’s currently an Environment Artist at Bluepoint. He provided a ton of great feedback and insight at every meeting we had, gave some amazing advice towards completing my thesis, and has helped me figure out solutions to any problems I encountered.

And on top of that, we had Discord channels dedicated to posting any updates on our progress, which allowed our mentors, alumni, faculty, and other students to post any crit they had. 

We have about 5 weeks in between milestone critiques, where we would present progress to the full faculty who would vote based on their confidence if your project is on track or not, and provide an in-depth critique. 

Then in the second semester, we create and rig our characters for the thesis, do a major-wide playtest, and start the job hunt.

I will say, it has changed drastically since I was a freshman. The Game Art department is constantly improving its classes to make them even better for the next batch of incoming students.

The College

Ringling College is a fine arts college located in Sarasota, Florida. They offer 13 majors, ranging from Game Art, Virtual Reality, Computer Animation, Film, Illustration, and Motion Design, and also offer minors in subjects like Art History, Creative Writing, and Business of Art and Design as well. If you’re interested in applying to Ringling, review the portfolio requirements here and apply here.

The NQZ Project

My senior thesis, NQZ, is about a crazed cryptid hunter, living in the National Quiet Zone. You've recently heard some rumors of a beast that lives in its woods, "Nongy," so it's your job to see if you can hunt it down, collect evidence, and most importantly, come back alive…

I’ve had the idea of "NQZ" in my head since the summer before my junior year. I took a lot of inspiration from Sequoia National Park. I went there for the first time in 2020 and I was inspired by the incredible beauty of the location and took a lot of reference pictures. I loved every little detail in the park, on the trails, on the picnic tables, on the maps – literally everywhere.  I also loved this mystical atmosphere that would happen at blue hour/night time when I went camping; looking up and seeing a super starry sky with a silhouetted tree line was just incredible. 

I’m also a big fan of cryptids, Nessie is my all-time favorite, but Mothman and Bigfoot are up there too. Sequoia felt like it was Sasquatch territory, and that inspired me to think about how all of these deep forests with untouched beauty might hold something mysterious in their depths.

Before formally pitching it, I knew what I wanted to be present in the environment, the general mood, and that I wanted it to be stylized. Then a month before the concept pitch, I spent a lot of time figuring out the main character, a real biome to base it on, the gameplay I’d like to have, and any other things I needed for the pitch.

Here’s what the concept pitch looked like for NQZ:

Super basic pitch, I wasn’t happy with the initial story reveal, so the crit I received from my faculty and peers definitely helped it get where it needed to be.

1 of 13

I took a lot of stylistic inspiration from LAIKA films, like Missing Link, Paranorman, and Coraline, and the games Firewatch, Baldur’s Gate, and Outer Wilds.

After developing the concept and all visual development further, and receiving full approval and great feedback from my faculty and peers over the semester, my Style Bible was completed in about 10 weeks.

This was the final pitch, and it was developed as a guide to follow in my senior fall. I really enjoyed every step in the visual development, it was really fun to flesh out this world and the rules in it, and get a true idea of what my thesis would look like!

1 of 17

Modeling and Texturing

During the visual development process, I was creating the grey box in Unreal at the same time. I was also dedicating a lot of time to getting the mood right with lighting, which I think is so important to develop early!   

During the summer between junior and senior year, I learned Houdini for procedural asset creation. That time allowed me to frontload a lot of work, which was spent creating most of my trees and landscapes. I didn’t mind creating trees in Maya/ZBrush, but I knew Houdini had the capabilities to speed up my workflow and provide a non-destructive solution while iterating.

SideFX Labs’ "TreeLabs" nodes were the key to creating my trees. SideFX has a great series of tutorials that dive into it further, couldn’t recommend it enough!

With two of my trees, I had created a base tree trunk that followed the VisDev, and procedurally placed branches onto those trunks, and ta-da! I had multiple iterations of the same type of tree.

As you can see here, it’s a really basic node set-up of just three nodes. I wanted to "keep it simple, stupid," which allowed me to refine further in Maya and ZBrush.

Next, I tackled my vista and landscape with Terrain tools in Houdini. I wanted to find a great base that I could build off of in multiple ways, either exaggerating for the focal point or playing down for a "filler" landscape. 

So by the time I started my senior year,  I had this great base that saved me a bunch of time during the semester and allowed me to focus on each step of the production pipeline. 

The first milestone was dedicated to modeling, with the goal of refining "1st Read" low fidelity models to "3rd Read," and basic lighting. I completed all modeling in Maya 2022 and created around 50 assets, which were a mix of hard-surface and organic models. 

Modeling is my favorite part of the process, it’s always so enjoyable to translate a 2D concept into 3D, and building the story into the assets themselves is so rewarding to me.

I will say hard-surface modeling is a bit stressful for me, so I challenged myself to make my environmental central asset hard-surface! I wanted to make the 70s camper that the cryptid hunter lives in, and make it his home base where he’d review all this evidence. 

I also had this little campsite that was nestled among these big trees, which the player would pass by while hunting for evidence. I was curious about ZBrush’s new fabric sim and played around with that to start the base of these tents. I’ve worked in Marvelous Designer before with previous projects, but I enjoyed the process a lot more in ZBrush.

And here’s the vista I generated in Houdini in game! It’s crazy to look back and see the difference between block out and the modeling milestone. 

The next milestone was for textures/materials. For this milestone, materials and textures must effectively do their job in regards to local color, nature, and wear. Materials and surface definitions have good visual variety and are consistent with the logic of the world as well. And are appealing at a first, second, and third read. Still only basic lighting, no baked lighting just yet! 

In 5 weeks, I had about 45 unique materials done in Substance 3D Designer at this point, and 15 textures authored in Substance 3D Painter. And after instancing and further adjusting in Unreal, I ended up with 100 mats at the end. 

I really wanted to push myself when it came to authoring materials and having a wide array of natural and unnatural materials work together in the same shot. It was a really fun challenge, and after some great crit, I was able to push the project further in the final milestone.

Lighting and Rendering

The goal of the final phase was to finish strong and secure lighting and add any last finishing touches. This was an essential milestone since some things strayed from the original concept, and the final lighting and post-process helped tremendously. 

This milestone was more difficult for me because I wasn’t as familiar with all lighting/post-process settings, and I would constantly lose the mood/atmosphere once I built my lighting. My mentor definitely came in clutch here, a lot of time was spent troubleshooting, readjusting lightmaps, light complexity, shader complexity, and optimizing texture maps.

Here you can see all the trial and error I went through, mainly trying to recapture that mood/atmosphere with built lighting. I tried a bunch of different HDRIs, played around with the Light Source, Skylight, and SkySphere BP, and adjusted my post-process settings (mainly Exposure, Bloom, and AO) accordingly. I think I had about 20 iterations before finally achieving that mood and atmosphere again.

How the Course Affected the Workflow

Ringling’s Game Art program really helped build the foundation of knowledge needed to succeed as an Environment Artist and allowed us to explore further in our free time. My personal workflow has changed drastically since my sophomore year, but it wouldn’t have been possible without the first one Ringling taught me.

Future Plans

At the time of writing this article, I am still looking for a job in the industry. I’ve been talking with a few studios, but I’ve not finalized anything just yet. I’m open to anything, but ideally, I’d love to be an Environment Artist at a game studio that focuses on narrative and creating beautiful stylized worlds.

I’d like to improve my technical skills overall, I had a taste of it when working in Houdini and I wanna push my knowledge of procedural asset creation even further. I think it’s extremely valuable to learn more about ways to speed up personal production and make it easier in the long run. I’d also like to get pushed in material creation. I heavily enjoy Substance 3D Designer when it comes to seamless mats, but I know there are other ways to push myself further in SD and SP for sure. 

Juliette O’Leary, 3D Environment Artist

Interview conducted by Theodore McKenzie

Join discussion

Comments 1

  • god God

    Nice Article!

    0

    god God

    ·a year ago·

You might also like

We need your consent

We use cookies on this website to make your browsing experience better. By using the site you agree to our use of cookies.Learn more