How to Create Autumn Temple with Ancient China's Charm in UE5

Introduction

Hello everyone, my name is Siqi, and I come from Guangzhou, China. I am more than happy to share some of my experiences of making my scene Eternal Temple Autumn (千古寺·秋) here on 80 Level.

I am working as an environment artist and have 6 years of experience. For the first 3 years, I mainly made props, and in the following 3 years, I began to be responsible for bigger 3D environment art. 

When I first entered the game industry, I only focused on model material aesthetic results and the structural details of props until I found Modeng's game environment art, an online course company, and 腾飞Finger, who is my tutor for this project. 

In his level art course, 腾飞Finger made me understand that making games requires a holistic view, which has been very helpful to my later work. I am very happy to share this knowledge with everyone. 腾飞Finger has taught me a lot of knowledge and experience in level art and Unreal Engine. He is a very patient and meticulous teacher, and I am very grateful for his help and inspiration.

Eternal Temple Autumn

I wanted to showcase the appearance of ancient Chinese Buddhist architectural complexes and created this as a possible map for an open-world game. The final presentation has four main shots of this temple, and it took me four and a half months of my off hours.

This article will be more inclined to explain from a design perspective why it is made this way, hoping to give some help and inspiration to the projects you are currently working on.

Design Ideas

1. The emotion I want to express

The expression of emotions is usually represented by hue because it is intuitive and eye-catching. Here, I wanted to express a warm and comfortable emotion, so I chose a warm yellow. Adding warm yellow color assets will run through the entire workflow, and my goal is to make this color’s picture proportion large enough. So, I constantly think about using more means to make warm yellow distribution more natural. 

After determining warm yellow as the main tone, I choose a small number of complementary colors to break the color balance. If the color is absolutely uniform, it will appear dull and monotonous. The color-matching inspiration comes from the Dunhuang murals (from 366 AD to the 14th century) in China. Complementary colors are more vibrant and visually impactful.

2. Scene brightness and contrast

A high-contrast picture is more eye-catching. The most intense contrast should be given to the visual center to guide the vision. The contrast at the visual edges should be weakened as much as possible, creating a difference that effectively separates the spatial levels.

In the picture above, the contrast on the left side is stronger because that is the walking route, the visual center. Vision usually shifts from strong to weak, so the picture will slowly unfold from the left side to the right side. This is a very subtle change.

Because this scene depicts an ancient temple, it needs to convey a sense of stability and heritage. So, I chose a high saturation, high brightness contrast color range.

3. Division of spatial hierarchy

Rich level occlusions can effectively open up the spatial sense of the map. The proportion of each level and the rhythm of the outer contour need to be subjectively controlled to achieve the desired effect.

4. The rhythm of the outer contour

Different levels of outer contours can try different lengths. Leave details to the center of the route to make the picture center more expressive. Having a dense and sparse distribution can make the picture more relaxed and natural.

We can imagine the spatial level as passing through several different doors to reach our destination, and each door needs to make different changes, considering their nesting relationship and blending with each other.

The rhythm of the outer contour can not only be used at the spatial level of the scene but also for the placement of small assets.

5. Visual guidance

The flow of the outline can help us strengthen the visual center. Players may not know that you have made visual guidance especially, but several visual guidance designs combined together will form a strong guide.

Production Process

1. Map planning

This project is a relatively large map. I designed this imaginary temple, which is located at the southeast edge of the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau in the second step of China's terrain and in the west of the hills of Guangdong and Guangxi. The climate is warm, the rain is abundant, and the light is sufficient.

I spent a considerable amount of time searching for atmosphere, composition, plant, waterfront landscape, light, shadow, and architectural structure references. I plan the composition of the map and four shots until I have a clear understanding of the entire design. In 腾飞finger’s course, this is a must step.

2. Blockout

After determining the composition of each shot, I will use the basic geometry of Unreal Engine for blockout. This step does not need to build too many details, only to determine the large spatial relationship. The lighting only has a default directional light, adjusted to the desired angle. I added exponential height fog, Post Process Volume, sky atmosphere, and sky light, but these parameters have not been adjusted; they are all default values. In this step, I will use the default character to run the map repeatedly and modify any uncomfortable parts, ensuring that the overall route is comfortable and smooth. 

3. Basic asset replacement

After the blocking phase, I look for assets similar to the design to replace placeholders. At this time, I don't pay too much attention to its details and structure rationality because it is still necessary to confirm whether the shot composition plan and 3D space are reasonably integrated. The lighting parameters at this time still have not been processed. The early steps are very important, so I will slow down, which can avoid major spatial problems in the later stage of the scene.

4. Basic lighting setup

After the spatial relationship is completed, you can start to adjust the basic lighting and atmosphere. The default lighting is cold, so you need to adjust it to be warmer. Because I wanted to create a morning atmosphere, the air should be cold, and warm lighting would make the atmosphere more like dusk, so I did not choose to adjust the directional light to a warm color. Fortunately, the yellow leaves and grass area are large enough, and the desired effect can be achieved only by increasing their saturation. At the same time, the yellow plants and cold space create an interesting hue contrast. The parameters of the exponential height fog will be shown in the following paragraphs.

The range of Post Process Volume is set to infinite, the exposure mode is set to manual mode, and the exposure compensation is 11. I chose Lumen for both the global lighting and reflection methods. In sky atmosphere, I chose blue atmospheric scattering, making the air more transparent. Skylight remains default because it only needs to provide some fill light for the dark parts.

5. Adding architecture to ancient Chinese structures

After the basic atmosphere of the scene is determined, the next step is to focus on the building structure. When processing the structure, we need to find a large number of ancient Chinese wooden building references to understand its basic structure and mechanical relationships in architecture. 

Building parts can be found on Quixel or other websites. After finding the right assets, I will create a blank blueprint in UE5 and build the building structure in the blueprint. This is convenient for better overall control and operation in the later stage, and sometimes there will be dozens or even hundreds of parts.

6. Adding fog and wind

After the building is completed, the construction of the scene will enter the final stages. We need to add more fog slices, ribbons, or animals to make the scene more vibrant. The ribbons are directional after being blown up by the wind, and we can use them as visual guidance. So I made them a more eye-catching red because their area is very small and will not destroy the picture, but at the same time, you can feel the existence of the wind.

Then I added some horses: the scene is set in ancient China, where horses are an important means of transportation. There are often people in ancient temples for worship or rest, so there will be horses outside the door. The placement of air fog will be described in detail in later paragraphs.

7. Post Process Volume settings

After the small items are placed, the last step is to use Post Process Volume (PPV for short) to process some simple camera effects.

There are many parameters available for post-adjustment, and everyone can adjust according to the desired effect. I found that the dark part of this scene is a bit too dark, which will affect the integrity of the picture. So I adjusted the Local Exposure's Shadow Contrast Scale to 0.5.

Finally, I added chromatic aberration and a vignette effect to increase the cinematic feel of the picture. The numbers should be: for Chromatic Aberration – 0.4 and for Vignette Intensity – 0.66.

Other Details Production

1. Trees

Because the scene needs to maintain high saturation, I need to make the leaves as transparent as possible. The yellow SSS material will emit red after being refracted by the sun, which just meets the required effect. However, the dark part of the tree will be very dark with refraction only, so I increased the indirect lighting of the sun to 12, the sun's strength to 10, and turned on the tree's ray tracing.

2. Shadow softness settings

The default shadow settings are realistic, but we don't need too many leaf shadows to interfere with our picture. So I adjusted the Source Angle to 2.64 to make the shadow softer and the picture more integrated.

3. Fallen leaves

First, I selected a leaf material with an alpha channel, made it into a UE5 material, and applied it to a plane. Then I edited it into the desired group of fallen leaves in the blueprint, and then I placed it in the scene.

The shadows of the fallen leaves also need to be turned off, and the trivial shadows will affect the overall picture.

4. Clouds and fog

For cloud and fog, I use the "Easy Fog" plug-in made by William Faucher.

The main role of clouds and fog is to make spatial division, so I put them in the middle of different blocks. Of course, they can also be placed on the visual edge to weaken the attraction of the edge and enhance the visual center effect.

The tool's parameters can be viewed in William Faucher's introduction video, which is more detailed. Adjust the tool according to your own project.

Because my scene is set in a valley with a river and lush vegetation, in this kind of environment, a large amount of water vapor will be generated, so it is necessary to use fog to restore this effect.

Because the main color tone of the scene is warm yellow with a little bit of purple, if the air mist is also warm-colored, the air will look very turbid. Therefore, I chose blue to make the air look fresher.

I wanted the air mist to start further back (Start Distance – 5,000), so I increased its value. This allows the details of the buildings in the midground to be clearly seen.

5. Special Chinese architecture and sculptures

Architectural assets mainly use scanned assets from a Chinese company called PBRMax, which can be downloaded locally and then assembled in blueprints. 

The company also helped Game Science to scan nationally protected cultural relics and ancient buildings in Chongqing Dazu Rock Carvings, Shanxi Yuhuang Temple, and other locations since the early planning stages of “Black Myth: Wukong” in 2019.

Conclusion

Thank you very much for reading. I hope it has been of some help to everyone. There is still much room for improvement in this work, and I am also learning to perfect it.

Siqi, Environment Artist

Interview conducted by Gloria Levine