How To Model & Texture A Moody Environment Featuring Architecture of Haussmann & Belle Epoque Styles

Introduction

Hi, I’m Blayde Gilley, and I am a 3D Environment Artist from Columbus, Ohio. I have been in the AAA space for the last three years. I’m currently working freelance as I search for my next opportunity.

Like many others in this industry, I was very passionate about video games from a young age. The earliest games I remember playing are Jet Set Radio Future and the Splinter Cell games. It wasn’t until high school that I realized I wanted to make games. I would spend hundreds of hours modding and playing Bethesda games like Skyrim and the Fallout games. My love for these games was the catalyst for me to look into a career in game development.

I went to a university in Ohio called Shawnee State University, where I initially started learning programming for games. I quickly learned that this wasn’t for me and switched to the art-focused program, where I learned environment art was my real passion. Shortly before graduating college, I received an offer to work at Lost Boys Interactive, where I spent the last 3 years working on the MMO New World from Amazon Games.

Inspiration, Intentions, & References

After spending most of my time within a proprietary engine doing solely world-building, I felt the need to stretch my kit-building and trim creation muscles in Unreal. Additionally, shortly before the project, I played the incredible game Lies of P. The use of the Belle Époque architecture inspired me to look into that style, as well as the Haussmann style. These styles played right into my goals and created an excellent learning experience.

The primary goals I wanted to accomplish with this project were to practice using a trim material for the majority of a scene and improve my skills in both composition and lighting.

When gathering references, I wished to find a balance between realism and cinematic. I began by finding references for the general mood and vibe, focusing on a good cinematic feel and great composition. For the architecture, I searched for examples of the styles and picked the main examples I wanted to replicate in my kit. For additional reference, I’d look through Google Street View around Paris.

Composition & Blockout

When composing a shot, I work better in 3D. Using the references I found, I began blocking out the scene in Unreal Engine. In my personal projects, I like to use the “Blockout Tools Plugin” for Unreal instead of in-engine alternatives, purely as a preference. I tried out a couple of different layouts to see what works best. Before each blockout, I place a camera in the scene and lock transforms to maintain the composition throughout the process. It’s important to maintain scale, so I use the Unreal mannequin to maintain consistency in both Unreal and Maya. At this point, I did a quick lighting pass to establish intent.

Kit Creation

Once happy with the blockout, I moved to adapt it to modular pieces. I use Maya for my modeling needs. All the pieces I kept on a 2m standard to allow for extra modularity within a whole wall and reduce empty space. I kept the main kit pieces simple to get the layout finalized. I added extra detail to a few important pieces that establish the look of separate buildings (i.e., the building facades at street level). These pieces keep the same standard and still fit within the kit.

Once I had some basic kit pieces established, I started looking towards trim and materials. Looking through my references, I singled out important elements of materials that would work well as a part of the trim. I modeled the basic shapes in Maya and imported those shapes into ZBrush to sculpt the more organic details like chipping and cracks, primarily to break up the straight lines.

When building the kit and trim, I keep the process fluid. I was constantly going back and forth between programs to see how the trim was working on the kit and how it looked in Unreal, then going back to ZBrush to make changes and additions as needed.

Texturing was handled in Substance 3D Painter. I used the high poly from ZBrush to bake the details to a plane. For the textures themselves, I relied mostly on generators, tiling alphas, and smart masks. I wanted to keep the texture as seamless and non-destructive as possible to allow for easy iteration. Since a major focus was reuse, in Painter, I set up masks to use in Unreal, where I could change the tint of individual sections of the trim. One map was packed into RGBA to reduce the number of maps. Each channel corresponds to a different section. I used an additional mask later on solely for the metal section of the trim, as it was added later.

In the trim, I included both wood and metal materials. Doing so allowed me to utilize it for a few individual assets. This sped up the prop creation and set dressing significantly and kept consistency across the props and kit.

Final Scene Layout and Composition

With the trim and basics of the kit established, this is where the speed of the project takes off. All of the kit pieces use the same materials and shapes, so even with new pieces I could quickly copy parts over from existing pieces to the new ones or copy the texel density of other pieces to keep the materials seamless where necessary.

I knew I wanted the three main buildings to be visually distinct but still unified by the trim. While the materials were the same, the geometry was different. The center building was the focal point that everything needed to lead to, but I still had to keep everything else interesting. When placing assets, my goal was to fill up empty space but not overcrowd the image.

Up until the end, I was changing the layout. The last major change was to completely redo the background tower, even after the whole scene was basically done. The original tower had scale issues that weren’t immediately noticeable. For the sake of scene scale, the building needed to be completely redone and pushed much further back to feel like a real tower and give the scene the proper scale.

In set dressing, I relied heavily on reuse. Many assets used the same materials or parts of the trim, and the colors were adjusted in material instances. All the grime in my scene was handled by decals, which is not the way I’d recommend doing it, but time was a factor that made me choose this route. Ideally, working with vertex painting and mask blending would be the way I’d suggest others take and myself in the future.

Lighting

Lighting was a major skill I wanted to work on with this scene. I knew from the start that I wanted to do two separate lighting scenarios. Lighting is truly the aspect that makes or breaks a scene, so it took much tweaking to get the right look, one that doesn’t feel too flat or too saturated. Luckily, we have Lumen, which makes real-time lighting much easier to do. For the clouds, I utilized the Ultra Dynamic Sky plugin.

During the blockout phase, I did an initial pass to establish intent. I wanted to bring attention to the main building, so I had the sunshine directed towards the facade of the main building. But the blockout lighting was very flat. After spending a while developing the scene, eventually, the flat lighting made the scene look worse than it should have.

For the daytime scenario, the lighting is primarily driven by the directional light, and most of the feel is determined by it and the skylight. I wanted to find a balance of realistic and stylized lighting to give the scene a grounded but idealized feel. I started by making the lighting realistic to get a strong basis for where the shadows are, the intensity of brightness, and the amount of global illumination. To get the idealistic feel, I relied on the post-process volume. Here, I placed some smaller lights, like adding the red glow of the cafe sign and lighting up the main restaurant sign and the facade of the restaurant.

Post Process

The post-process is where a lot of the magic is done. I control the brightness, contrast, and colors to really bring out the depth of the scene and hit that idealized look I want. To avoid any issues with exposure, I lock the min and max EV100 to 1.

By default, Unreal doesn’t have ambient occlusion (AO) enabled. Here are a couple of commands I like to use to address that:

r.Lumen.DiffuseIndirect.SSAO 1 
r.Lumen.ScreenProbeGather.ShortRangeAO 0 
r.Shadow.distancescale 0

With these, I can use AO to add an additional layer of depth to the image. Under the “Color Grading” section is where the final touches live to get the right colors for the scene. The changes made here are very subtle but add up to the right look.