Technical Tips for

Environment Artists: Part 1

27 March, 2019

Environment Art

Environment Design Tutorial

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Harry Gray allowed us to repost his guide

with numerous technical tips for
environment artists.
INTRO

You will learn thought processes and skills

through this that are highly versatile.
Environment Art is one of the highest
growing areas of game art; worlds are
increasing in size and detail with more
people needed to complete them. With this I
aim to help artists to efficiently populate
space with tailored assets that can help fill
out an environment effectively while
maintaining a sense of world and story, but
also the highly important framerate. In my
specific scenario, I wanted to create a
Junkyard, but the techniques used are in no
way limited to trash or debris.
I hope you enjoy and learn from my
exploration into the creation of White Noise’s
environment.

YOUR WORLD

This is your world. How you fill it out can tell

a lot about how it functions. This will involve
some self-reflection on what your world is
and what you want to convey.

The things I took into most consideration for

my Junkyard were time period, location,
what is utilized, what is thrown away, how is
consumerism treated, what technology
exists/is obsolete, how can I communicate
that in the items that are disposed of?
How’re they organized?

These world building questions will aid you a

lot at the beginning of production, the first
thing you’ll gain is what to find for reference.
Maybe you surf the internet, maybe go to
locations near you that are similar to what
you’d like. For example, in these references, I
gathered their composition, transition from
thick trash to dirt ground, and an overall
ambiance I wanted to pull off in the final
image.

BLOCK OUT VISUALIZATION

Blocking assets out is a great way to quickly

figure out what assets you’ll need. This may
involve realizing new things will be
necessary or cutting out others. This early
on it’s important to be flexible and always be
ready to accept new possibilities. Block out
models should not be more detailed than
enough to communicate what they will be
eventually. This is the best time to figure out
your ratio of quality to quantity. How much
can you realistically produce to fill your
space to be detailed, but not overly
repetitive?
The junk pieces I decided upon involved
waste in all forms. In my world where you’re
experiencing the yard is where all waste is
placed, to later be sorted and burnt or
recycled by a plethora of automated
processes.

MODELING, SCULPTING, GARBAGE

Part 1 – Detail Modelling and Variation

The artist’s dream stage. Go hard at it.

Sculpt to your heart’s content! There are a
few things to keep in mind when creating
these scattered assets however. Controlling
how much noise each asset has is going to
avoid the issue of making this highly
repeatable piece too noticeable and
unappealing. Also remembering
that no single item is going to be alone, the
beauty of each piece will come in the sum of
its whole.

This is where variation begins to appear,

each blockout model can easily turn into 3-5
others with some crushing, stretching and
bending. “Imperfection is Digital
Perfection” is a statement I live by.

Part 2 – Pile Creation

So you’ve got all of your
garbage/refuse/detritus/scatterable pieces
together in the same ZBrush project. The
first thing you’re going to want to do is Poly
Paint them to be used as ID Maps. Do not
forget this step unless you want to hate
yourself later.

Colorize the meshes and give each separate

kind of junk a color. If you don’t end this Pile
Creation stage with clown colored piles then
you’ve done it wrong.

I recommend saving this zProject out as a

zTool. You will then be able to bring your
Junk Collection out whenever you wish, into
whatever Project you wish.

For this portion of the Tutorial, I’d like to

thank Ilya Nedyal for his ‘Modular Rubble
Tutorial’ on 80lvl. Check out his tutorial over
at 80 Level for a great breakdown of his
method for rubble and debris!
Welcome to the IMM (Insert Multi Mesh)
Brush. A true beauty and time saver if used
correctly.

Set up your new zTool in a Project so that

they’re all separate Subtools. Then from the
Brush menu hit ‘Create InsertMesh’. This will
create a new IMM for you including each of
your pieces! (How sweet is that?! You’re
about to find out how sweet it is.)

First, let’s jump back into Maya and grab

some bases for the piles, these will inform
the main shape of your piles. Think about
what ground is there, is it different from the
contents of the pile? Some kind of dirt?
Maybe it’s a parallax layered material
showing
that this pile goes deep?
Choose one of those piles to start with, pull
it into your zProject with the IMM you’ve just
created and now the next bit of fun can
begin. Subdivide the base mesh to give it
enough smooth poly info, Hit that Colorize
again so that ZBrush understands we want
this mesh to have color information. Then
select that new fangled IMM brush you
made.

What the IMM will allow you to do is Drag

brush in any and all of your meshes. Go
through and layer in how you please. I like to
go from large silhouette defining pieces to
medium filler, to small filler. You can
transform these pieces after dragging them
in if it isn’t perfect on first drag.

Remember. Clown Piles.

The reason I opted to use the IMM instead of

duplicating and placing pieces is this is a
significantly faster workflow. It also
automatically makes each piece act within
the same subtool as the base pile, so no
merging has to happen later.

OPTIMIZATION ROUND 1… FIGHT

Part 1 – Projecting

We all know that taking this 14mil poly mess

into UE4 would be a great way to spend the
night crying. So let’s fix that with the ZBrush
tool ‘ProjectAll.’
Remesher/Dynamesh/Decimation could do
something, maybe, but the results would
come slowly and unreliably with all those
separate shapes and high poly counts. This
will take a lot of hassle away and you care
about your time spent.

Append a plane in your scene and have it

cover the horizontal space of the pile. Give it
some subdivisions so it will be able to
handle high details. (I went for ~2mil). Find
ProjectAll in your Subtool Palette, increase
the distance till it covers you whole pile, then
hit ProjectAll.

Now that you’ve got a plane with lot’s of that

sweet pile detail, use Decimation master to
knock it down! For my Large Pile I hit 3k
while maintaining silhouette details, but my
smallest rubble piles were as low as 500!

Part 2 – Silhouette, Deleting, Quadraw, UVs

Let’s warp this new optimized piece into

Maya and make it even more game happy.

Reasons why this isn’t ready for Integration:

1. The ZBrush projection has vertical

limitations for shape

2. There’s still flat space left over from the

plane

3. It could probably have better poly density

4. it isn’t UV’d Let’s address these.

Deleting a flat plane is pretty easy, doing that
will give you the ground shape you want. But
the wheel seen below requires a bit of extra
modeling. I really wanted to keep that wheel-
hole silhouette for the integrity of the model.
Take a block out mesh and place it in the
right spot, this may require approximating
rather than extreme accuracy. Delete the
polys from the bad projection and attach it
all together as one mesh! UVing should be
easy for most of these, a lot of the work can
be done with a planar projection and
unwrapping/optimize pass.

PAINTING EFFICIENTLY

Part 1 – ID Maps

You’ve got your mesh(s), they’re optimized

and UV’d, let’s hit Substance Painter. I will
not be going over painting techniques, but
giving a few tips that are going to make this
portion as efficient as possible!

You made clown piles, and now you love

yourself. Because with those colors we can
generate ID Maps. Bake in that High Poly
detail and discover the filter ‘Color
Selection.’ This will allow you to make masks
for materials based on your IDs. I personally
used mainly Substance Default Materials
here that would later get polished and
painted till I hit a nice level of grunge and
dirt.

A good idea here is to utilize the User0 Map,

add that into your texture set and give all
Junk one value and all Ground another
(probably black and white). This gives us a
Mask we can export that Unreal can use to
differentiate between what’s Junk and
Ground.

Part 2 – Smart Material

Before making any paintbrush specific edits

to the Painter file, we can streamline the
entirety of what we just did with a Smart
Material.

Do all ‘Mesh Map’ specific stuff now. AO

Multiply Layer, Curvature Overlay, whatever
adds a little pop in detail you want. Insert all
the current layers of ID Masks and Materials
into a Folder and name it. Right-click the
folder, hit Create Smart Material, done. Apply
this Smart Material to any of your other
baked piles and it’s like magic. You can then
go onto making any specific edits to each
that needs it.

Part 3 – Exporting

We can also streamline our exporting

process so that our later UE4 Materials flow
smoothly.

Create your own export Configuration. By

doing this you easily maintain naming
conventions, which partners are going to
love you for. (Tip: “$mesh” will insert the
name of the used low poly mesh into the file
name.) This also sets a standard for your
texture packed Greyscale maps so you’ll
always know which channel holds which
map.

All you’ve got to do now is export those

textures. Coming next time, Let’s integrate
into Unreal!

THANKS FOR PERUSING

That concludes part one of this process. In

my next installment, I’ll be going through the
process of UE4 optimization, Substance
Designer, and usage of the Foliage Brush.

If you liked this set of tips or it helped you

with some part of your own project let me
know on ArtStation or feel free to email me
at 15wgray@gmail.com!

I’m completely open to any feedback you

may have as well if there’s something I could
have communicated better, I’m sure others
will have similar questions to you.

Hope this was informative, see you next

time.

Harry Gray, Technical Artist

Simple River Stones by Stan Brown is

a procedural material for your
environments fully made in
Substance Designer. The package
includes a fully commented and
organized graph for study and
customization.
 Any future updates are included and
will be available for download in case
they are released.

See the full description

Contact Stan Brown

Simple River Stones -

Substance Designer

Buy Now $4.00

Tip the developer

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