3D StylizedProps Part 3 RomainDurand

Stylized PBR Props
Details and Integration

Introduction

Hello and welcome to this tutorial where you will learn how to do a stylized PBR box, this
tutorial will show you in 3 parts how to model, sculpt and texture completely an asset. Please note that
this is my way of doing it, but tons of ways exist in order to achieve the production of a stylized props,
things could be improved and i’m far to know everything.

This tutorial will help you understand how to stylized an asset, from its shapes to the colors,
how to synthesize it in order to have something clean and nice looking. We will be using softwares such
as Maya, Zbrush, Marmoset, Substance, Photoshop and Unreal Engine.

Stylized PBR Props

Hand Painting Details

We are almost done with the texturing part! What we need to do now is to add some little hand
painted details ! Just before doing so, I just want to add some contrast with a little saturated AO going
into my corners. Adding this can depend on how you will use your asset in the end and also on the
artistic direction, some love to have some light information directly in the Albedo, while others are
completely against it, for me it mostly depend on the case if we are going to bake the light, if the objects
is going to be movable and also if we want to stay 100% true to the principles of PBR.

Here you can see that I simply gradient a fill with my AO as main color and then I applied a
gradient filter on top of it in order to control the color of my AO. As a little note, I never leave my AO
or curvature in black and white.

Now that i’m happy with the final results, we can export our textures, a little step that we can add
before is to pack those textures, you may or may not want to do this and the packing will depend on

Stylized PBR Props

the project that you are working on (most of the tech teams will give you informations about how you
have to pack your texture for the project that you are working on.)

Since i’m working for myself and i’m having some shader that I created some times ago, I’ve
created this export settings in Substance, it basically export my Albedo with my potential Alpha, My
RMAO map is the roughness, metalness and AO in the respective R.G.B channel of a texture. Packing is
a good thing to have when working, it saves a lot on performances and you won’t have to disable the
sRGB on multiple textures when you are importing in engine.

You can see below an example of how my packing of PBR values looks like in photoshop, if you have to
change it by hand for any reason, you simply have to select the good channel to work on.

Stylized PBR Props

Now that we exported our PBR values + Albedo, I’m going to improve it a bit by hand painting
some little details in 3D-Coat, this hand painting part can be done on different software, and even on
Substance Painter or Photoshop, I’m just used to 3DC and I like the process on this software. I usually
hand paint my 3D mesh in this and my flat tileable texture in Photoshop.

We simply need to import our mesh in 3DCoat and our Albedo, I then go into the unlit mode by
pressing the “2/é” key so I can focus on the colors.

Once we are done with the importing thing, we are ready to do some hand paint, I usually do not add
that much details and I mostly use a soft round brush with a soft opacity.

Stylized PBR Props

The different steps of my hand paint process are pretty easy to follow, I start by adding some
color variations in my wood, adding some little red and blue very subtly. I then try to highlight the
parts that could have contact with the world and some friction, stuff like the edges of my wood planks. I
redefine a bit the hard angles with a smaller and harder brush, for example near the wood knot, and
finally I add some dirtiness, on this particular wood I added some darker spot as if something greasy
had tinted it.

Stylized PBR Props

You can see that all of my highlight are super subtle, some people like to go crazy on the color
variations, it mostly depends on the Artistic direction and what you are aiming for.

Stylized PBR Props

Since we are aiming in this tutorial for something that is Stylized PBR and not Hand Painted, i’m going to
stop here and don't add that much details in this part and export the texture toward Unreal in order to
start the integration and light setup.

Stylized PBR Props

Just before importing my mesh and textures in Unreal, i’m going to create 2 new different boxes with
some small deformations, that way we can avoid repetitions and it will bring some variations in the
shapes.

In order to do those, I simply used the soft selection, you can also do it using the lattice tool that we
have seen in part I.

Depending on the result that you want, you can even go crazier and have some super wonky shapes!
If you wanna see some crazy curvy stuff, here is the portfolio of a good friend.
https://www.artstation.com/jamesloymartin

I then simply import my models and textures into the engine in order to start the integration!

Stylized PBR Props
Light and Integration

Once i’m done with importing my meshes and textures, the first thing that I do is disable the sRGB on
my PBR values! (If you don’t do it, your values won’t be calculated the same and the
roughness/metalness won’t look the same!)

Stylized PBR Props

I then simply apply the textures in my shader (I won’t cover this part in the tutorial, but I highly
encourage you to look up for shader programmation and tech art!)

Once i’m done with it, this is how it is looking in engine with the realtime light.

What we are now going to do is create a scene and some lights in order to showcase our little boxes!

Stylized PBR Props
I start by adding my essentials things into the scene, directional light, skylight, skybox, post
process that I setup as unbound so I do not have to worry about the area of efficiency of it, light
importance volume and some other little stuff. I also add a reflection sphere that will be super useful
to have a nice rendering on our metallic parts !

Both of our light (directional and skylight) will be stationary in this case. I start by modifying the
settings on my directional light, what I usually go into is to have some warm color in it that i’ll contrast
with some cold colors in my skylight.

Stylized PBR Props

I then go and start to change the settings on my skylight. Unreal allows us to either capture the
scene or use a custom skylight cubemap, I most of the time go for the custom one so I can modify it
and fully control the colors and how it will influence my scene.

On both light I play with the indirect lightning intensity, this will boost the G.I effect on our
lights and will help all of those colors to bounce. (Note : same as for the shader, I also highly encourage
you to go and learn about how light works! It is a super interesting subject and you will be able to
improve your scene and rendering !)

Stylized PBR Props

Light are important but let me also show you the power of the Sphere Reflection ! Those
Sphere Reflection are used in order to render your metallic and glossy parts, depending on the settings
it can dramatically change the look of your props! As same as for the skylight you have the choice to
either use your scene or use a custom cubemap, I also go for the custom cubemap, that way I can
control what colors will reflect in my metal !

Stylized PBR Props

Unreal have a nice little button that allows you to update your reflection spheres quickly! So when
doing changes, feel free to smash it! (Build -> Reflection Captures)

As an example, here are some screenshots of the same scene, same light, but with different reflection
spheres.

Stylized PBR Props

First setup with warm colors

Stylized PBR Props

Second setup with colder colors.

Stylized PBR Props

Once i’m happy with how my metal looks like, i’m going to do a little post process thing.

If you remember well, I told you that I never leave my AO completely black or white, because I don’t
like black shadows that much. Most of the time i’ll do the same in the post process in the shadow
settings, I offset them a bit in the red/blue/purplish colors in order to give some saturation and tint on
those darker parts.

Depending on your taste you can also change the post process in order to have more or less contrast
and saturation, more of less AO etc.

After that, i’m going to prepare the mesh for the light baking, luckily UE4 created a new UV with
lightmap UV when I imported the mesh and in 99% of the time, you won’t have to do it by hand.

The only thing that i’m going to change in my case is the lightmap resolution for my asset, i’m going to
push it to 256 (always need to be multiples of 2, like texture size) but it depends on the size of your
objects, if it's in the background or not etc…

Stylized PBR Props

If you are wondering what my view is, it's the lightmap density view, you can enable it like this (click
on the lit button -> optimisation Viewmodes -> lightmap density)

Stylized PBR Props

In order not to lose too much time testing my light, I test it with a low quality first and i’ll increase it
when i’m sure that my colors and intensity are fine.

I’m pushing the indirect lightning and skylight bounce in order to have more GI and more light bounce.
I’m leaving the level scale and quality at 1.0

Stylized PBR Props

Hot tip 6 : Light settings!

● Static Lightning Level Scale and Indirect Lightning quality should
always be equal to 1 (0.25 * 4 for example)
● Don’t do your baking test with a production quality and settings
like 0.1 * 10, you will only lose time if you need to change stuff.
● Sky lightning bounces can be cool in order to have some nice
baked GI, just be careful that you should also think about your
skylight intensity, else everything will be too bright.
● I highly encourage you to read those about the baking on light in
UE4 :
https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/Engine/Rendering/LightingA
ndShadows/index.html
● https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihg4uirMcec

Now that are done with the tests, i’m going to do a light bake in production quality and 0.1 * 10 settings.
By the way, in order to change the quality you have to go here, and the settings are in World Settings.

Stylized PBR Props

And here is the final result of this little Stylized PBR Asset tutorial!

Albedo

Stylized PBR Props

Light details

Stylized PBR Props

Game View

Stylized PBR Props

Final Words

I’d like to thank you for following this tutorial and I’m hoping that it was helpful ! also want to
remember that this tutorial will remain free and that if you had to pay for it, you’ve been bamboozled.

I also would like to thank all of my awesome artistic friends and colleagues that i’m working with and
who are my everyday inspiration! You guys rock.

And a final big thank to my wife who’s been supporting me everyday even if my job only consists in
creating rocks and trees that will be displayed on a pixelated screen just so that our homo sapiens
congeneres can have fun after work.

PS : Atlantis is the best Disney.

The end.

Stylized PBR Props

Outro

Thanks for joining me in this small tutorial that I hope helped you!
While you are reading this you can check out my portfolio : https://www.artstation.com/romaindurand
And if you have any questions, feel free to contact me : romaindurandart@gmail.com

I also quickly want to talk about Artside, a video game art school where i’ll be part of the teaching team,
if you want to learn about it feel free to have a look here : https://artside.school/fr/

About Me

I’m Romain Durand, French, born in Dijon. I’m 20 years old and specialized in 3D Environment Art, and
in love with the stylized art style ! I’ve been working in the video game industry for more than 3 years
and had the luck to work on games like Spyro Reignited Trilogy and with companies like Toys for Bob,
Airborn Studios, Spiderling Games and more!

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Hand Painting Details

Light and Integration

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