Hey Everyone, 

I was out of work for a couple of months, which allowed me to spend some time working on this project. I had a lot of general props to create, so this was a great time to crank these out and focus on finishing the project. 

The first asset I worked on was some vents and aircon units that would go on the top of the gas station. Games like Wolfenstein and Fallout inspired these, and some awesome high poly work was done for these games. 

This is the high-poly work I did for these props. I tried to create an interesting and functional design and shape based on real references. 

Here is a quick pass on the texturing for these

This vent was inspired by one of the designs from Dex Diner in Star Wars. They had a cool-shaped roof vent, but it's very hard to tell the detail as it's only in one shot in the movie. So, I took some artistic license and tried to add detail that matched the look of my vents from above. I even reused a section of the wall vent to better connect these. 

Here is how it matched the building shape in the game. I added metal trim around the edges to fit it properly with the building. I always try to find opportunities to do this to avoid meshes looking jammed together. 

Next, I mostly cranked out a few props that needed making for the Gas station. These were all made for Nanite, so the details are modelled where appropriate. I did a quick Zbrush pass for the cone to bend the plastic to give that used look. 

The oil drum was sculpted and then dynameshed down to form the geo. I added a label on top with a masked alpha to make the edges of the label. 

I modelled the vents on the side with radiators inside to give depth for the ice storage. The ice font was a paid-for font I used in Painter, which saved a lot of time when texturing.

These are all pretty straightforward props. The only noteworthy points are there are quite a few modelled bits, such as screw bolts, hinges and cut-in holes on the signs. As the meshes are all nanite, I can add that extra geo but still keep the models pretty low in detail. I mostly have to think about the texel space these elements take up. My rule is that if something becomes too complex or fussy, uses too much UV space, and is under 10cm in depth, it can sometimes be easy to bake these down to a normal map. Many of these props don't use a normal; if they do, it's more material-level-based. 

I used a combination of scans from the Megascan library and some sculpted meshes for these cardboard boxes. I reused a lot of the geo from the scan but did a clean-up pass to remove crunchy detail on the edges and then retextured them in Painter, so the meshes sat a lot better with all my hand-crafted work. This is a great example of how you can benefit from a tool like Megascans but edit the work to sit better in your art direction. 

I made these two pricing signs. The pricing and signage are created as floating planes or geo on top. 

For these telegraph poles, I made a couple of different modular variants. I also made a Blueprint following a tutorial allowing the cable to snap between two points. This means the poles automatically create the cables and update as you move them around. I also created other cables with gravity and weight in the scene. So, it's quite a versatile tool. 

Next, I wanted to create some cars for the scene. It is a gas station, after all. I didn't want the gas station to be from any particular time period, and I have a mix of models and assets inspired by different eras. The overall style of props I was going for is soft boolean merged shapes and rounded forms. This is mainly applied to the props tied to the gas station itself. The more realistic props still have some more square and sharper shapes. 

I originally tried some older cars from the 50s, namely the Ford Consul, but I found the shapes to be a little too rounded and stylised, and it felt a bit too cartoony for the scene. Ultimately, I settled on the Ford LTD, manufactured between the '60s and '80s. It still has some slight roundedness, but it's much sharper overall. I kept it faithful to the reference but adjusted it based on different designs to create a mix I felt looked good. 

Here is the textured version. I also created a mask to allow the vehicle to be colour-tinted. 

I also wanted to create a silhouette variant on the cars so they didn't all look like the same car when I placed them in the scene. I thought I could make a pickup-style version by reusing many of my original car parts. Also, having the colour tinting and the doors and boot being able to open would help give more variants without having to make loads of new cars. 

The pickup was pretty simple. I only modelled a new back section, including the rear fenders, rear window, and tailgate. Everything else was shared from the other vehicle. This created a nice change in silhouette and allowed me to set dress props in the back of the pickup. 

Finally, I worked on the door designs for the Gas station. Again, I took inspiration from many of the shapes in Wolfenstein and Fallout's original high poly work. I wanted these to have a nice, rounded, bevelled look with interesting details while still looking functional. 

The entrance door was supposed to fit the space and conform to the trims underneath. I liked the idea of adding technology on the right-hand side and maybe some more vents or air conditioning above. The same was true for the garage door, except it was just a lot wider. 

I settled on electrical boxes and screens for the tech, plus the air conditioning/vents, as mentioned. Much of this was referenced from real references of similar electrical boxes or switches. I made the entrance door first and then reused many of these components on the garage door. The only unique bits of the garage door are the roller door itself and the vent. 

I also made a quick swinging door for the interior pictured below. 

Here is a shot of some of the assets and details in the game. 

I hope you enjoyed the update

Thanks 
Ben

Hey Everyone, 

After the interior, I worked on some more exterior bits. Starting with windows and trims. 

I first experimented with creating a grimy-looking glass surface. This is a glass Shader with a mask that gives it opacity and roughness variation. As it's mostly in roughness at certain angles, you can see all the way through the glass, and it only tends to be viewable when it catches the light. 

Once I was happy with the glass, I created the window modules. These were modular pieces that snapped together to form the windows' shapes.

I also created modular trims intended to go on the top, underneath and bottom of the walls to add overall detail to the gas station.  

At this stage, I looked at the gas station and wasn't happy with how the Octopus and gas pumps worked together. So, I decided to try a few ideas and experiment with how it all sat together. 

This was the idea I ended up settling on. Keeping the weight of the Octopus on top and the supporting structure relatively thin to allow for breathing space and balance in the environment. I liked seeing through to the rest of the environment and not blocking the view to the distant mountains too much.

It was based on a Gas station I found online in Slovakia, the Atelier SAD gas station. I just really loved the shapes in this. 

Original Blog Link 

Next, I felt I needed to spend time on the terrain and forecourt sections as they weren't very functional. I started with a new blockout for the forecourt, just working out the positioning of the pumps and the logic of how cars would drive in and out. Figuring out the materials and the different spaces. 

I wanted the landscape and the forecourt to mix a bit with soil and foliage creeping into the asphalt. Making it feel unused and rundown, so I also worked on blending the material and placing some foliage in these areas

I added puddles and dampness to the blend so I could get even more variation. 

I replaced my blockout road texture with a proper texture and added a grunge map and road lines. The road lines are temporary placeholders that I created in Designer. 

After this, I created a few more assets that allowed the forecourt to function. The first was a curbstone trim I could run around the gas station. The actual asphalt floor sits flush with the road, but there is a step between the terrain and the asphalt that I needed to fill. I also wanted to have a modelled drain properly cut in as I started to switch the project fully to Unreal 5. 

Gas stations also have many covers and drains. There are specific-shaped covers that allow people to access the gas pipes and workings underneath. I made the models below to give me a range of different covers I could place across the forecourt. 

As they have depth, I also needed to devise a solution to cut them into the ground. I wanted this to be real-time, though, so I could move the drains around if need be. So, I decided to use mesh distance fields and opacity to create a shape that feeds into the material. This creates a hole in the material, and I can move my drains around quickly. It's essentially a cheap boolean solution. 

I also needed to make a few assets that helped bring all the far-distant terrain stuff together. Barriers and assets that could separate different areas. 

Here are some of those working in the environment. 

Next up was the terrain and distant mountains. I used Gaea to create rocky mountain ranges that I could convert to static meshes to swap out my placeholder mountains. These were Mesa-style ranges with rocks and foliage baked into them to simulate the foreground detail. 

I also updated the terrain in the foreground to create some surrounded low rocky outcrops to bed together the near and far detail. Here is how this looked at this stage. I placed the foliage using the procedural foliage volumes, and the material blending came from the masks that Gaea generated. 

Next up was the Octopus. I started by creating a new blockout. I wanted the octopus to feel like one of those giant signs you see. On highways or sometimes shop fronts. Sinclair Gas also has a dinosaur that provides some nice inspiration. As it was large, I wanted to make sure it had construction seams and looked like it was pieced together in parts. 

I created this by splitting it into a head and tentacles. I blocked out the shape in Zbrush for the head using Zspheres. I made a straight tentacle for the tentacles, placed splines where I wanted to position them, and deformed that mesh along the spline. 

I created a proper Zbrush pass for the final model, which I baked down. Still, the head is unique, and the tentacle section is straight. I applied a macro normal map to the model. As this is such a large asset, I used a layered shader to texture it. 

Now, he is textured and finished. Again, he is a bit grimy, which I will tweak later. 

This is how it was all looking at this stage. With all the updates. 

For the next update, I will show a big prop push I did when I was out of work for a few months. 

Thanks 
Ben 

Hey Everyone, 

I know updating this project has been slow, but I always have multiple projects on the go at once. I am very close to finally being able to call this project complete, and I wanted to post a few blog updates to bring me up to the present. I think I have done about 6/7 other projects in the timespan of this environment, but now it's time to finish this beast. 

Now, the end is in sight. I am currently working on the final couple of assets and polishing the scene as we speak. So, more updates to come! 

The last time I wrote a blog for this, I had just finished redesigning the look of the gas station, mostly shape-wise, as it moved a little bit too far away from my original intent. 

Next, I started fleshing out the interior some more — just getting the structure in there, working on the trim sheet, and a few tiling materials. 

I also made some props, starting with this bar stool. Which was a fun little contained asset. 

I worked on material for the floor, which is a checkered tile. At this stage, I still was going pretty hard on the abandoned theme, so it has moss and a lot of grime (which I change at a later date) 

Before Unreal came along with 5.3/5.4 and its material tesselation, I also experimented a bit with POM and contact shadow solutions to get some depth on the floor, which, considering there is no actual depth, is pretty convincing. I always felt like shadowing was missing from POM, so this helps sell it. 

This was how things were looking at this stage.

I also worked on the walls, doing a pass and adding tiling materials, trim sheet sections and dirt decals. 

I used the same techniques to detail out the roof. I created a base plastic material that I could use to drive the plastic panels on the walls as well. 

Here is a bit more polish on the tiling plastic panels 

and that same material applied in the scene. 

Here is a first pass on the chair for the chairs and tables I have in the interior.

I also worked on the booth and lights. Initially, they were pretty grimy and mossy, which I later decided to change. 

Here is a snapshot of some of those assets and materials in the scene. 

Here is a screenshot of the interior as a whole and how it was shaping up at this stage. 

Thanks for checking it out. Keep an eye out; I will post some more updates soon. 

Thanks
Ben 

It has been a while since I did an update on this project. I picked it up again after a good break away. In that time, I have worked on an Artstation competition, a collab project and another personal project, so I don't feel too much art guilt. 

I won't lie. It's a challenging project, but I am determined to finish this monster. 

This is where we left off...

Since that, I have worked on foliage, grasses and bushes. I posted this as a separate project on Artstation and wrote a few articles detailing my learnings and process. 

After the foliage, I tried to establish different times of day for the scene with a wider 21x9 shot. I knew I wanted to have four different setups. The primary rainy sunset mood from the concept, Sunrise/set golden hour, hot midday sun and either night/overcast style shot. Four shots together seemed to make sense to me for presentation purposes. 

When I returned to it, I started looking at the destruction, trying to imagine what I could do to try and show a more abandoned setting. I wanted to get a damaged roof where it had partially collapsed, breaking down the top into modular pieces and creating a slight tilt to the roof itself. 

From here, I left the project alone and had a break to work on the other projects I mentioned above. I dipped in and out of the project for a while. Often I would have 2 or 3 projects on the go at once, so progress was slow during this period.

When I finally wrapped everything up and returned full-time without distractions, I knew I wanted to rework my gas station style. I wasn't happy with how square everything had become. In my art bible and style guide, I wanted all the props to feel rounded and bevelled, similar to some of the sci-fi designs you see in games like Wolfenstein or Fallout. Those games have always been a visual inspiration for me. I created a fallout-style project in the past. I looked at doing a pass to bevel and round out the shapes similar to those games. Fallout has an excellent gas station called the 'Red rocket' station. 

I also thought it would be cool to implement the octopus into the gas station more. 

Below is the progress once I have fleshed things out a bit more.


At this stage, I also tried different arrangements for the octopus. I got some advice from friends about which designs were working best. I tried the octopus' tentacles forming the support pillars, wrapping around them, or isolated to the top. 

In this version, I had a connected roof which was a bit of a rip-off of the red rocket station; it felt too close to that design, so I decided to split it. The negative space worked better for my design, especially as the octopus on top is pretty heavy. 

I also redid the interior. The interior was initially blocked out as a service shop for the gas station, but I felt the aesthetic was crying out for an old 50's style diner. So here is where I left it previously. I wanted to have it boarded up and overrun by infection. So the robot is inside exploring. 

The theme is still the same. Overrun with infection (although this isn't in the shot yet), except now it will be an old diner instead. Here is the shape of the new blockout for the building 

How the blockout was taking shape at this stage for the inside. I was also inspired by some of the forms inside Dex's diner from Attack of the Clones. 

That wraps up much of the blockout; if you made it this far, thanks for reading. In future posts, I will show some of the progress on the interior creation and outside of the building, which is much closer to completion now. 

The whole scene is much further along than these blockout shots, but I haven't been great at updating the blog. 

Peace out
Ben

In my last post I explained what I learnt during the process of blocking out the Tokyo street scene. I invested quite a bit of time and hard work into this and most of it proved extremely valuable for the project. I hope that this blog will serve as a reminder to myself of the steps I took to get to the end result, as well as provide some insight for anyone interested in my process.

Lighting

Considerable time was spent attempting to figure out the right approach for lighting. On previous personal projects I worked with a baked solution in Unreal. Despite good results, I often wasted a lot of time while the lighting was building. This slowed down my progress and meant I couldn't be as flexible with updates and changes. I researched into LPV's which Epic used on Fortnite. I watched a great GDC video Here which sold me on the technique and with the help of the documentation got it setup. For the Blockouts this gave me decent results. I was able to achieve accurate bounce light and was confident some of the resolution issues would be less noticeable with final art. 

Find more here: LPV UE4 Docs

During my time on the CGMA lighting course I discovered the disadvantages of the LPV system. With the systems current implementation, it only works with the Skylight, Directional and Emissive materials. Not having access to point and spot lights meant it was a lot more challenging to light interior scenes. After further research it was at this point I switched to NVIDIA VXGI solution which used voxels to drive the bounce lighting. I used this for the course and my upcoming project, so I will do more of a breakdown about this later. 

NVIDIA VXGI

Materials 

To create a framework for the materials in the scene I started a mini library. These were all created in Substance Designer and to a first pass level. The idea here was to get the main materials in the correct folder structure and get a consistent art style defined early.  With a good structure replacing them later would be easy.

I pushed for a more stylised look for the art style as my main source of inspiration was the overwatch short. 

I created a trim sheet which I used to texture most of the street and pavements in the scene. Plus, a decal atlas which covers the Japanese signage.  

Meshes

For the blockouts I normally start with the largest brush strokes. First, I create a blockout in 3ds Max, modelling the whole layout in one file allows me to figure everything out and establish a good sense of scale. Once the idea grows i separate the individual elements and establish either modular pieces or unique assets. This isn't always perfect straight away but more of an organic process that grows over time.    

Full blockout street scene

Further breakdowns for the individual assets

Style Asset test

Post blockout, I pushed ahead with finding a style in the unique assets. I wanted to find a balance of exaggerated realism with somewhat simplified details, exaggerated silhouette and realistic materials.           

This started with the post box asset. For art example assets I normally try to find something with multiple techniques and materials to try and encapsulate and answer as many questions as possible. Here I had sculpted worn paint, metal and stone. For stone I was inspired by Michael Vicente (Orb) Portfolio style with slightly more realistic micro noise. The metal was mainly about subtle edge damages and stylised warps. For the paint I attempting to reveal the metal surface underneath. for the Silhouette and mesh itself it was about finding the balance of how far to push reality.

UE4 Shaders and Tech

As I have become more familiar with UE4 I have adapted my approach to environment creation somewhat. I now make simple set dressing assets in blueprints which helps to easily replace and add logic to asset prefabs later. (more of this in upcoming blogs) 

Shader wise i am focusing on master shaders to encompass parameters for flexibility later. The most bespoke work I did was parallax interiors. I built small rooms from blockout assets. I then capture an HDR using a scene capture actor, this is driven in the Shader to create a fake room. These are blurred and provide enough depth along with set dressing to give the look for rooms in buildings and shop interiors for the various shops. The beauty of this is as the assets get to final art quality, a simple recapture improves the HDR rooms.  

Small rooms created for the interior windows

Designing the Robot

I did some initial design work at the start of the project to figure out how I planned to handle the robot. I made a series of kits of arms, legs, bodies and heads and kit bashed them in 3d to generate the designs. Had a lot of fun with this but I plan to redesign this guy with more detail later.

  Kit bashed designs for Robot

Final design choices. In the end I chose design 3/6

Next Post

In the next post I will be covering the switch to the new project idea. Showing some more process and blockout work towards my new idea. 

I hope you enjoyed reading about my process and if you have any questions or require further information let me know in the comment section below.

After the first blockout, I still wasn't satisfied with the layouts. I continued with another composition, which was loosely based around the first blockout from the previous blog post. Visually this composition was my preference but it lacked depth. To counter this I messed with having a strong fore and background where the robot was the main focus. The background trailed off to the city behind.

At this stage something that I thought could be interesting and fed into the tutorial side of things was different time of day setups. I was quickly able to visualize this inside of marmoset and play with what a sunset and night time might look like. 

From here I focused on refining the idea and creating a more finalized blockout. As I grew more confident with my idea I ported everything over to Unreal and started setting up all the assets in a proper folder structure and getting the mood and lighting right. 

Here is a process gif to show how this evolved as I blocked out the scene. 

At this stage it was easy to see the trajectory of the project and visualize the end result when finished. I was pretty happy with how everything felt here but It lacked a little focus composition-wise as the street distracted me too much from the robot.

I tried one final composition which had more focus in terms of camera and scale. I also loved the idea of doing a portrait image as you don't often see this for Environment scenes. 

Decision to change the project

At this stage I made the difficult call to change the project theme. Somewhere along the line I lost the initial theme of an abandoned world with the robot and heading into overly stylized. I realized I was working towards something that my heart really wasn't in. Bearing in mind the plan for tutorials and a continued series of work it was best to take what I learnt and change gears. I am much happier about the new project and I have taken a huge amount of the process/learning forward into this. (will be showing this in a future blog) 

Next post

To round this work up I will be doing an update about the process on the environment blockouts, Shaders and tech I used to get the blockout to where it was at the different stages. As I put a lot of the framework in place even at a blockout stage it was a lot further along than any environments I have made in the past. 

As always love to get thoughts/feedback and comments. 

Anyone who follows my Artstation page may have noticed that there has been very little recent activity or updates lately. This is due to a major project I have started work on that is going to be taking up most of my time for the foreseeable future. In an effort to stay active and provide insight into my work flow, I have decided to document my on going progress and ideas on this journey.

The working title for the series of work I am developing is 'Human Emotions'.  I plan to let this title sit for as long as it doesn't feel weird or until I can think of anything better and more appropriate for the project- feel free to suggest something in the comments if you have time.

My aim with the project is to create a series of environments, assets and materials that I can be recognized for and set a standard of quality in my work. It is an evolution of my original V Ray work here; Previous Blog Post  In my previous post I wanted to work on something themed around robots, I planned to use the robot to tell the story and the basis or signature for future environments.

Story:  A robot in an abandoned world interacting with every day human themes or finding itself stumped by human emotions.  

Aims of the project: 

• Create a tutorial series that would cover themes of environment creation that aren't commonly covered in tutorials.
• Continued series of environment, assets and materials for portfolio
• Cinematic mood and atmosphere 
• Excellent rendering
• A key focus on telling a story 
• Great composition  with no question of subject matter

Here are some images of the first blockouts where I was initially trying out ideas. The assets are blockouts modeled in Max with the scenes created in Marmoset. Marmoset is a great tool for quickly iterating and visualizing ideas and I had a lot of fun throwing around simple meshes and lighting.

Here is my initial ref board for the project at this stage. I was also leaning more heavily towards vegetation to serve the tutorial.