My final 3D module project of this term is a PBR workflow based project to make a fireplace hero asset for a game. I was really looking forward to this brief as it was our introduction to using ZBrush and Substance Painter to sculpt high poly assets, then bake and texture them in Substance Painter. I have been very keen to learn how to use ZBrush, so I wanted to challenge myself into making interesting and unique assets to add to my fireplace scene. As I really like quite dark and gothic games, such as Dark Souls, I decided that I wanted to make a fireplace for a gothic themed living room, combining interesting and unique designs together to make an asset which reflected my own interests. I also felt that, with this theme, there could be lots of unique items and elements that I could incorporate into my design. It will be a fun and challenging brief which will introduce me to a different kind of workflow with which I am not yet familiar. I am looking forward to seeing what I can create and how I can produce a creative asset which adheres well to the brief guidelines.
After I had collected some relevant images, I did this quick concept sketch of what I wanted my fireplace to look like. I tried to use lots of interesting and thematic shapes such as the bat wings and the spikes on the mirror to create an interesting silhouette to the asset and make it a memorable part of the game environment. I drew in some statues (this will be a challenge for me to sculpt using ZBrush) and also several mirrors, paintings, rugs and a pouffe. I am also thinking about modelling an armchair as I feel like this would look good within the first block out. I would like to have a go at making a leather texture in Substance when I move onto texturing. Coming up with this concept will help me to start making my first block out in Max as I have a general idea about what kind of things I would like to add and might work together. I would have liked to have spent a bit longer on this iterative process; however, I was conscious of the amount of time it would take me to model. I am so far very enthusiastic about learning this new workflow and keen to make my ideas in 3D.
This frame, which I spent a long time on, will be the central piece in my room and will go on top of the fireplace. I plan to add a metal texture to this and it will have a plane in the middle of it with a mirror texture on. Some design features I decided to include were a bat to tie in with the other elements such as the stone bat wings and skulls to tie in with my gothic theme. Many of the carvings that I sculpted came from real gothic architecture which I had referenced from both photos I had taken myself and from online. I wanted my design to be quite fantasy like but have convincing elements of realism and authenticity. The frame took me quite a while as there were lots of small details. However, I used the symmetry tool in ZBrush so that both sides would be identical. I carried on using this workflow for other high poly assets in my scene such as the armchair, wood, stone wings, logs, wicker basket and candles. For each low poly, I made a low poly sculpt on ZBrush apart from a few such as the candle holders and rugs to which I added a lot of loops and chamfers to to make the high poly version. My main fireplace was sculpted in the same way as I had some with the frames as you can see on the image below. I again used the idea of bat carvings and skulls to tie all my assets nicely in together. I think I underestimated how long the high poly sculpting process would take as I added quite a lot of detail to each on of the sculpts.
This is what most of my high poly assets look like together at this stage in the process. I will now need to re top anything that I changed the structure of in ZBrush such as the wings and the statues.
Another issue I ran into on Substance Painter was with the steps. As you can see, where the steps meet, there is a strange grey line. Due to the fact I ran out of tri budget, I didn't re top these stairs and instead had 2 separate cuboids for the top and bottom parts. Therefore, this made this strange effect. To combat this, I moved the steps slightly apart from each other and re-baked so that I wouldn't have this error. I later moved the stairs back together and was able to texture in a shadow instead. I also realised that some of my books had baked oddly due to the fact I had them resting on the floor. To fix this, I moved them so that they were floating in the air as the ambient occlusion was a bit strange and also the UV wasn't completely relaxed, therefore, there was some strange occlusion going on which I fixed.
Using Substance Painter, I made my own smart materials using procedurals and masking out parts from scratch. For the paintings, I did some actual landscape gouache painting and a painting of the possible owner of the house on Photoshop, made them into alpha stamps and simply stamped them onto the planes. I found this pale stone quite challenging as I kept making it look too noisy which was taking away from the details on the edges. Therefore, I had to knock back some of the grunge which I had added. So far, I am really enjoying using Substance Painter as I am able to try out lots of different combinations and layers to create realistic textures. I ensured that I was using a range of different materials in my piece as the brief required me to do so. For all the textures I made, I used references from my initial board and some new ones from online. Most of the assets I made to look a little bit aged and worn; however, I didn't want to overdo it too much because my high poly sculpts were already quite detailed.
I was really looking forward to making leather and spent a long time making this chair. I used quite a lot of layers and grunges for this to build up a slightly cracked leather effect. I also used a paint layer to hand paint in some wear on the chair with a lighter shade of brown so that it looks like it has been used and worn down over the years. Next time, I would also model the buttons on my chair separately because then I could have vert painted them into separate material groups instead of having to carefully hand paint them one by one, which was not an efficient method. I tried to make the cushion on the chair a silky texture. This was challenging as I kept making it look too metallic and pristine. All the metal wear was hand painted on the fill layer instead of using masks.
I used some of the alpha stamps in Substance to make these books. I also adjusted the height map on these so that they would look like they were actually embossed into the leather itself. I added some wear and ageing on them along with a texture for the pages. The pages took me a while to experiment with as nothing really looked realistic enough; however, I found a good grunge texture which I changed the setting of a little bit to add some height, depth and ageing. There are 3 variations of books. One with this Celtic type motif, one with a cross and one with an eye. In relation to a game, these could be picked up by a player in order to learn a new spell or as part of a quest. The books are blue, brown and purple to contrast a little bit with the heavy red theme.
I made my wallpaper and rug textures using some wallpapers that I found online and edited myself in Photoshop to make them look purely black and white. I added these to a fill layer as a grunge texture and added height and other layers to imitate either a worn fabric appearance or a wallpaper texture, having some of the design stick up slightly. The part that sticks up looks a bit more puffy and matte whereas the other part looks more shiny. This is common in ornate wallpapers such as this.
When I first put everything into Unreal I was unhappy with how my textures were looking. The leather looked a bit too shiny and the mirrors didn't function as mirrors. Therefore, I had to find some ways to correct these issues. This is before I had properly lit it or made the fire.
Non functioning mirrors - ahhhhh!!! They should have been reflecting pure black as the void was black; however, they were this strange murky white colour.
After changing some settings in Substance and installing a plug-in I was able to make Substance imitate what my model would look like when it is in Unreal Engine so that I could adjust the textures and make them look how I wanted them to look in the game. I had to refer back to a colour chart showing what the actual base colour of certain surfaces would be. I realised that the reason why my mirrors were not functioning as mirrors in Unreal was because I had the base colour set as white when I needed to have it as a mid-toned grey colour. Referring back to these colour charts made a huge difference to the appearance of my assets in Unreal. Once I had sorted out the textures that didn't look accurate, I reimported everything in (each one as a 1024 sheet), set up my folders for good organisation in Unreal and plugged everything into the correct node in the material set up.
This is my material set up for the fire animation I added. I made the sprite sheet using a YouTube video. took frames and edited them in Photoshop. In Unreal, I used a flipbook node to animate them all together. I think if I was to do this next time, I would add in more frames. However, due to time constraints, I only did 4x4 frames. We were given an extra 1024 texture sheet to do this on.
Example of my material node set up.
After setting everything up in Unreal and organising my project, I lit my project in a new all-black level as I wanted to bring out the light and atmosphere of the scene. I am really happy that I went back and corrected some of the strange looking finishes to the textures as they look a lot nicer in the engine now. I used a mixture of different lights to make the candles look like they are glowing. I also added a cooler toned light to the left side of the piece to act as a hypothetic moonlit window. I liked how the cooler tones light created a contrast to the very warm tones on the left hand sides. I tried to make the room as atmospheric and narrative as I could with the help of my lighting set up. I also focused on bringing out the textures themselves and creating a setup which lent itself well to my concept.
This is what my block out looks like so far. I referred back to my board and my concept sketch to make this and decided to model in the armchair. This was challenging, as I had to keep it quite low poly due to the tri limit and considering any smaller assets I might like to add such as books or candles. I will probably move some things around and add some additional assets just to add more interest and narrative for a player. I wanted to create lots of points of interest through out this project. I am making sure to optimise my model as much as possible as a piece of feedback I received from my shopfront was that not all faces had been deleted where they weren't needed to optimise the model. This time I am trying to make my model and workflow as efficient and game ready as possible to aim for a clean and logical finish and process. At this point, I will continue adding smaller assets into my model and will then begin adding in things that will be sculpted using ZBrush to make a high poly version.
Today was my first attempt at using ZBrush and I found it really difficult at first as the mechanics and way of thinking are quite different to that of 3DS Max. However, so far I am really enjoying it. I had a go at experimenting with lots of different brushes such as mallet fast and trim adaptive to carve out some basic slabs which I will use as the high poly version of the steps up to my fireplace. I used a combination of these brushes, along with orb cracks and some reference images of the kind of rocks I wanted to sculpt, to inform my modelling. The initial sculpt of these slabs I did on Max and then quadded so that I could use the subdivide tool in ZBrush to up the tri count and add further details into the model. I added edge wear and other changes in surface to imitate the texture of stone. I didn't want to make them too noisy with texture so I was conscious not to sculpt too much into them. I wanted to add a nice texture in Substance Painter. Once I had modelled each of the 3 slabs and I was happy with them, I decimated them to a lower tri count and then imported them back into Max.
The next high poly asset which I sculpted in ZBrush was this statue, which I will be sculpting as part of my fireplace design to hold 2 candles. The candles will be stood in its face and will light up the area in the hood, creating a spooky, yet atmospheric, effect. I used images of stone and a picture of this grim reaper statue that I found online. This took me a while to make and instead of using subdivide I used dynamesh as I was constantly changing the forms quite a lot. I made a basic shape of the statue in Max and then brought it into ZBrush as I thought this might be quicker than modelling from scratch in ZBrush as I already had some of the very basic forms down. I will have to re top this to make a low poly version in Max before I bake as I need some of the structures to be picked up so that it bakes nicely. I was quite happy with this sculp in ZBrush and am very keen to continue learning and refining my skills using the software. I plan to have these statues either side of the fireplace as can be seen in my initial concept sketch. I had a couple of issues with decimating this and had to find a nice point to decimate it at so that it would still retain as much of the detail as possible and so that I could import it properly into Max. I still have a lot to learn when using ZBrush but I hope that through this project I will be able to develop my skills further.
Here is another asset which I sculpted in ZBrush. There will be 2 of these in my living room. I added some engravings onto the front of the frames using different gothic motifs which I had some references for from other medieval gothic assets. I wanted the frame to be very ornate and detailed so as to add a sense of luxury and wealth to the room, therefore adding to the narrative and giving the player an insight into what kind of person would be living here. I used the tool clay tubes and the normal brush to build up clay and carve back into the sculpt. For this I brought my quadded low poly frame into ZBrush and subdivided rather than using dynamesh as I wasn't changing the silhouette of the actual frame.
This is what my re top of the statue is looking like. It has taken me quite a while to get a nice clean re top and I have really tried keeping to the constraints of the tri limit and optimise it as much as possible. As I've not baked anything before, I'm not sure how this stage will affect the bake of this but I'm hoping that I have added in enough geometry for it to bake all the details in well.
Here is the process of me re topping the stone bat wing after I changed the shape of it quite a lot on ZBrush. I hope that the details will bake well in Substance. I have had to reduce the tris quite a lot to conform to the tri limit.
I added in some stone slabs to make the floor. Originally, I was going to just bake them onto a flat plan; however, I really wanted the floor to look 3D and have front and sides to it. Therefore, I ended up changing it from a plan to a box with no back or underneath as I think the bake will be nicer and I think just having a plane will really make the model look too flat.
During this process I learnt how to use layers within the hierarchy of the organisation of my objects, to make it easier to separate out my high poly and low poly assets. I was also planning out what assets I would be having on my UVs as I plan to use all 4 as texture sheet because my model will not be requiring any emissives. Therefore, having 4 unwrap sheets with 3 texture sheets will conform to my budget of 3 2048 sheets. Using layers really helped me separate out the groups of high poly and low poly assets as I needed to name them correctly in Max in order for the bake to work. I also placed the objects I was going to bake together directly on top of this and when I only needed to see the low poly I could just hide the high polys altogether. It took me a long time to organise my Max file and I should have taken more care at the start of the project to separate out things and to not have so many random unused assets lying around. I will be taking this knowledge through to future projects as this will help my workflow become more efficient. I think I did waste some time trying to sort everything out and this set me back a bit, not leaving me as much time for texturing. As you can also see from the image above, I changed the floor to be 3D and not just a plane and I will bake my stone slabs over this.
This is the final low poly blockout of my fireplace asset ready to be taken in Substance Painter to be baked. As you can see the assets are split up into layers on the side, depending which UV sheet they are on and if they are low poly or high poly. I will be taking these into Substance Painter in UV groups which I have packed and organised in terms of material and how much of the texture sheet will need to be taken up.
Here is an example of one of my texture sheets. This is my first UV and as some of the assets will be sharing the same texture I have moved these onto the corresponding places on the tiled UV plane. This will help to achieve a nice clean bake. I have also tried to pack this sheet as best as I can, utilising as much of the UV space as possible. The unwrap and packing stages took me quite a long time as I had a lot of assets which needed unwrapping and sorting out into the UV sets. After a lot of trial and error, I finally split up all my assets. To help with this process I wrote down which assets I was going to have in each group in a notebook, so that I could refer back to it if I needed. I wanted my workflow to be as efficient as possible and in each stage, I had to consider the new factors which would lead up to the PBR processes which I was learning through this brief.
I brought each UV into substance and began to bake down all the high polys onto the low poly models and to texture them making my own sets of textures through masking and layering. This is how the bake looked for my armchair after a few adjustments to the settings. Becuase each part of the sofa was separate, the bake turned out really well and the only error I had was at the side of the chair where the decimated high poly mesh was very good. To fix this, I re-imported a better version of the high poly mesh for the side panel of the chair. The details picked up quite clearly on the buttons and I'm looking forward to making some textures for this asset as I spent a long time sculpting it.
Due to my tri budget and having so many assets, I wasn't able to re top these assets so I was concerned about what the bake would look like. However, I am really pleased with the outcome. The design also didn't really require me to re top; however, it would have achieved a nicer bake. It took me a bit of time shifting around setting and baking some things slightly apart; however, I don't think it looks too low poly. I added a simplistic stone texture because my slabs already had a lot of detail on them I didn't want to overpower it. I added some lighter edge wear along with some grunge which I added height to in order to create some more cracks.
I wanted to have a go at using Substance Designer to make the rug texture; however, because I was really short on time, I wasn't able to and did my best at making one in Painter. In summer, I really want to have a go at using Designer to make more realistic textures.
Wallpaper
Rug
Here is a close up of my candles. As you can see, they look quite low poly; however, the bake helped with the details on the side. I made the middle of the candles glossy to imitate melted and liquid wax. I also added some more orange parts to make it look like the wax was thinner and light was passing through these areas. Next time, I might consider adding a thickness map to make the candles look more realistic.
Non functioning mirrors - ahhhhh!!! They should have been reflecting pure black as the void was black; however, they were this strange murky white colour.
Finished and lit!
I spent a lot of time working on this project and really loved working with a PBR workflow and learning how to use Substance and ZBrush. I got really into the theme as well as it is something that I personally like in a game. Even though I came across quite a lot of challenging points in this project, I was able to learn from my mistakes and to understand what I need to do next time in order to make my workflow more efficient, therefore leading to doing it in a shorter time frame. The most challenging part for me was trying to figure out how to fix certain errors with baking and being able to keep everything organised in Max because I ended up with so many things in only one Max file. Next time, I would think about maybe splitting the project into a few different documents to help me stay on top of everything and create efficiency and better organisation. I would also have liked to have added some flames for the candles; however, I did run out of time. As I enjoyed this project so much, I think in my free time I am going to add another wall to it and maybe build up the scene a little bit more as I have some further ideas for how I can add to this and really push myself with the new PBR techniques I have learnt this year. Some things I think went well are the arm chair and the statues as I like how they contribute to the narrative of the set up and I am pleased with my sculpting on these assets in particular.
Overall I learnt so much doing this PBR hero asset project and cannot wait to apply my learnt knowledge to up and coming projects!
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