Wonky Town

Welcome to "Wonky Town"

For this project, I wanted to keep a narrow focus and really experiment. My main thing was to explore my own imagination and see what I would be able to create if I gave myself a lot of creative freedom. My main goal was to get better at texturing and making a scene with a coherent style. To do that, I knew I would really need to up my stylised light/shadow- game inside Unreal Engine to help everything blend well and create the right atmosphere. Texture-wise, Overwatch was my main inspiration. For the buildings I basically started with primitives to explore shapes. I knew I wanted everything rounded, wonky and fun. The yellow buildings are some sort of a suburban area, and the buildings in the back are more "corporate". I wanted these two areas to blend even though they are really different. My main focus was to make a scene that looked good from the main render angle.

Final Renders

Blockout phase

Before I started concepting, I wanted to play around with some blocks to see if I found an interesting composition to draw a concept from later on. This gave me a base that I could screenshot and draw on top of it in Clip Studio Paint. I am not a concept artist at all, so doing it this way really helped me explore both shapes and fun architecture just from my own imagination and not locking myself into references - YET. I just wanted to play around before I commited to the project and this really made a huge difference. I really liked the idea of these bridges connecting buildings for this project. Most of all for creating an interesting composition, without any focus on how realistic this kind of architecture would be in this exact environment. If I was to build this style for a game, I would focus more on where they would seem to "make sense", and where they would not. 

Reference Board

My reference board mainly consisted of style references. I used a few artbooks to find inspiration for my props. One of those being an artbook from Overwatch. It massively inspired my color choices.

Since I wanted to make this "wonky" look, I made some rough version of the buildings first. This was to make sure I didn´t go into too much detail too soon since I still had some challenges figuring out how I wanted the details. I did make sure it would be easy to customise the buildings more when I had some more thought. I also made some "mushroom" lamps to help with defining this style since it was new territory for me. I added some trees and foliage from an asset pack by Jabami Production (Unreal Marketplace) to visualise where I wanted to add my own later on. 

I started defining the archtecture and details for the buildings. It really helped after creating a few props which gave me more of a style direction. I knew I wanted to add lots of LED-light, even in the more suburban street, but still keep the archtecture relatively classic in this type of environment. I re-used a lot of doors and windows for most of the buildings and I added them onto the meshes in Maya. I made a building kit for the project to easily update the buildings so I could tweak them and reimport the buildings into Unreal Engine if I wanted to change things up.

Textures 

For the buildings and the streets I decided to give Substance Designer a real go. I wanted to get more familiar with this node based texture creation. I also wanted to create some multi-purpose textures for the buildings. The plan was to make some neutral and then tweak the materials inside Unreal Engine. I learned a lot from this and I will definitely use it a lot more from now on. I also made some for mesh painting purposes to add more life to the buildings and ground.

The upper material graph is the main one I´ve used for my Substance Designer materials. 

The lower one is the one I´ve used for mesh painting buildings and sidewalk and giving them separate possibilities to tweak the UV´s for each texture.

I also sculpted a wooden texture in Zbrush for some variation in the scene. You can find it on all the wooden props in the scene with some tweaks to the color tones here and there.

Props

For the props, I wanted to create some simpler ones, and some more detailed. I always try to be aware of how important the prop is, how close it will be to the camera and think about how I distribute my time during this stage. I usually get really detailed-oriented, but on these environments, I want to focus on how everything blends together more than getting too caught up in details. I´m still learning to balance that and find the middle ground for what´s necessary and what´s not. One thing I regret is not taking more advantage of trimsheets for this project. In general. I made a lot of custom textures for the props, which I enjoy doing, but I could most likely get away with some of the work with trimsheets.

I decided to go pretty high detail and topology on the scooter since it would be close to the main render camera. I used Vespa Scooters and Mobility scooters as inspiration for this one. I did the same thing with the fire hydrant since my initial thought was to have it close to a camera too. 

Foliage

For the Foliage, I made my own trees in Maya, and my own alphas in Photoshop. The bark material is made in Substance Designer. I still have a lot to learn about shaders for leaves since it has not been a focus area yet. So the shader for the leaves is from Jabami Production in Unreal Marketplace. 

Decals

I made some puddles to the scene to create some more visual interest. I´ve used mesh painting for this before on previous projects, but I liked the control I had with making it a decal this time. I also made it possible to tweak the color to make it a tiny bit darker than whatever ground it was placed upon to seem more believable and stick out some more.

I also made a master decal to all the other things, like grafitti, pedestrian crossing and for dirt.

Splines

I created a simple spline blueprint for the edge around the sidewalk and for the hose. I really liked how easy it was to organically place these things within Unreal Engine and I will definitely take advantage of this in future projects.

Lighting, shadow, fog and AO

One of my main priorities for this scene was cracking the code for proper stylised lighting. I really love playing around with that. 

To get softer shadows, I used two directional lightings. One of them was more subtle and in the opposite direction from the primary one which was stronger.

Point Lights

I also took advantage of some point light in the areas with the harshest shadows. I gave them some pink tint. I could have taken more advantage of baked lighting and lightmaps to get this more optimised though. 

Fog

I made use of both Exponential height fog and some local height fog to soften up the streets. I put the local fog close to the ground to make it feel a bit warm and dusty. The Exponential height fog softened the corporate buildings in the distance some more. 

Ambient Occlusion

I took advantage of the ambient occulsion in the post process volume relatively early on, and I did not go back on that at all. I really liked how it helped the style.

Conclusion

For the scope of what I wanted to achieve during this environment, I feel like I did a good job. My main focus was learning more about the visual parts of environment art, creating a wholeness, exploring style and try to create something unique and explore how far I am able to push my own imagination. I am more used to working off from images or concepts, so it gave me more confidence in my own abilities and artistic voice. Like I can find some cool takes on props like mobility scooters, haha. I tried to be smart about my props and priorities. On top of that, I put a two months deadline. It didn´t take long before I realised it would take me longer. Mostly because of selling our house and having to find a new place and traveling back and forth during that time. I spent four months on it, but probably three effective ones.

I am mostly proud of how good everything looks - from my skill level and from the perspective of my main goal with this project. This is my second environment and I did crack some of the codes I wanted to primarily focus on with this one. My biggest regrets is running out of time and not being able to optimise it more in regards to lighting. I had to stop now because of moving. What I will do differently for the next one is to take more advantage of trimsheets. Sculpt some more by hand since I love how much control sculpting gives. I will also test out what I´ll be able to achieve with lightmaps. And learn more about optimization. I will also make sure the next one is a smaller one so I can really focus on diving into the more technical parts with more focus.

It was a really fun project and I am really excited to keep evolving my skills to create even better projects!

Credits:

Thiago Klafke, for his Environment Art Mastery Course. Which has helped me grow so much faster by adopting his way of creating environments pretty early on in my own journey. His course is my environment art bible. 

Jabami Productions (Unreal marketplace) for the stylised foliage shader, as well as the flowers in the windows.

Leeyo Atelier (Unreal Marketplace) for the stylised clouds.