Ben Rodgers - 3D Environment Artist

Abandoned Shed - Realtime 3D Environment

This abandoned shed scene was a mock art test. We were given a limited amount of time to create the scene which I saw as an opportunity to improve my skills. I used Maya for modelling, Substance Designer and Painter for texturing and Unreal Engine to build the scene. 

I decided to use Substance Designer for most of my materials. Being able to create tiling materials, adjust each detail at any point non-destructively has sped up my workflow. Anything not made in Substance Designer I put on a trim sheet.

I also wanted to learn more about vertex painting, when and how it is used. I created the mould texture in Designer and used blend nodes in Unreal Engine to paint the mould on top of the other textures. Adding a height map in so the mould fills any cracks first really brings the scene together.

Due to the time constraint I used Megascans for the foliage.

The limited time for this project was beneficial to my learning. It forced me to work smarter, be efficient with my time and plan accordingly.

PlagueAxe - Game Ready 3D Asset

This game ready PlagueAxe asset was an opportunity to get more experience with the high poly sculpt and bake pipeline, as well as have fun with a stylized prop. I used Maya, ZBrush and Substance Painter for this project and Marmoset for rendering.

My original plan was to build a minecart and scene, which shows in the reference and concepts. I decided to scale the project back to focus on polishing one asset to a high standard.

This is an overview of the process.

After studying work of artists I wanted to emulate I found gradients and colour variation are common in stylized work. Adding edge highlights is also heavily utilised, it implies more geometry than there is and helps objects feels chunkier and more alive. 

As this pickaxe is used for removing plague stone, I wanted the colours to reflect the sick and dangerous atmosphere. I used purple to represent the plague and have subtle gradients on each piece. It's most obvious on the 'beak' part. The more healthy area starts with a yellow gradient which flows into purple as it becomes more infected. 

The lighting also enforces this, so it was useful to think of lighting and texturing as one process.

Tennessee Forest Lodge - Realtime 3D Environment

This project was an opportunity to create an outdoor game ready environment running in real time, utilising everything I've learnt while studying at university.

I have written an article breaking this project down, which is available on the Discover page. Rather than repeat the article word for word, I've shown all my renders and a few parts of the process.

Reference

This is my PureRef file at the end of the project. In addition to reference for the setting and feel of the scene, I have lighting reference, close ups of assets and materials, as well as my own concepts and other people’s paint overs who were kind enough to help.

Concepts

As the lodge was the focus of the scene, I made a model sheet to help me understand how I would build it in 3D. I planned to have smaller cabins and a larger space around the lodge, but decided to scale back during the project. 

Modularity 

I decided to make the lodge modular early on in the project. Modelling each piece to the grid and exporting with the same pivot points meant I could swap pieces in and out easily. 

All hard surface assets are either on a trim sheet or tiling texture with packed maps, made using Substance Designer and/or Painter. The scope changed during production, the original idea was for multiple lodges hence the need for modularity. As the project progressed the modularity could have been reduced with more bespoke pieces being made.

Texturing

I used Substance Designer to make my tiling textures, and Substance Painter for the trim sheets. I’ve shown the process I used to create the wood log material below. 

I used ZBrush to make the initial log. This was to test if a grayscale map made outside of Substance Designer would work as a base for my material. It worked quite well, and I'm glad to have another skill if I need it in future.

I used Substance Designer for my other tiling textures but followed the same format as this graph. My graphs are relatively simple. This is to prevent me spending too much time trying to get the ‘perfect’ texture. The game/scene is in third person, so the player camera will never get close enough to see fine detail.

Optimisation

I packed any grayscale maps into the RGB channels of a single texture to save texture memory in engine. I also compressed all my maps to reduce their size. Another way I saved on texture memory was to reduce the size of certain maps. These packed maps can be 1024x1024 or 512x512 without a noticeable drop in quality.

The polycount was a factor when making this environment. I always try to keep it as low as I can, while finding a good balance between optimisation and visuals.

SpeedTree

This project was an opportunity to learn a few new programs and techniques, game ready foliage being one of them. I used SpeedTree for the large trees in my scene. 

A great feature of SpeedTree is the ability to setup LODs when making the trees. I tried to keep the overall silhouette and avoid popping when setting these up. I repeated this process for all the trees in the scene, of which there are three separate models.

For the foliage texture material, including grass and flowers, I combined atlases from Quixel Bridge using Photoshop. This saved space and avoided having multiple unnecessary textures in engine.

Storytelling

I used props to add some story and make the lodge feel lived in, but leave enough ambiguity for the viewer to come to their own conclusion of the residents. 

Lighting

For my lighting reference I used both nature photography and paintings. Ivan Shishkin’s work is great for this.

Composition

I used the rule of thirds in the final composition and tried to create triangles to keep the viewer engaged.  

In-Engine

My target was 60fps in engine, with OBS running this dropped a little but I was able to hit a consistent 60fps when not screen recording.

Feedback

I owe a big thank you to Diana Karakushyan, Elias Tsirides and Elisa Binz for taking the time to give me some amazing feedback and tips! The big jump in quality in the timelapse is thanks to this.

Summary 

Thank you for taking the time to look at my submission for the Rookie Awards 2024. I'm proud of the work I've completed over the past year, and it's great to see the improvement from my 2023 entry. My time studying at the University of South Wales has taught me so much and I'm excited to take the next step into a career in the Games Industry.

Good luck to all other participants! I'm looking forward to seeing the entries this year :)