Update One: January 9th, 2019
Introduction: So What is Ubisoft NEXT, who am I, and why am I Doing it?
Well Im glad you asked! First of all hello everyone, my name is Dylan Abernethy and I am a Game Development student attending Durham College in my final semester. Im from the Toronto area and aim to be an environment artists once my schooling is complete. With only a single semester left before graduation, the projects I have left to do are quite limited. Thankfully our program grants us a lot of freedom when it comes to choosing what we wish to create for our final demo reels, so for one of my last scene created through my college program, I will be participating in the annual Ubisoft Toronto NEXT Student Showcase Competition.
Ubisoft Toronto's NEXT Showcase is an annual Student competition for game development / art students in Ontario. Originally focusing on modeling and environment art, the competition has since expanded over the past 5 years to include concept art, user interface, level design, programming, animation, and technical art. Ubisoft Toronto supplies a theme / list of criteria for each department, and its up to the students to create something based on those guidelines. In my case, I was given a short letter sent between two fictional characters from the 1920'. The Letter describes a horrific scene of an old Victorian operating gallery that has been transformed into a almost cult like facility. In all honesty the story is quite bizarre to describe, so if your up for a quick read here is the link to where you can find it ( http://toronto.ubisoft.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Ubisoft-Toronto-NEXT-Model-Art-2019-Brief.pdf ). Additional information can be found on the official competition's web page ( http://toronto.ubisoft.com/next/ ). The aim of the competition is to recognize young local talent, granting the winner of the contest a 3 month paid apprenticeship at Ubisoft Toronto.
In the past, students from my program such as Cody Drake have placed in the competition and have found work at Ubisoft in doing so. I would love to be able to follow in their footsteps, and use this great opportunity to sharpen my skills as an artist, as well as meet local / online talent with a similar passion for their work.
I have participated in the competition each year I have been enrolled in college, learning valuable skills and lessons each time. The first year I attempted NEXT I knew my abilities were very limited. The main reason I chose to participate was because it would force my to make my first full scaled scene based on another person's criteria. In doing so it pushed my out of my comfort zone, making the inside or a Russian submarine filled with Indiana Jones style relics in not something I'd come up with on my own. Despite unlisiting that post awhile back, Im still quite happy with how it turned out at the time. For last years NEXT competition I was tasked with making a futuristic Indian chai tea stall with a haunted virtual reality pod. This is when I started to question how Ubisoft got their ideas for their competitions. Even though it was quite out there, this project taught me an inedible amount on the importance of planning and composition. In other words, I should have spent more time on pre production (one of my classmate likes to remind me of that quite regularly).
Submarine Fly through: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8a_lhXFPSg
Tea Stall Fly Through: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQIKE9Hn6Dc
With this blog my aim is to to document my entire workflow from beginning to end, showing off the techniques I use throughout my pipeline. On top of that I hope that those who read this can both learn something themselves, as well as point out areas I can improve. Since my last entry I have completely changed my modeling workflow and overall production pipeline. I have a much stronger understanding of hard surface modeling, zbrush, baking, composition and lighting. I hope to put this newfound knowledge to the test and and make my best scene yet. The goal of course is to be a NEXT Showcase finalist though, third times the charm?
Update Two: January 17th 2019
Getting Started: Reference, Block Out and Whitebox
Before diving into any production on the scene I made sure to gather plenty of reference. I wanted to make sure I had a good understanding of what real world examples of an operating theater looked like, how they were layout out, and well, how they operated. The description of the scene was pretty specific as far as what assets were present, which means the building itself is one area in which myself and other contenders can really make themselves stand out. I not only gathered reference for existing operating theaters, but other architecture from that era to blend it in with. Understanding what i am able to work with to best sell this story is critical. Heres one of the mood boards I have made so far to get ideas for the building and its props:
So with the creative juices flowing its time to jump into Maya and start blocking out the scene. At this stage I am just trying to get a feel for the layout, come up with an interesting composition, and stay true to the reference material. The short story makes it very clean that the orrery is the center of everything, so I really wanted to start with that in the middle and build around it. I also wanted the atmosphere to feel very unsettling and cramped. The letter in the story had the writer feeling very uncomfortable being in the theater, and I want the viewers of my scene to feel that way as well. Another important aspect to keep in mind when blocking this out was to already think of the production. Based on the time frame given and the fact that I still have other work to complete for my program I cant afford to make this scene too large or over ambition. With all this in mind here is the first rendition of my block out:
With this version I feel like there were some areas I did right that I could further build off of, but also many areas that definitely needed improvement. As I mentioned previously, one of my goals was to center the orrery. This is one thing I believe I did quite well in this rendition. The stepped bleachers surround the orrery in such a way that your eyes are dragged in that direction. On top of that the scene is filled with leading lines that will keep you focused exactly where the action is (this also means if I dont nail the orrery things will look messy).
After sharing my progress so far with several classmates, professors, and peers online I found out where my shortcomings where, and how I could improve on them. Where I failed in this version was how I used my space. This mainly came into effect in two areas: The front being far too cramped (even for the feel I was going for), and the back of the scene being a waste of space. After pushing the front walls forward I saw in immediate improvement in the overall feeling of the the scene. The extra space was certainly needed, and it aloud a much more simple flow through the scene. The back of the room was a bit more complicated. originally I wanted to keep is pitch black to add a sense of unknown and have plenty of room for camera work (while saving time), but as some friends of mine pointed out it wouldn't be too difficult to make a better use of that space. I decided to use it as a second entrance way with a wide hallway. This aided to realism of architecture, gave that area a purpose, and left plenty of room open for camera work and dramatic shadows.
At this stage I was happy with how things were looking, and felt like it was time to see how it appeared in a game engine. I broke my assets up into their individual parts and started importing them into my engine of choice, Unreal Engine 4. Using vertex snapping I set up scene up as I did in Maya, and was now able to run around the 3D space with my character. This gave me a much better feel for the space I was making, and aloud my to make some more changes to the overall scale / positioning of the assets. This was also done through more feedback, something I try and get after every major scene change. Other than a few changes to the roof and some asset scaling, the scene in Unreal now matched my scene in Maya.
Modular Building Creation:
Before populating the building with creatures, antique lighting fixtures and ancient orreries, there has to be a building In place to work from. Personally I enjoy creating unique prop models most of all, but for a building of this scale a modular workflow is the best way to handle the situation.
Seeing as the building doesn't have any dramatic changes in shape from start to end, I decided to make the majority of the walls based out of tiles. I could line them up against the whitebox rather easily, and since there would be no major material changes either it would tile perfectly. I did this method for the floor as well. Each square tile was scaled to be 2.5m in size so that it can easily snap to Unreal Engine's grid which is based on multiples of 5. Each tile is also subdivided to add a few more faces, and to allow vertex painting. Though this will cost slightly more, it is 100% necessary to break up the repetition on the floor and wall materials.
While its safe to say this is probably more polygons per plane than a typical game environment, I decided to go with more vertices since there was no specific poly limit, and its a one room environment.
So As I mentioned before, vertex painting will be key to break up all of my modular parts, and lower the feeling of repetitiveness. The first material I made was for the walls. This material is a three layered vertex painting material that starts off with cracking paint, transitions into exposed concrete, than finally damaged brick. The Material also chunks away while paining like it would when being damaged. So why go for this look? The short story described the building as being old, but not very old for the time. It has been heavily damages, but NOT BY AGE. This is very important. I needed to find a way to show variation, while also making it seem like the damage happened suddenly and not over a long period of time. By exposing the bricks it gives the illusion of a large collision occurring in the environment.
The effect was made by combining several other vertex painting effects I found online. While there were some great examples of this effect previously posted (such as this example by Gary Do https://www.artstation.com/artwork/x2zRO ) I couldn't find any documentation on the process. The paint layer was easy to produce, all that had to be done was to merge the paint material with the concrete material via a lerp and a vertex colour alpha with noise. For the chunked out brick I found several sources of information online that lead me in the right direction.
Sources:
http://jadearkadian.blogspot.com/2014/10/cracked-wall-material.html
https://80.lv/articles/creating-abandoned-hospital-in-ue4/
By combining a similar effect to my paint with what I learned in that first article, I came up with this:
A full look at my material graph can be found here: https://blueprintue.com/blueprint/8_5sf72a/
With the walls done I made a simplified version of the material for the floor, and moved on the the rest of the modular parts. The remaining parts of the kit were pretty simple. For the large wood components, I measured them out in Maya based on my whitebox, sculpted them up in Zbrush, and brought them into UE4 with their own simple vertex paint based texture to add unique damage.
For the wood components Polygon Academy's tutorial on the subject helped me create a nice looking damaged wood: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiwV_C3IWQI
And with that, the modular pieces are now complete!
As more lighting changes and props get introduced, I expect to make modifications to what has been made up to this point. For now this kit gives me everything I need to make the basic shape of the building, and since everything aligns and snaps in Maya it should be quick to set up in Unreal.
This is how things are currently set up, time to move on to some more unique assets!
Unique Assets Part One:
This blog will continue on a different post due to character limits. The link can be found under the blog header on my Artstation page. Thank you
