Complex Scenes Made Simple! || Environment Art Tips (Unreal Engine 5)

[@mickybam623]

Great video! I would love to see the progress videos for your next environments. like the actual process of you making the environment, thanks! Would love to see more content from you

[@VertexLock]

I have a running series that goes over that, in that series it’s teaching people how to make an environment from scratch with the main reference being from the Elden Ring art book! Currently it’s on part 3

[@neill6585]

So many great channels going to blowup!

[@thedrawhawk]

Really cool, thanks for the tips!

[@unrealhabitat]

Great job!

[@TorQueMoD]

Great video full of awesome tips and examples :)

[@AzazeoAinamart]

Ok, I get it - just pillars all the way down! Great video, thanks

[@daniinframe]

Awesome! Thank you for this content 😀

[@lockdown50559]

You should make a few variants of that pillar design and bake your repeating stone texture + a few of these details into a trim sheet. You could fit all of your stone mesh texture informations into 1 single material being careful about how you UV the pieces.

[@VertexLock]

You could do that yes! However, the objects in this scene use a world space tilable texture, so the roof is the only thing that’s a different texture. No matter how large or small I scale my pieces they retain their texture density, and I did it this way because I knew I was going to use The pieces in crazy ways and wanted the most flexibility possible. If I was going to do it differently today I would have added RVT blending between all the stone pieces

[@EuropaUX]

Awesome content, please keep it up.

[@focusmaya251]

Amazing knowledge you've shared.thanks friend.Subscribed.❤

[@trek3295]

thanks for the video breakdown !

[@PedroVencore]

Good content!, I subscribed, looking forward for more videos 😁

[@harrysanders818]

Awesome educational content. Will sub for more.

[@MrOutrageousJon]

Nice work man!

[@depedi5373]

Great video! I Subscribed.

[@artofminh]

Great vid!

[@scethmedia]

Awesome vid ! How did you make some of the trees that are combined with the temple ? They seem to follow the shape of the structure. Did you model them ?

[@Alexander_S_K]

Great video, thanks for the thorough explanation! What's your opinion on nanite? Would you consider using highly sculpted modular pieces with the same workflow?

[@VertexLock]

So Nanite is cool, I like Nanite but I try not to like- use it as much as possible. The reason being is a lot of my experience is in other engines, so I’m very “old school” in ways I work, and try to make things in a way that allows me the most versatility. Now- with Nanite I would do some different stuff, I’m exploring right now some new workflows for a new scene and it’s exciting so hopefully that will be up soon

[@Alexander_S_K]

@VertexLock Sounds great, looking forward to that video!

[@elfootman]

Thank you so much for sharing

[@OverkillTheory]

If this is ever used in a game I really hope you use instancing of those duplicated and reused assets

[@VertexLock]

@@OverkillTheory I do! That’s the theme here, but you’re correct in I should use some more careful wording when I talk about it.

[@OverkillTheory]

@@VertexLock Ok cool just thought I'd mention it and as far as I know unreal engine has some editor tools to detect and convert things into instances. Very cool scene btw.

[@VertexLock]

@@OverkillTheory thank you! It was a fun one to make

[@Supreme-Emperor-Mittens]

1. Just found your channel - and subscribed. 2. What are the specs of your computer? Unreal runs slow on mine. 3. You said "tutorial series" but I didn't see anything in the description. What's that series about? Thanks

[@VertexLock]

I have; -Ryzen 5900x -128gb ram -RTX 3070ti (that’s probably breaking)

[@VertexLock]

On the tutorial series, the first 3 videos on the channel are all part of that. It teaches how to make an environment from Elden Ring

[@pigalero]

Cool

[@dylaninthemovies]

Good point about making a solid reusable kit, but I don't think it's a good idea to have all that ornate detail hidden when using the flat side of the pillar. It wouldn't really be much work at all to make a variant of the pillar that is flat on all sides, and just use that in places where you don't need the detail. Having a stripped down and efficient kit is a good goal, but oversimplifying to the point where you are hurting the optimization of the scene is not. On the other hand, if the workflow involves merging all the meshes together at the end, exporting to a 3D program, and then deleting the faces that are not visible -- then the approach shown in this video could be perfectly fine.

[@VertexLock]

@@dylaninthemovies exporting all of this out of a 3D program as one piece you would lose all your LOD potiental, all of the pieces have fairly aggressive LODs, IE- almost the entirety of the pool area disappears when you’re not in it. The moment you get I think it’s what would be 30ish feet from the pillars it deletes that ornate detail and swaps to a texture instead. That’s the reason I went this route. I have a similar scene where I went the route you described and it’s a performance nightmare(It’s a giant church about the same size of this scene where the church is mostly combined pieces). Needless to say, learned the lesson.

[@dylaninthemovies]

@@VertexLock thanks for the info on performance when it comes to merged meshes, that's good to know (though these things can potentially heavily depend on what system you are using, i.e. nanite vs legacy workflows) I still stand by the point about having a separate pillar -- even if you are using an automatic lod system those faces will still exist when the player is close (actually, that may not be the case with nanite, I'm not sure -- but there are situations where you may not be using nanite since it has its own downsides)

[@VertexLock]

@@dylaninthemovies True, you could run into issues where they aren’t needed but are rendering anyway. If you’re making super detailed kits I would be significantly more concerned about that, but as it’s not a *huge* difference I wasn’t all that concerned here. Geo isn’t [usually] what is the rendering cost, where you typically run into issues is shader counts/complexity of shaders.

[@dylaninthemovies]

@@VertexLock I think you're right on that last point about the cost of Geo -- as long as you make sure there is a good lod system to keep "quad overdraw" down.

[@benjaminvos3365]

whats up with all the foliage flickering in the video? I've noticed it too on a project of mine and it seems lumen related. It's breaking a lot of immersion on foliage assets. Is there a way to avoid this?

[@VertexLock]

I have a few different thoughts of how to fix it, but I also think it’s lumen related- I’m away from home for the next few days, but I have a foliage-centric video I’m working on next and in the process of that I can try to solve some of those issues and figure it out

[@Conbini.]

Cool to see the tips, would you also just sell this so I can give you my money?

[@VertexLock]

As of right now I don’t have any plans to sell my environments/assets that make them up- that could change at some point in the future but mostly it’s because all of my projects share one master unreal file and it sounds like a multi-week long headache to sort stuff out to new scenes that don’t break anything

[@htcemployee]

i like this

[@Lv7-L30N]

Thank you

[@robertroder5601]

just to throw this out there. The 2 ref images you show are most likely generated by AI. While they're cool for ideation it's a good idea to get real photos of places like Angkor Wat or other temples of that architecture.

[@VertexLock]

I had many more photos of the actual temple but I wanted to explain how I started the piece. It wasn’t till long after I started that I started to realize these were probably not real images so I wanted to base the rest of what I was doing off of the real images I had from the actual temple and temples like it, especially with how the vines grew/flowed throughout the building

[@DeltaNovum]

I'd say when it comes to references a.i. would be good for inspiration, when it looks cool/good as a reference. And as long as you're going for a certain style, and not looking to create a true to life "copy". Not completely sure what was needed here though. Nvm: just read Vertexlock's comment.

[@chaosordeal294]

That scene is very busy.

[@aXelRedfield]

Dude spent 5 minutes and 30 seconds just explaining how we can see a shape repeating multiple times in his image, we get it bruh we can see it just move the fk on ffs

[@VertexLock]

I’m sorry you feel that way about the video! I’ll try to be more concise- but really that *is* the point here. You don’t need crazy kits, thousands of pieces, insane hand sculpted pieces, etc to make a complex environment. With some good pre planning, some creative reuse, and knowledge of detail layering you can make detailed complex scenes out of simple pieces and forms insanely quickly that perform like crazy

[@wk0427]

Then move on. Watch something else. Nobody forces you to watch this video. Did you really get that angry to write a comment? Says a lot.

[@JuanSanchez-jd2nu]

That was the whole point of the video !!

[@aXelRedfield]

@@wk0427 yeah I actually did watch the whole thing and that prompted me to comment, I was not expecting the whole 10 minute to be the same fucking sentence a million times, my bad for expecting substance.

[@harrysanders818]

Dah please, don't take comments like these as feedback. It is clearly coming from someone who doesn't know how hard this craft is, especially the simplifiying part. There is a reason why someone working this craft points this out so often. Jus need to take one look at Clinton Crumpler's paid courses, or do environment yourself if you think this can be repeated too much. If you ever are to create your own environment, you will hard regret ever writing this comment. This unthankful attitude will get this commenter nowhere. Keep gaming and stop harassing decent professionals spending their precious time to educate you for free. Cause if you can't endure someone repeating an important sentence/lesson, you won't get passed 1% of the mojo needed to create something like this. Let alone work in the field, cause nowhere ever do people wanna work with someone who has this kind of attitude and the impatience of a passive aggressive child.