How to Create Your Own Real Time Sci-Fi Environment in UE4

Have you ever wondered how environment artists create beautiful and fleshed out scenes? What are the steps to get from start to finish? Where does all the detail come from, and how do you get everything into Unreal Engine and build your scene?
In this tutorial, Thomas Herrera stops by Stylized Station to walk us through the steps you need to take to create your own sci-fi environment, and his mindset and challenges faced when creating his environment 'FareWell'
This tutorial consists of 3 parts, the first part will cover everything you need to be doing before you even start your scene. References, storytelling aspects, and composition, a crucial stage.
In part 2, Thomas shows us how he creates a mesh in Blender, and all the steps you need to do to create them.
Finally in Part 3, we get into Unreal Engine 4, and break down how to set up your scene, and create some super cool materials.
Timestamps:
00:00:00 - 3D Coloring Book
00:00:54 - Part 1: The Planning Stage - setting the tone of your story
00:23:30 - Part 2: Creating a mesh in Blender
00:46:37 - Part 3: Importing into Unreal and setting up the materials
Make sure to check out the rest of Thomas' work on his Artstation & Linkedin.
Artstation : www.artstation.com/trherrera
LinkedIn : / thomas-herrera-906414154
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[@StylizedStation]

LISTEN UP ART NERDS. For ANYONE struggling with texturing in Substance Painter, I've got your back

[@PrimordialStrange]

This tutorial is GOLDEN. Pure GOLD content right there. and I am just 20mins in!

[@yusrighouse]

Dude what amazing tips. I didn't even know we could use 2 UV maps. This blew my mind. Also that tip on panel intersections with trimsheets...pure bliss. I'm working on creating my first modular environment ever and this has really pointed out so many flaws in my approach. So much to learn in this video.

[@driftprincess_z4876]

Great Tutorial Cant wait to see all the rest of your content!

[@ShibaShibaInuWoW]

Thanks for this video. Some of the workflows in this video are very efficient, and I really appreciate all the breakdowns and process. Quality stuff man.

[@StylizedStation]

Glad it was helpful!

[@jennychou9196]

Thank you for taking time making this awesome tutorial!

[@Mephi1995]

Oh my god thank you so much for this ! That level of high quality content is impressive and amazing. No Clickbait, no bullshit just hig end Stuff. Will definetly check out the 3d coloring book as soon as im done with my project !

[@StylizedStation]

Oh wow thanks so much :) Thomas did a fantastic job with this one, I'd love to work with him again in the future. Glad you're enjoying the content :)

[@MovingDungeons]

Great video! 5* Thanks for the share, I am just scratching the surface in Blender and this is just what I needed.

[@mastaflex30]

Very nice tutorial man ! Useful and practical for game artists.

[@MinGuen]

Awesome work. Thanks a lot for sharing!

[@olliveraira6122]

I cant get enough of this video! The more times I watch it the more amazed I become really. I never heard of design rulse like these. Do anyone know of any other learning content that teaches design rules like this?

[@Toal84]

Great video, but next time could you please change the battery of your smoke detector before you start recording? I've spent about 30 minutes trying to figure out where the beeping was comming from before I noticed it was from the PC.

[@songcenter2800]

feels man i'm forcing myself to watch its hella annoying but good content

[@rizalrizfani9092]

Woah now that's some quality content... I actually got struggle with setting up material in unreal engine you guys have any recommend tutorial for that thank you before

[@StylizedStation]

Then this tutorial is perfect for you!! Glad you enjoyed it :)

[@YuriNoirProductions]

wow i literally started creating a sci fi envrionemnt yesterday... i mean yes its unity and 3d pixelart but damn you guys always hit it with the timing

[@StylizedStation]

Im in your head

[@YuriNoirProductions]

@@StylizedStation I'm not even uncomfortable by that thought :D

[@sabrinamizzi2398]

same with me i was thinking of creating one :)

[@ADNCoach]

Great tutorial, I learnt a lot from it! Thanks! One question if I may: when you pull the XYZ texture from the WorldAlignedTexture, is it supposed to make the decal applicable to any surface? Because when I try that, it only applies correctly to the floor, and if I apply the decal to the X or Y facing wall, the texture object is stretched from top to bottom, so basically Z and XYZ produce the same result. Am I doing something wrong?

[@thomasherrera5578]

Hey man, so I think the issue is that a decal is just a projection in 1 axis. So If you were to use a closed mesh it would work as expected but because it is a projection of only one axis the other axis don't work. That material worked fine for what I needed in my level but I realize now there are some issues with the other axis. You could probably used a world position node and add that to a panner node so that it would tranform the UV's based on world position.

[@ADNCoach]

@@thomasherrera5578 Makes sense, thanks. I checked it and it works fine for meshes. With decals Z and XYZ allow applying decals to Z-facing surfaces, and XY allows applying to Y-facing surfaces. X-facing surfaces just don't work in any case. So I guess using WorldAlignedTexture for decals is not the best way to go. I came up with this setup that seems to work fairly nice, regardless the surface orientation, if anyone's interested: i.imgur.com/p25PbfN.png

[@DonEsteban3D]

Why do you use plugin for smoothing normals when we have WeightedNormal mod. inside blender?

[@Frostiedkdk]

Yavne is just faster, and with more control for fast assigning the desired weight.

[@coffeediction]

Thanks for this! How would one approach the decal creation with its respective mask? i.e with Substance Painter, or blender high to low bake, but where to get the mask from?

[@noniko96]

For decals like he is showing on the video, i would use photoshop. But u can easily do it on susbtance too. U can add personalized channels which can be easily done with fill layers and pack them together when exporting in 1 map wh

[@alexandruachim743]

I'm sorry I think I'm missing something (I'm a maya 201 user). You are making 2 uv maps, the second is for the trims (from what I see) the first is for tiling materials. But isn't uv set 2 (trims) supposed to be tileable as well? trim maps tile. Also when you shrink the large area (34:15) you don't want using a trim, it would mess up the texel density, but your model does does not seem to be affected by it.

[@felipealbuquerque6309]

I don't get this YAVNE normal trick there, is it different than having a Weighted Normal modifier?

[@nxgentech]

As with most addons, it's more like a quality of life thing, where it doesn't completely add new functionality that wasn't there before, it just makes it a whole lot easier to do what you need to do. With YAVNE, you get more control over the influence of each face (weak, medium, strong) and the algorithm used to calculate the final normal weight by quickly selecting the faces you want to edit and use the GUI from the N panel to set the options. It also has other various operators that make normal editing a lot easier, like a quick normal transfer. But yea you could do most of these things with the Weighted Normal Modifier, for example you could use the vertex groups to control which faces the WN should apply to, but then you'd have to stack a few WN modifiers and create multiple vertex groups for complex objects which would make things more difficult to manage.

[@pf9515]

Great video I totally get the point but unfortunately we don't get to see the shader in blender that allows you to use the first uv set for tiling texture and the second for your trim sheet and can't seem to find any hints online how to make it.. It's a shame because it makes it hard to try out your workflow even if we have the ue4 material shown :/ Any clue anyone ?

[@mixton5050]

Not sure if you're still looking but I had a tinker around with a shader, and this set-up seems to work as far combining the tiling and trim normal maps together: drive.google.com/file/d/1f1OOKL0MWL9rb1lG5vpT_idUEOmIUdPS/view?usp=sharing Ensure that the names of the UV maps on your object match the UV map names in the material, and you should be good to go.

[@olliveraira6122]

Theres a UV map node in Blenders shader graph that lets you specify which UV channel to use

[@spaceman2202]

Wouldn’t having all those different materials on only one model be kind of not good for optimization?

[@tommy-sf6re]

How long did this take to build?

[@Fantasma_Gameplay]

I always modelled folloing the principle that every face must have 4 edges at max, Is this acceptable in a professional medium? like a game?

[@noniko96]

Defenetly no. You should fix all the engons before exporting to UE other wise u can have shadows mistakes and lightning issues. I believe he make it quickly to have it done for the tutorial. But i would recommend to do everything in quads with the minimun triangles possible. Additionally what u can do is duplicate only the mesh where is the details and have as a separate element in the same object. (Check out the star citizen workflow)

[@Fantasma_Gameplay]

@@noniko96 yeah that's why I do it that way, thanks

[@thomasherrera5578]

So technically you can model with Ngons. What you need to watch out for are any shading issues with Ngons but if there aren't any shading issues then it doesn't matter because any model you bring into Unreal will automatically be triangulated. Also, usually triangulate the mesh when the mesh is finished. I do this because every program triangulates the mesh slightly different and that can cause slight shading issues in Unreal even though in blender it looks fine. Now, if you are going to deform the mesh and animate it, then you should definitely get your model to have evenly split topology that can handle all of the deformations. So yes this is technically acceptable in a professional medium.

[@Frostiedkdk]

its perfectly fine, and always fine on flat surfaces, also you could just triangulate before export.

[@fhuzy]

I will buy a battery for your fire alarm

[@Crypto_Baron]

Isn’t this LunaOne?

[@russell559]

whats the addon for blender?

[@thomasherrera5578]

Hi. The plug in I mention for blender is Y.A.V.N.E its for face weighted normals.

[@russell559]

Thomas Herrera do you have a link ?

[@GAMAschool]

YAVNE, it stands for "yet another vertex normal editor" github.com/fedackb/yavne Great job Thomas, it really came out great!

[@russelp9666]

@@thomasherrera5578 Hi Thomas! Thanks for your great tutorial. Then I would like to learn more from u. Are u considering to make a more comprehensive 3D environment course using UE4 and blender?

[@geetee5505]

Alot of Ad play unfortunately.

[@Heroickittens]

That smoke detector chirping in the background is annoying af.

[@StylizedStation]

Thomas was so committed to making this tutorial that he let his entire apartment burn down

[@MR3DDev]

@@StylizedStation LMAO best answer ever

[@MovingDungeons]

Try and imagine it's just someone happily running around on basketball court in the background :)

[@peter486]

i dont think this is the way, you make complete models. then you just instace it.

[@Kabaji]

1st

[@3DPROG]

2 😉🙃

[@StylizedStation]

3RD!!!!!!!!!!

[@fjb666]

I hope you put a battery in that smoke detector.