The 3D Artist's Guide to Modular Environments - Unreal Engine Environment Breakdown

[@StylizedStation]

Huge shoutout to Thomas (Nice name by the way) for the amazing breakdown! Check him out on AS: www.artstation.com/thomashooke

[@Kapthos]

Holy shit, I've learned more in 30 minutes than in the past 3 years. If this video was 20 hours long, it would be worth every minute of it

[@DarkAutumn3D]

I've been a 3D model artist, working with games engines for about 19 years. Modular building is often the best way to go as it means that your environments look as though they're actually in the same Universe. It also saves a lot of time to have a library of assets to pick from.

[@alphaomega887654321]

Hey my friend, can you recommend a good site with tutorials or good tutorialvideos?

[@devonjuvinall5409]

I have finally been dedicating my time to working on my asset library in blender specifically and it is truly a blessing. (Once I got over the guilt of not building it all myself lol)

[@StylizedStation]

Seriously though, every artist needs to learn modularity/trim sheets

[@master-o7288]

I just started because of you! Thank you !

[@darkroyale8991]

how and where can you learn modularity?

[@pixeldustinteractive]

are there any tips on optimizing this? I would probably want to bake the textures fully and use static objects... i use unity but this was still really helpful, basically 1:1 concepts betwen UE and unity here

[@tando6739]

More blender 3D users 😍😍😍

[@wallacesousuke1433]

🤢

[@theNickn]

Hi Thomas and everyone! Instead of seperating the pieces and then joining them together again you can split the mesh by selecting the area you want to seperate, or "split", by pressing Y. That way everything stays in the current object and you don't have to join them together again.

[@PixelaidMix]

Blender has a really good sculpting feature. It would have been awesome to keep it all in one app. Zbrush does have its advantages too. Great work!

[@mutemilomusic]

Fantastic tutorial! In case anyone else has a similar problem - I was trying to create the tree foliage meshes using geometry nodes instead of particles since I prefer the workflow, but was having horrible results after importing into Unreal and applying the material with the opacity mask. Was banging my head against it for a while until I noticed that since the particle system realizes each instance as separate objects, then get joined back together, the UV's of all of the corresponding planes overlap, which is crucial for the opacity mask to work properly in Unreal. Geometry nodes on the other hand realize the instances as a single mesh, and seems to not preserve the UVs of the original object. Two potential workarounds - you could use Make Instances Real (use F3 to search for the operation) instead of applying the geometry nodes modifier, which will create separate objects for each instance, then join back together. This is basically the same as the particle system workflow. The other option that I prefer is to use the Magic UV add-on which lets you copy UVs to similar faces. Unwrap the original foliage plane object in case if you haven't already, copy its UVs, switch to your foliage mesh (the one created from the icosphere + geometry nodes), select every face, and paste the UVs

[@Mamori3D]

Quick tip, If you Subdivide the geometry in zbrush after you export it with th amount of subdivisions in the tutorial it is going to deform the sculpt geometry you can either use zbrush subd without smooth a few times to keep those hard edges or select the edges that ar going to be sharp and set the crease to 1

[@ShinGidora]

Loved the environment survival kit! I wouldn’t mind buying a spiritual successor to that course with a focus on vertex painting, architecture, skyboxes, and trim sheets :))

[@StylizedStation]

Thats the plan! Glad you enjoyed the course.

[@ShinGidora]

@@StylizedStation Mega hype!! Substance Designer with Unreal Engine shaders would be some fire material :)

[@dibritto1298]

this content blowing my mind, thank you for share you knowledge with us

[@nikshakya7389]

6:39. A little tip: instead of selecting and creating a seperate object, you can just press y to split the selected faces.

[@Alander787]

This was a great breakdown! You have a nice calming voice!

[@Vertex2dawrld]

bro I need to get the environment course and take notes from this, could be in great use for later

[@wilismatrix9847]

that's a hell of wow work and technical artistic skills !!

[@LANGIMATION]

At 5:15 you can make 5 cuts instead to keep the squares even. This wouldn't really matter but I like to keep things even

[@jairdeoliveiraneto605]

Bro... This tutorial is GOLD! Thanks a lot

[@bitemyshinymetalass7393]

holy hell this is exactly what i needed ! thank you guys so much!

[@Manas-co8wl]

Pretty cool. Also aiming towards this look

[@brandonjacksoon]

Amazing! Beautiful landscape! Thanks for the really nice tutorial! :))

[@Zilwerraein]

A nice tutorial for people who already know the program 👍

[@quintongordon6024]

For the normals you can set the target to any distance above your mesh then check the align box to make the normals parallel with each other. The way they're doing it is to basically set it's vanishing point to be really far off in the distance so it's almost straight.

[@Zaive]

Soooo much great information! Thanks for these videos!

[@yukiw7888]

This is exactly what I've been looking for, thank you!

[@ThunderPlayStudios]

this video is truely a gem XD

[@radub6941]

Nice work, man! Love it.

[@MAJmufin]

nicely done Thomas - Goed gedaan knaap.

[@LaszloIvanyi]

All right, SS, I came back here for a long while, but I must say I found this tutorial the best on your channel. It's approximately in my skill level, although not really beginner friendly, I understand everything in it. Lots of good techniques, and Blender is used. I'm not without critique though, but congrats, this is good stuff. Suggestions: - Could have spare the extra 20 sec to show how you made the opacity mask in Krita, it's essential for the tutorial, and when I started making similar stuff, it was extremely hard to figure that out at least for me. If you paint, the edges are not crisp enough, or jagged, etc.. - I'm not sure why you used Zbrush for the wood sculpt orb brushes are available for blender too, could have been sculpted entirely in blender making the number of programs less and the tutorial easier. - Would be nice to see an overview of all the asset list you used, I see apples and barrels there too, just to have a scope of how many items are used in this 1 scene - and my all time favorite missing item: If you made it in Unreal why didn't you add a few second of FPS or TPS walking around the scene? This still requires an large amount of tools knowledge, like how you make weight blended layers for the landscape and how you paint them over, or little bits like how you incrementally move the modular parts to make sure they fit. I'm also still not convinced at all about trim sheets. I just don't see the advantage over a simple texture. I guess with TS you don't need to restrict your length of beams, since they repeat on X but to be honest, I have not seen anything on the scene that would require X tiling of the wooden texture so what's with all the extra work for making a wooden beam? Why not just make a beam, duplicate, re-mash in sculpt mode, then add the grains there, then use SP to bake from HP to LP and that's it. Same result, much less steps and paywalled programs. Also, extra question: Why do you have a watermill in a still water? :D The water will never move so the watermill wheel will also never move. Not like there's a river on the picture..

[@ikcinbeatz4365]

Ehm, you certainly did not pay attention very well on the trim sheet part of the tutorial. And I'd suggest you take a deeper look into the pro's of trim sheets.

[@heyitsjoshmusic]

When in-game, trim sheets are absolutely necessary when working on any large environment, you will eat up resources and be unable to hit performance requirements if you HP to LP bake every type of beam. That's too many unique texture sets for a kit that could easily include dozens of variations. In terms of workflow imagine a design change that requires refactoring all the variations of beam--maybe with 2 or 3 it's not a big deal to open each project file, re-sculpt, and re-bake, but again reach into dozens and the trim becomes a lifesaver: a single set of sculpts to change and all the low polys instantly update upon re-importing the textures.

[@sergii1544]

very useful tutorial, thanks!

[@Palman97]

Thank you for this video:)

[@aFewBitsShort]

This is amazing info for Blender and I don't even use Unreal Engine!

[@A-Mod_Studio]

Thank you very much for that environment breakdown)

[@slothsarecool]

beautiful! such a great tutorial, thank you

[@tatopaz4364]

Great Video as always!!!

[@Bassonaitor]

That waterwheel in a pond seems pretty useful 😂 great video though

[@bs_art3625]

Great Video man!

[@arunaldo1089]

Great Tutorial.. Thanks much..

[@BramvanVliet]

Superb, thanks for sharing! 😍

[@EricDuarte27]

AMAZING!!! Does foliage work in unity?

[@RDD87z]

lol i learned so many cool things in this video, THANK YOU!!

[@abolfazlsabzi1295]

Thank you Bro! Thank you.

[@an1_mate]

wow, thanks a lot!

[@luizfellipe1206]

Beatiful tutorial, really helps!

[@bluecrystalstudio402]

Great explanation, thanks a lot

[@devformation]

nice work!

[@PhotographyAdventure]

Amazing!

[@Koto-Sama]

7:22 use Y Key to separate a model

[@Devilproking]

Back when I had a laptop before it stopped working I use to just sit at lunch and design cool buildings and models on blender

[@josephvanwyk2088]

Fantastic pipeline tutorial Thanks. Just a quick question, trying to fully understand the integration process. If you build a village of unique houses, do they all work from one large modular set or will each unique house be their own modular set (and hopefully 1 texture atlas map) (or will that mess up the memory if every unique set has their own texture map) ?

[@pnac3d]

Impressive

[@sockenschock3964]

Very cool video! At ~ 15:20 Thomas mentions that he created the roof by scattering 9 different roof tile objects randomly on a plane in Blender. But how? Did he also use the Particle System Modifier for it, or Geometry Nodes? Or maybe just the pre-installed Add-On "Scatter Objects"? Would love to know since my random scattering approaches for roof shingles always look a little bit unclean and his roof shingles look sexy! :)

[@egl8556]

I think you could technically use the Array modifier to make something similar to what he has

[@peter486]

yes it the model itself has 923 drawcalls GL With that.

[@simonjohnwright5129]

Waterwheels need a river not a pond to turn them.

[@harrysanders818]

What a nice scene and breakdown! Thanks! I'd have two questions: Why waste the rest of the row including only two top cap sections in the wood sheet? Wouldn't it be beneficial to include 2 more there for cap variations? Or maybe some bolts? Cause it is unused space essentially?

[@harrysanders818]

Furthermore, why create a simple color variation of the wood boards in painter, using and extra texture? And not just using color tint in shader? But understandable if it needs to have .ore unique detail/color variation. But they look very similar from afar.

[@movgto3392]

Would you recommend this guide even if I want to create assets for Unity?

[@Ken-us3xf]

I don't understand why he says you need to have all of your normals pointing vertically or up the Z axis on the grass and plants. Wouldn't they still be displayed correctly if they pointed in their natural direction?

[@SalmanKhan-dx1ch]

if the normals had their natural direction then its too easy to point out the flat planes from each other and the lighting isn't received on all faces together it also gives a nice illumination effect so its a great trick atleast for stylized environments

[@MRCarlosFactory]

What's about Texel density?

[@DannyBoy443]

What makes them animate and move like real foliage? A shader?

[@jjwillie7584]

For anyone who can answer this it would help. So I use blender when making props and assets when making 3d props for the environment should you make the more detailed models in same file or on a different one before moving the file over to unreal?

[@RubenCc1999]

You should create a Low Poly version. You can export that file as an .obj and create a high Poly version with that obj and subdividing it. Now you can export that high Poly as .obj and take them both of them to substance painter and bake the high Poly into the low poly to add the detail as a Map. Note: if you want to have multiple materials on your asset, you can add them since the low poly model and export as an .fbx which stores more information not just geometry. And do the same with the high Poly. Hope this helps

[@NamIStyleHard]

You are the best

[@MyAmpWamp]

Is this tree normals setting like that work also work when I have a normal map baked for the leafes?

[@te0]

what is the purpose of this wheel? :)

[@WendigoJr]

How'd you make the paths through the grass?

[@ArtificialIntelligenceReport]

Very cool

[@NayanThapaMagar-f1o]

Hello, is the course updated? Can I take the course now? Will it work in unreal engine 5?

[@the-nomad-show]

How much of this could be done with nothing but Blender and other free tools? Can't affort Zbrush, Substance etc. Have been trying to utilize Quixel Mixer instead of Substance with some success.

[@sudanemamimikiki1527]

Technically all of it can be done inside blender. But it will be a lot harder to get it to work. Quixel is a good alternative but It's abandonware and it's just worse than substance in general. Doing the textures in blender might actually be a better way to go. Specially for stylized wood. Aa for zbrush. Never used it since I don't do much sculpting outside blender, but blender doesn't exactly work for this method. You'd have to use dyntapo for proper mesh deform and that quickly gets out of hand...

[@MrMsti]

Soo cool

[@BeatTorrent5]

hey, anyone can tell me where I can find informations on how to separate regular stuff (like a house, a building, etc, ...) into modules ? That's what causing me the most troubles, thinking in a modular way to cut my models in separate parts.

[@marconapolitano2821]

I recommend you to start with a block out that tries to emulate the general shape of the building you are trying to make, and then divide that into simple shapes, like squares, triangles etc. And then you can add details to that simple geometry to make it look like a wall or a window, or any object for that matter.

[@pourmydrank]

I tried to make a mobile game with a high def environment, bro the lower end devices can't go above 4 fps

[@thomazmauricy3147]

Ganhou mais um inscrito pelo conteúdo e por seu meu xará kkkkkk

[@ukaszj2906]

Great content. Hey, anyhow when you finish these wooden boards or brick and import them into unreal they are in .obj format?

[@Donerbrt]

.fbx

[@malibar1]

Oh hell yeah

[@olegshtolc7245]

Thats some gourmet shit

[@orizon-media]

I've been dying to be 3D creator but where and how am I getting all these requirements from computers to wherever you are 😢😢😭

[@PavelLesa]

Hello. What the music?

[@XYZ__-mv2vg]

i still don't understand why he elongated those bar in X direction ,

[@jeseviso-s2u]

What games do you play bro?

[@Benn25]

I don't understand why the texture of the wood is tiling.

[@aldo_3d]

wow😱

[@coffeediction]

entire texture for 1 wooden log? xD damn youre fancy

[@beqa2758]

minecraft background music :O

[@gamertose]

Question on the flower part. Is it better for performance to have multiple of the same mesh using 1 trim sheet or to have 1 mesh using multiple materials instances? I'm asking cause I have 1 model that will have 6 color variations, and am looking to get the best performance from it

[@DylanBurke]

What he could have done with the flowers is had one mesh with one material and use a world space noise to offset the UVs of any particular flower to achieve variety while maintaining a single draw call for all the flowers. That may be the type of approach you want to take.

[@marconapolitano2821]

I agree with Dylan, because right now he is getting 923 draw calls for the foliage alone, and that's insane, you could reduce that to one easily.

[@Gasparvjs]

BlackFriday discount?

[@tim_k4]

👍

[@lynic-0091]

Why use Zbrush instead of blender? Also, tell us WHY you're doing something. Just telling us "we need to this, it has to be like this" teaches me absolutely nothing.

[@richeskokoti1235]

Maybe he is more comfortable using Zbrush. Doesn't really take anything away from the video.

[@Kosari4242]

You are fucking awesome, Subscribe. Thanks for cool content. Rise Up :)

[@todogamer297]

Es idea mía o se parece a FABLE

[@TheGreatArlei]

Tell me you speak dutch without telling me you speak dutch:

[@jiajunzou-m2h]

c418， love form china

[@kyanschrijver4106]

I Smell dutch

[@Pete_L77]

Who else couldn't figure out what "aposty mosque" was. haha

[@phoeberia2734]

Honestly as soon as you moved over to the substance painter you lost me lol

[@Hasnat1]

Would anyone help me have some royalty free medium sized realistic grass border textures. 1-Medium sized 2-Royalty-free 3-Realistic Thanks in advance.

[@DimisD]

What i see is how Nintendo's "Breath of the wild" affected or inspired some artists. It's nice.

[@JustAhmd]

:D

[@coinsinfo977]

Don’t learn 3D for a career why I’m saying because most of the studios only look for the experienced artist and they don’t even care about the freshers especially in India & the competition also very high.After I completed a 4yrs course on animation &vfx now I’m totally jobless and I’m afraid that my skills, time, fees all is going to be waste😑

[@Alloniya]

Watermeal in still water

[@glorymanheretosleep]

So much easier to do on blender.