
Review reference imagery to plan a Maya and Unreal Engine environment, break the scene into reusable rock assets, a temple and a bridge, then start with a block-out before sculpting.
Block out a realistic fantasy environment in Maya and Unreal Engine by arranging floor pieces, aligning pivots, and exporting assets for real-time lighting with skylight and directional light.
Sculpt a realistic round cliff in Maya using cutting, dynamite cuts, planers, and dynamic workflows, then merge geometry for a reusable game environment in Unreal Engine.
Sculpt a cliff edge using basic shapes, timelapse sculpting, and non-destructive workflows to build dynamic rock forms for a realistic fantasy game environment; prepare materials with substance.
Learn how to soften rock edges with bevel and normals, optimize Substance Painter materials for performance, and build base color with gradient maps and noise for realistic rock textures.
Learn to craft a realistic rock material in Maya and Unreal Engine by layering base color with dirt, grime, and highlights, adding noise, masks, ambient occlusion, and roughness for depth.
Explore building a rock material in Substance Designer by combining masks and distance-based cracks, layering greyscale, color, dirt, and curvature to enhance the normal map.
Unwrap rocks for a realistic game environment by applying plane mapping, layout adjustments, and distortion and seam checks in Maya, preparing textures for Unreal Engine with worldspace mapping when needed.
Export baked rock assets to Unreal Engine, then create a rock master shader that blends baked normal maps and AO with moss, dirt, edge highlights, tiling, rotation, and masks.
Create a fuzzy moss system in Maya and Unreal Engine by duplicating and extruding rock faces, assigning moss materials, and building cliff edge and stone variations (A/B/C) with moss textures.
Continue building a base snow deck by creating a heightmap and normal map, then blend snow with dirt, roughness, ambient occlusion, and color in Maya and Unreal Engine.
Build a stone pile by baking, extruding, and removing faces to shape rocks. Export to engine, replace moss masks, and use a world-space moss toggle with painting to control moss.
Align temple scale to a character by using a 180 cm reference cube and importing the scale into Unreal Engine, then refine steps, walls, and the entrance.
In Maya, create the temple exterior walls and a large doorway, refine with extrude and bevel, and prepare for roof and texture in later steps.
Fix and optimize a bridge mesh in Maya by merging vertices, removing problem faces, and carefully unwrapping and laying out UVs before baking textures in Marmoset and Substance Painter workflows.
Learn to create a realistic fantasy bridge environment by texturing stone and wood in Maya and Unreal Engine, including baking normal maps, curvature, ambient occlusion, moss, dirt, and masking workflows.
Move and align bridge planks, clone assets, and adjust scales and normals to produce a realistic bridge. Optimize performance and lighting in Maya and Unreal Engine for polishing.
Learn to refine composition in a realistic fantasy game environment in Maya and Unreal Engine, adjusting foliage, rocks, and trees, and prep the lighting pass by tweaking color overlay brightness.
Refine the final chapter by adjusting rock angles, finalize layout, create camera fly-through sequences, and capture high-quality screenshots to showcase a realistic fantasy environment in Maya and Unreal Engine.
Instructor Info
Emiel Sleegers always had love for video games and when he was young, he started using Unity3D for programming but he found himself gravitating more towards the art of making games. Now he is currently working as a Senior 3D Artist at FlippedNormals. He contributed to creating AAA games such as Forza Horizon 3 and The Division 2. His all time favorite game is The Last of Us and that video game is what inspired him to want to work in the game industry. His advice for beginner artists is to focus on one aspect of gaming that they are passionate about, stick to it and get better at it. His hobbies include anything related to games or films, whether it be working on personal projects, freelance work or going out for movies.
Course Info
Hello everyone! And welcome to this very exciting tutorial course on how to create a game environment from start to finish.
My name is Emiel Sleegers, I am a senior 3d environment artist who have years of experience working for AAA game studios and I will be your tutor for this course.
In this course we will go over on how to create a Realtime game environment completely from scratch.
That means that we will make it 100% from start to finish and we will have 95% of this tutorial in real time.
For this course we will be using Maya, Zbrush, Substance painter and designer, a tiny little bit of photoshop, marmoset toolbag, Speedtree and unreal engine 4.
I know, I know it might sound like a lot of programs but I will make sure that everything in this tutorial is easy to understand and follow.
Now, this tutorial is targeted towards intermediate artists, these are artists who are already familiar with the tools I just mentioned but just want to learn the workflows and techniques to creating a video game environment.
As a quick little overview.
We will start this course off with going over our reference and discussing on how we are going to create this environment.
We will then start by making a nice blockout of the environment so that we have accuracy in the scaling and composition.
We will first focus on the rocks since those are one of the main components in this tutorial.
This means we will first complete all the rock sculpts in Zbrush. Setup the low poly in maya and bake the rocks in marmoset toolbag.
Then we will create a rock material inside of substance designer and a special material inside of unreal engine to make the rocks look amazing. For this we also need to quickly create a special mask in substance painter which will give us control over the dirt amount and highlights of the rocks.
After we have done all that we will move on to our moss system, since this is probably the second most important thing in this environment.
I will start by creating a moss material inside of substance designer.
Then I will show you how to use this material to create both procedural moss and hand made fuzzy moss for all your rocks.
Finally, we will start by setting up our environment, doing lighting and composition passes. We will create some foliage inside of speedtree and placing it in our scene. We will create our temple building along with special tileable edge damages. And once we are happy with the entire environment, I will show you how to create some final portfolio screenshots and flythroughs.
If you follow this course you will have a very solid foundation and skillset to tackle almost any kind of game environment, no matter if it is organic or urban.
So why don’t you come and join me at victory3d and we can get this course started!