Developing 2 (Conclusion)

Image 1 (Final dungeon diorama)

This second developing project has further deepened my love for stylization of 3D environment art and has helped me in learning industry techniques that are employed in creating stylized assets. I am now fully confident that I can use ZBrush to its maximum efficiency to create stylized assets which are game ready.

The entire assignment was really fun to work on. I first started with my research online on what type of diorama would I be working on and as I was scouring through the internet, I came across this beautiful dungeon concept by Tobias Koepp. I then set to create a low poly scene of the dungeon diorama in Maya and used ZBrush to create high poly versions of the said assets created. I then baked the normals onto the low poly meshes and textured them in a stylized format. Finally, I concluded by rebuilding by dungeon diorama in Marmoset and rendering it.

I am fully certain I can improve upon certain aspects of the scene when it comes to making the assets more stylized, texturing them properly and lighting the scene properly. I am content with what the scene turned out to be. I would really like to thank Alex Jerjomin and Harry Biggs in making me realize what can be done better to improve the scene and Neil Gallagher in aiding me with certain tips and tricks to make my scene stand out more professionally.

I do believe that the scene for me is not personally complete and portfolio ready as I would love to port this entire scene to Unreal Engine 5 as it gives me more flexibility to work on the materials and the lighting system. But as of now, I am happy with how the assignment turned out to be.

Figure 2 (Dungeon diorama by Thomas Hamilton, (Hamilton, 2024))

Figure 3 (Environment diorama by Ross Garrard, (Garrard, 2018))

REFERENCES

Hamilton, T., 2024. ArtStation. [Online] Available at: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/Xg50Ll [Accessed 09 January 2025].

Developing 2 (Mistakes)

During the entirety of this assignment, after much inspection and reflection, I could point out certain mistakes I did while working. Some of those mistakes were simple to fix whereas others were a bit tough to remedy given the remaining deadline duration.

Some of those mistakes were also kindly pointed when reviewed by my lecturer Neil and Wayne and also highlighted by Alex Jerjomin and Harry Biggs.

Lighting was primarily one of the weakest aspect in the initial render of the dungeon diorama. As Harry pointed out, the lighting really felt flat in the initial render which I instantly set out to improve. These 2 images below show the stark difference between the improvement of the visual quality just by improving the render.

Figure 1 (Flat lit initial render)

Figure 2 (Final lit render)

Even though I have only tweaked a bit of lighting values and deleted a lot of unnecessary lights in the scene, it immediately provides a crisp contrast and the ambience of an actual dungeon. Also, I believe if I were to recreate this scene in Unreal Engine, I would be able to perfect the lighting as Marmoset 4 has a lot of limitations when it comes to lights. You cannot have more than 3 lights for your viewer export file and the cast shadows from the directional lights do not get rendered.

Neil pointed out the flat textures of the floor tiles implying that the grunge detail of the tiles were very lackluster. I improved upon this by increasing the opacity mask of the grunge details for the floor tiles inside the Substance Painter file. Since, the textures are directly linked to the original directory, it gets updated immediately in Marmoset.

Figure 3 (Low grunge details on the floor tiles)

Figure 4 (Final grunge details on the floor tiles)

Initially, I wanted to render the scene with ray traced enabled but it introduced a lot of noise and blurriness into the scene. That decreased the stylization of the dungeon and I later rendered the diorama without ray traced enabled.

Figure 5 (Raytrace enabled that introduces noise and blurriness)

Figure 6 (Raytrace disabled that eliminated noise and blurriness)

The lower lights of the vents on the floor emitted lights of high brightness that caused the light to bleed on the pillars, doors and the walls. I fixed the light bleeding by changing the lower directional lights to a spot light, tweaking its cone angles and changing the value of its brightness so that it doesn't bleed into the rest of the assets.

Figure 7 (Light bleeding in pillars, doors and walls)

Figure 8 (Light bleeding eliminated)

Developing 2 (Reviews)

As with the first developing assignment, Alex Jerjomin and Harry Biggs immensely helped me during the entire assignment. Alex being a specialist in stylized assets himself, gave me constructive feedbacks as to how I can use certain techniques to improve the visual stylization of assets.

Figure 1 (Reviews by Alex Jerjomin)

The thing that stood out the most about his feedbacks were to go easy with the highlights for the curvature maps of the assets. That would smoothen out the stylization.

He also told me to research about how cracks occur in similar real life stone structures and take into account how heavy the asset is as that plays into how deep the cracks are made. Increasing the stylization according to him can also be done by drawing a noise mask on the assets or even adding bloom to it.

Harry critiqued my work on the textures I created and the initial lighting of the dungeon diorama. I screenshared my dungeon scene in Marmoset to him and he spent a lot of time going over all of the details in the scene.

Figure 2 (Reviews by Harry Biggs)

He made it very clear that the framing of the scene through the lens of a camera is one of the most crucial aspects of 3D for the audience. Since, my dungeon initially was framed incorrectly that included a lot of empty space, he told me to make full use of the 'Safe Limits' option in Marmoset that provides limit guidelines which can be used to properly scale a render frame for the scene.

Next, he went over my lighting as he believed the scene looked more flatter and the settings for the lights could be tweaked to achieve some great results. The one thing he said that stood out to me the most regarding lights was a properly lit scene with less lights is always better than an unproperly lit scene with more lights.

Finally, he also believed I could later in my own free time, tweak the textures of the floor tiles a bit as it looked more similar to the pillar textures and that eliminated the contrast of the scene. Nevertheless, both Alex and Harry were really impressed by my craft on low poly models and baking the normal textures correctly as it is a very crucial aspect and a founding stone of any 3D artifacts.

I also posted my renders on the discord server 'The DiNusty Empire' where the Principal 3D Environment Artist of Compulsion Games James Arkwright went over what could be done better to enhance the scene.

Figure 3 (Reviews by James Arkwright)

He noted out that since the entire shape of the scene resembles a box, he would like for me to explore the variety in shape of the walls and the floors. He also pointed out the significance of populating the scene with small props relevant to the dungeon context and tweaking the existing assets to differentiate the hierarchy for the focal point. Lastly, he mentioned the importance of thickness in the scene as the floors look very thin and increasing the length of the carpet to add more dimension to the diorama. I will be keeping this in mind when I further develop it for my portfolio.

Developing 2 (Week 6)

We approach at the very last final step of the assignment which is rendering a screenshot of the stylized dungeon diorama. There are a lot of ways you can go about doing this in Marmoset and it is really convenient and flexible for the users.

You set the correct render settings on the left outliner when you click on the 'Render Settings' tab. I also tweak the post process effects of the scene by a very little as the entire scene gets affected by it. For instance, when toning down the exposure, if you try decreasing it by a great value, the entire scene becomes super dark which messes up with the lighting you set in the first place.

Figure 1 (Tweaking the post process effects)

From the render settings, I introduce a bit of bloom so that the lights emitting on top of the vents look more bright to the user. A couple of different settings like exposure, highlights and contrast is tweaked to a very small degree.

I also introduce little gradient vignette to the corners of my scene, trying to redirect the attention of the user completely to the diorama.

You can render an image by clicking on the 'Render Image' button inside the render settings. Be sure to set the correct resolution when exporting a render image to your desired location.

Figure 2 (Render settings in Marmoset)

However, there is a limitation in Marmoset 4 where you can only render out 3 lights at once and the cast shadows by directional lights are not displayed properly. That contradicts the entire lighting setup in our scene as we have more than 5 lights that each have an important role to light the assets.

Thus, I decided to render the viewport image of the diorama scene that can be accessed by clicking the 'Render' tab on the top bar and clicking on 'Viewport'. This allows us to capture the entire lights in the scene while providing us a final render.

Figure 3 (A render of the dungeon diorama)

I then set about taking different viewport renders while tweaking the lights in the scene, so that I can grab the best render among the handful renders. This also allows you to examine areas in the scene which is not being lit properly and allows for a room of inspection and tinkering about.

Developing 2 (Week 6)

I begin by adding lights to my scene. Marmoset provides you with 3 sets of default lights, a spot light where the light will be emitted in a spot, a directional light where the light will be emitted in the direction the light is facing and an omnidirectional light that emits light around its set radius.

Figure 1 (Adding lights to the scene)

I introduce tint to some of the lights in my scene. The vents emit an orange tint and the omni light emits a blue ambient light for the entire scene.

You should make sure to spend a lot of time in this phase trying to get the lighting correct. You don't want the lighting to be too dull or too bright as that degrades the quality of the final render. For that, it is important to set the value of the lights appropriately.

Figure 2 (Tweaking the lights #1)

I also decided to set my background to a darker shade so that the entire emphasis leads to the dungeon and no where else. You can easily do this by clicking on the 'Sky' option on your outliner. This is the sky lighting for your scene where you can decrease the background brightness, set a tint or even assign an HDRI to the scene.

Figure 3 (Tweaking the lights #2)

Developing 2 (Week 6)

Before we proceed into our final phase of dressing up our scene, we can do it in two different methods. The first method is to individually import everything into Marmoset, rebuild the scene and assign textures to it. The second method would be to combine modular assets in Maya, export the scene as a whole and import the entire dungeon scene directly into Marmoset where you will then assign textures.

I will be using the second method as it will be more convenient for me to create materials for combined and modular assets and then export the entire scene. That way, when I assign the materials to the combined mesh, it will assign materials to all of the assets together.

This post will be very short as I will just be creating materials for the assets in Maya with only the normal maps assigned.

Figure 1 (Creating a material for the assets)

Once I set the material with its normal maps, I plug in the materials to their corresponding assets in the dungeon scene.

Figure 2 (Assigning materials for each of the assets)

This is also a good way for users to check if the normals are correctly being applied to their corresponding assets. However, Maya is known to display a glitchy viewport when it comes to displaying textures with normal maps. It may look something like this image attached below.

Figure 3 (Glitchy viewport in Maya)

Figure 4 (Combining modular assets)

The image attached shows the normals of the assets being either displayed in pure white or a shade of gray. This is completely normal and users shouldn't be scared if their normals maps are being displayed incorrectly. If you use the same maps and assign it inside Marmoset, it will display correctly.

I ran into an error where I miscalculated the document size in ZBrush while trying to export the tiles as a map after which I overrode its save file. That way, I had no way of going back and create the tiling textures for the scene. This is why I chose the alternative of using the actual tile objects, decimating their resolution in ZBrush that allowed me to export a very low sized high poly model and use those models to get the baked maps.

I finish assigning all the materials correctly to their assets. After this, I set out to combine all the modular assets and the pieces that will end up using the same texture maps.

Figure 4 (Final dungeon scene)

This officially concludes the last step before moving onto the final phase of dressing up the scene completely in Marmoset and lighting it up. The entire scene is selected and exported so that it can be imported as an obj file in Marmoset.

Developing 2 (Week 5)

We are almost done with texturing most of the assets of the dungeon diorama. I am left with texturing the door structure, the only piece remaining. Same as before, I import the door structure into a new Painter file and set about texturing it.

Figure 1 (Texturing the door #1)

Sometimes, when you want to texture specific faces or polygons, you can press the fill option on the left toolbar or press 4 on your keyboard to access the fill option. This allows you to cycle through options you can use to fill; it could be faces or polygons or a brush. Some of the cracks in the door structure were harder to reach, so I used the polygon fill and selected the face option to fill in the base color for the faces of the stone structures.

Figure 2 (Texturing the door #2)

I start painting light shadows in the cracks I sculpted with the orb crack brush in ZBrush. I also darken the curvature of the cracks with the filter 'Levels' that allows me to control the values of the black and white channel of the curvature maps. I use both of them in combination to add a painted shadow effect to the stone structures.

Figure 3 (Texturing the door #3)

Since, I didn't want the door structure to be the same color, I used black masks on different color variations and also used the polygon fill option to fill different polygons with different color variations.

Figure 4 (Texturing the door #4)

Figure 5 (Texturing the door #5)

Developing 2 (Week 5)

After the completion of the texturing for the wooden tiles, I move onto the remaining assets for our scene. These blog posts won't carry the entire detail for the remaining assets as they are exactly the same process but do contain the progress for the remaining assets.

Figure 1 (Texturing the wooden beam #1)

I import the wooden beam into a new Substance Painter file and start texturing it. Before that, I plug in the normal, ambient occlusion and the curvature maps of the mesh before proceeding any further.

Figure 2 (Texturing the wooden beam #2)

Here, I have created all of the base colors along with its grunge variations. Now, I create a separate layer to paint occlusion, shadows and edge highlights to the asset. I then use the slider under the 'Normal' tab to control its opacity.

Figure 3 (Texturing the wooden beam #3)

After adding a small tinge of dark and light gradient to the beams, I was also finishing with its texturing.

Figure 4 (Texturing the pillar #1)

As the ornamental and the base pieces of the pillar are separate, it is very easy for me to texture those pieces individually. I plug in the corresponding maps, add the base color and its variation and add filters like blur and levels to adjust the color texture.

However, for the pillar, I decide to add emphasis to the edge highlights and metal shine for the bolts sculpted. I use a blank layer and paint those details onto the asset so that it is painted rather than the objects itself holding the properties I want to be displayed.

Figure 5 (Painting the metal shine)

Figure 6 (Texturing the pillar #2)

Figure 7 (Texturing the pillar #3)

After I finish painting the textures for the pillar base and its ornamental pieces, I create a new Marmoset file and import the low poly model and assign it those exported textures just to see if it works perfectly without any errors.

Figure 8 (Testing the assets in Marmoset)

After ensuring that the model works perfectly with the textures we created in Marmoset, we go back to finishing texturing the remaining assets.

Figure 9 (Texturing the barrel #1)

Since, the cap of the barrel already has data sculpted into it, it wouldn't require any additional height texturing for its lines.

Figure 10 (Texturing the barrel #2)

Figure 11 (Texturing the barrel #3)