Italian Old House

Greetings, this is my latest Environment, here my objective was to do the scenario as optimized as possible while getting a good look and aesthetics.

I'm going to share with you my workflow and the tips and tricks I followed in order to archive my objective for this environment. To start the software I used to work in this scenario was: Maya (modelling and UVs), Zbrush (sculpting), Substance Painter (textures), Photoshop (foliage textures), Substance Designer (materials), Unreal Engine (Lightning and final output).

To start I did a blackout of my scenario Inside Maya with blocks that was substituting for the models once I had them . This helped me a lot with planning and realizing what I was gonna be needing to produce in the final output. This environment was important for me in the workflow aspect as I wanted to make a modular building kit shown in the images to make it as efficient as possible.

Then I did the Sculpting in Zbrush, this was to get more details. With this I was able to get more dept to my scene and get as much detail as possible.

Then I took all my high poly models to Maya in order to make the low poly version. I made the UVs and took special attention on the texel density (for this scene I used 4k textures).

After I got the textures done I passed the models to substance painter where I did the projection from the high poly to the low poly to make the maps. Inside Substance painter and helping myself with some materials I made inside Substance Designer I was able to get the maps I needed.

The foliage was a little different. In order to make the assets I walked to the park near my house and took some pictures of the elements that I liked the most, I did this with my phones camera as I currently don't have a professional one, but implanting to buy one soon. Then I took this photos to photoshop and did some editing to make them a little more stylized and less realistic. With this ready I built the foliage inside Maya with the textures and the Uv map I built of the foliage

The maps where taken to Unreal Engine where I started building the world with the help of the building kit that I was building.. This was super helpful as it was a very non destructive process and I was able to make some changes without the need to remake much when I wanted to improve something.

The wall kit I did for the scene worked great and with the tool of vertex painting it was very easy breaking the symmetry of the material and giving life to the textures by adding the bricks and dust over the base wall plaster.

Lightning normally is a very important part in my scenes. here I decided to made it a little simple in order to focus on other aspects of the environment. I added some post production process volumes and a skybox to simulate the clouds and the sky with a direct light to simulate the sun.

The optimization process was a crucial part for me in this environment my objective was to always have more than 120fps (I was able to do so), I used LODs first of all to start already with a good optimization in my scene also because I wanted to stay with the Realtime lights. Then I keeps everything in a few quality of texture atlas in order to have few textures in my scene.

Then I merged the objects that shared the same material or that where close in the scene in order to have less draw calls as well. This should be done at the end of the process as then this merged actors come to substitute the separated assets. I recommend making a optimized an a non optimized version of you level by making a duplicate.

if you arrive here thanks for reading.

That's all for this project. I hope you like it!

Note (the tree and the bush are not of my property I edited the textures and assets as well as many of the values inside their materials and the general blueprint (took them from the "City Park Environment Collection" by Unreal Engine )