Hi there! My name is Madison, and I’m a 3D Environment Artist at Lucid Games, creating assets for Destruction AllStars. I also did some work on the Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit Remastered. Prior to my job at Lucid, I studied Game Development, Game Art at Falmouth University in Cornwall.
你好呀！我的名字是 Madison，我是 Lucid Games 的 3D 环境艺术家，为 Destruction AllStars 创建资产。我还为《极品飞车：热血追击重制版》做了一些工作。在 Lucid 工作之前，我在康沃尔的法尔茅斯大学学习游戏开发、游戏艺术。
The Plague-Master's Crypt Project
The Plague-Master’s Crypt scene began as a much smaller project – I had been wanting to do another stylized scene for a little while and decided to take a break from my other personal project and create a small diorama after I started looking at
Tobias Koepp’s Stylised Dungeon tutorial series on Udemy.
瘟疫大师的地穴计划
开始时是一个小得多的项目——我一直想做另一个风格化场景有一段时间，并决定在我开始看
Tobias Koepp 的Stylized Udemy 的地下城教程系列。
Creating another stylized project was something I was really looking forward to, building on the work from my previous project
The Sanctuary, but this time creating cleaner meshes and textures for a more polished result. Over the past year at Lucid Games, I’ve learned so much and I wanted to also implement this into a new project!
在我之前的项目
The Sanctuary的工作基础上，创建另一个风格化的项目是我真正期待的事情，但这次创建更干净的网格和纹理以获得更精美的结果。在 Lucid Games 的过去一年里，我学到了很多东西，我也想将其应用到一个新项目中！
The overall aim was to make a stylized environment, focusing on an internal space that incorporated external elements to help it feel more grounded and delve into hand-painted textures created with Substance Designer and ZBrush, inspired by the stylized dungeon series, whilst also maintaining some individuality in terms of the layout and theme of the dungeon.
总体目标是创造一个风格化的环境，专注于一个内部空间，它结合了外部元素，以帮助它感觉更接地气，并深入研究由 Substance Designer 和 ZBrush 创建的手绘纹理，灵感来自于风格化的地牢系列，同时也保留了一些地牢的布局和主题的个性。
While I didn’t use a particular concept, I’ve always been hugely inspired by the world of Overwatch and love to incorporate this into my personal projects – this time, I took inspiration from the Reign of the King section of the Blizzard World hybrid map, as I loved the lighting and materials used to make a cool, ghoulish dungeon area that was still bright and colorful. The amazing work of
Jasmin Habezai-Fekri,
Jimmy Malachier,
Thiago Klafke, and
Lucas Annunziata was also a huge inspiration during this project, and their stylized works are really beautiful!
Approaching the art direction, I created some moodboards of game environments to take inspiration from, including games like Overwatch, Torchlight, and World of Warcraft. All these games inspired me in some way with their textures, lighting, and environments and I wanted to channel elements of these into my scene – the final layout for the dungeon came about after I jumped back into Dragon Age: Inquisition and saw the undercroft of Skyhold. Creating a space using natural rock formations and blending in some focused architecture would allow me to practice sculpting, as well as help focus my attention on specific areas of detail like an altar and study area, and so I began to roll with this idea in mind and create some sketches.
在艺术指导方面，我创建了一些游戏环境的情绪板以从中获取灵感，包括《守望先锋》、《火炬之光》和《魔兽世界》等游戏。所有这些游戏的纹理、光照和环境都以某种方式激发了我的灵感，我想将这些元素引入我的场景——地牢的最终布局是在我跳回龙腾世纪：宗教裁判所并看到地下室之后产生的。天守。使用天然岩层创造一个空间，并融入一些重点建筑，让我练习雕刻，并帮助我将注意力集中在特定的细节区域，比如祭坛和学习区，所以我开始考虑这个想法并创建一些草图。
I also started getting inspiration at this stage for the blue lighting and contrasting warm lights! I focused on creating a solid blockout early with a lighting set-up to explore different color combinations, as the texturing and lighting were things I identified as strong elements of these game’s styles.
在这个阶段，我也开始从蓝色灯光和对比色暖光中获得灵感！我专注于在早期通过照明设置创建一个实体块来探索不同的颜色组合，因为纹理和照明是我认为这些游戏风格的重要元素的东西。
As mentioned above, I generally begin my projects with some moodboards for lighting and style, and usually, if I’m taking inspiration from real-world terrain/environments, I would research the foliage and rock compositions/structural elements so that I can then identify which areas I want to over-exaggerate and stylize to create fun silhouettes and shapes. In this case, things like crumbling bricks and worn stone would be key elements to the project. The sketches I did were really rough and loose, primarily to give me a general idea of what I’m aiming for and help nail down the number of modular assets I’ll likely need to create an environment – at this stage in the project,
Alex Lac joined me to create a themed character for the scene and help out with some more of the sculpted elements like bones and corpses!
如上所述，我通常会从一些用于照明和风格的情绪板开始我的项目，并且通常，如果我从现实世界的地形/环境中获取灵感，我会研究树叶和岩石成分/结构元素，这样我就可以确定我想要过度夸大和风格化哪些区域以创建有趣的轮廓和形状。在这种情况下，诸如摇摇欲坠的砖块和破旧的石头之类的东西将成为该项目的关键元素。我所做的草图非常粗糙和松散，主要是为了让我大致了解我的目标并帮助确定我可能需要创建环境的模块化资产的数量——在项目的这个阶段，
亚历克斯·拉克 和我一起为场景创建一个主题角色，并帮助处理更多的雕刻元素，如骨骼和尸体！
Having these sketches of the layout and the props really helped in explaining the themes of the project and meant we had a shared reference point. Once I had these, I downloaded an asset pack of rocks online and blocked out the general space while using Maya to block out modular elements that I could add detail to later. I brought all these assets into Unreal and applied a base material with a value of 1 on the Roughness, Metallic, and Base Color – I can then sketch on top of a screenshot of this blockout to plan further detail and note any changes that I need to make, and get a better visual idea of how the scene would look later.
拥有这些布局和道具的草图确实有助于解释项目的主题，这意味着我们有一个共享的参考点。一旦我有了这些，我就在网上下载了一个石头资产包，并在使用 Maya 来屏蔽模块化元素的同时屏蔽了一般空间，我可以在以后添加细节。我将所有这些资产都带入了虚幻引擎，并在粗糙度、金属色和基色上应用了值为 1 的基础材质——然后我可以在此块的屏幕截图上绘制草图，以计划进一步的细节并记录我需要的任何更改制作，并更好地了解场景稍后的外观。
You can see all the iterations of the blockout below and how much it changed! As I wasn’t working from a set concept, I tried really exploring some different layouts, and identifying strengths and weaknesses of each iteration of the blockout was key – I have a lovely group of friends over Discord that regularly gave feedback on the structure and composition, which was great to keep me motivated and focused! I knew I wanted a detailed altar area at the front, and then some more detail at the back to make it feel like there’s a world beyond the scene we’re seeing. This eventually led to a tiered structure that you can see in the final piece – this was simplified later so that the scene didn’t have too much visual noise.
您可以在下面看到封锁的所有迭代以及它发生了多少变化！由于我不是从一个集合概念开始工作，我尝试真正探索一些不同的布局，并且确定每个迭代迭代的优势和劣势是关键——我有一群可爱的 Discord 朋友，他们定期对结构和作文，这让我保持动力和专注！我知道我想要在前面有一个详细的祭坛区域，然后在后面有更多的细节，让我们感觉有一个超越我们所看到的场景的世界。这最终导致了您可以在最终作品中看到的分层结构 - 后来对其进行了简化，以便场景没有太多的视觉噪音。
All the assets for this project were created using Maya, ZBrush, and Substance Suite – I tried to keep a consistent workflow throughout the project. I started with creating a low poly mesh in Maya, which I then unwrapped and brought into ZBrush where I sculpted in the details. Creating the low poly and unwrapping it before sculpting was useful for a few reasons – firstly, it meant I was more inclined to maintain the silhouettes, keeping strong shapes that would be more effective in the scene. It also meant that I could bring all my assets, with accurate UV’s and lightmaps, into UE4 and construct the scene early on. This let me see what was working well and what assets needed some adjustments to their overall shape before I spent the time sculpting in detail and working on the materials. I followed this for all the elements, starting with the larger tiling elements and moving onto smaller elements like candles and barrels to populate areas that needed more detail and avoid anywhere that was already too noisy visually.
这个项目的所有资产都是使用 Maya、ZBrush 和 Substance Suite 创建的——我试图在整个项目中保持一致的工作流程。我首先在 Maya 中创建一个低多边形网格，然后将其展开并带入 ZBrush 中，在其中雕刻细节。在雕刻之前创建低多边形并展开它是有用的，原因有几个 - 首先，这意味着我更倾向于保持轮廓，保持在场景中更有效的强形状。这也意味着我可以将我的所有资产，以及准确的 UV 和光照贴图，带入 UE4 并尽早构建场景。这让我可以在我花时间详细雕刻和处理材料之前了解哪些工作正常以及哪些资产需要对其整体形状进行一些调整。我对所有元素都遵循了这个.
For the elements of the structure that had to be aligned with a curved wall, I used the Curve Warp tool. This works by using an extracted curve (in this case, extracted from the wall mesh) and deforming a modular asset along it – I used this method for the banisters by creating one repeating segment of a banister, duplicating it to the correct length, and then applying a Curve Warp that took the curve from the wall. This can be read about here! This meant that I could easily adjust the size and thickness of the banisters, trim and other elements of the meshes without having to be destructive in any way. It also meant that if I had to change the walls' length or angles, it was really simple to then adjust the relevant meshes too!
对于必须与弯曲墙对齐的结构元素，我使用了曲线扭曲工具。这是通过使用提取的曲线（在这种情况下，从墙壁网格中提取）并沿其变形模块化资产来工作的 - 我通过创建一个重复的栏杆段，将其复制到正确的长度，将这种方法用于栏杆，然后然后应用曲线扭曲，从墙上获取曲线。这可以在这里阅读！这意味着我可以轻松调整网格的栏杆、装饰和其他元素的大小和厚度，而无需以任何方式进行破坏。这也意味着如果我必须改变墙壁的长度或角度，那么调整相关网格也非常简单！
The large structures of the architecture, for example the main crypt building, was broken down into three main segments – the front arch, the corner detail, and the cap. This meant that I could add more detail to the texture map and sculpt and use the individual sections of the mesh, such as the cross and bricks, to add more detail to other areas of the scene. I was trying to be as efficient and non-destructive as possible in this project (such as using the Curve Warp tools earlier for the other structural elements) so using methods that let me utilize meshes in other ways was important to me! All the textures for the project were made in Substance Designer and Substance Painter.
该建筑的大型结构，例如主地下室建筑，被分为三个主要部分——前拱门、角落细节和帽子。这意味着我可以向纹理贴图添加更多细节并进行雕刻，并使用网格的各个部分（例如十字架和砖块）为场景的其他区域添加更多细节。我试图在这个项目中尽可能高效和无损（例如之前对其他结构元素使用曲线扭曲工具），因此使用让我以其他方式利用网格的方法对我来说很重要！该项目的所有纹理都是在 Substance Designer 和 Substance Painter 中制作的。
The curved crypts at the back were created by stacking the standard crypt model on top of itself and deforming it with the bend tool in Maya – all I had to do then was some clean-up, reducing the polycount where possible and ensuring there were no overlapping planes in the mesh!
背面的弯曲隐窝是通过将标准隐窝模型堆叠在其自身顶部并使用 Maya 中的弯曲工具对其进行变形来创建的——然后我所要做的就是进行一些清理，尽可能减少多边形数并确保没有网格中的重叠平面！
Regarding my color palette, I knew early on that I wanted to explore blues and greens. Initially, I multiplied the materials' Normal and Roughness with a base parameter in the material set-up so that while I was still figuring out the lighting, I could adjust and identify what color I wanted the stones to be and how this was affected by the saturated colors – all I then did was go back to my material graphs in Substance Designer and adjust the more detailed version of the Color Maps to be correct.
关于我的调色板，我很早就知道我想探索蓝色和绿色。最初，我将材质的法线和粗糙度与材质设置中的基本参数相乘，以便在我仍在确定照明时，我可以调整和确定我想要石头的颜色以及它是如何受到影响的饱和的颜色——然后我所做的就是返回到我在 Substance Designer 中的材质图表并调整颜色贴图的更详细版本以使其正确。
The majority of the scene was textured using tileable materials and one trim sheet, with unique structures having their own texture maps created in Substance Painter. My workflow varied slightly depending on what was needed – for the bricks and floor tiles, I created a tiling design in Maya and then brought this into ZBrush to add detail and sculpt in the surface information. I then brought the depth map render of these sculpts into Substance Designer, plugged them into a tile generator, and created the tiling materials' Albedo, Roughness, Metallic and Height Maps in Substance Designer, focusing on creating a Base Color and working up to add detail and paint strokes by filtering through a variety of slope blurs and warps.
大部分场景的纹理使用可平铺材料和一张装饰板，独特的结构具有在 Substance Painter 中创建的自己的纹理贴图。根据需要，我的工作流程略有不同——对于砖块和地砖，我在 Maya 中创建了一个平铺设计，然后将其带入 ZBrush 以在表面信息中添加细节和雕刻。然后我将这些雕刻的深度图渲染带入 Substance Designer，将它们插入瓷砖生成器，并在 Substance Designer 中创建瓷砖材质的反照率、粗糙度、金属和高度贴图，重点是创建基色并努力添加通过过滤各种坡度模糊和扭曲来绘制细节和绘画笔触。
I then used vertex blending combined with decals in-engine to help reduce any visible tiling in the textures and add detail to some of the plainer areas. This helped keep the materials modular but allowed for some extra variations to be added and created.
然后，我将顶点混合与引擎内的贴花相结合，以帮助减少纹理中任何可见的平铺，并为一些较简单的区域添加细节。这有助于保持材料模块化，但允许添加和创建一些额外的变化。
Smaller props and assets were made in the same manner – sculpted in Zbrush, retopologized in Maya, and textured in Substance Painter. Most of the materials' Albedos were blended with a parameter so that I could lighten/darken them and add/reduce saturation in a Material Instance easily to add some variation to the scene.
较小的道具和资产以相同的方式制作——在 Zbrush 中雕刻，在 Maya 中重新拓扑，并在 Substance Painter 中纹理化。大多数材质的反照率都与一个参数混合，这样我就可以使它们变亮/变暗，并在材质实例中轻松添加/降低饱和度，从而为场景添加一些变化。
Assembling the final environment took some time, and at first, I worried as I felt I was seeing little progress. However, once I imported the full rock kit and modular assets the scene started to come together a lot more. Once all my main meshes were in the engine and had a base lighting pass, I began to look at ways to begin to bring all the smaller elements together. This consisted of creating decals, vertex blending a variety of materials together, and adding general dirt and clutter to the environment with the smaller props (such as barrels and candles) into the scene.
组装最终环境需要一些时间，起初我很担心，因为我觉得我看不到什么进展。然而，一旦我导入了完整的摇滚套件和模块化资产，场景就开始变得更多。一旦我的所有主要网格都在引擎中并且有一个基础照明通道，我开始寻找开始将所有较小元素组合在一起的方法。这包括创建贴花、将各种材料顶点混合在一起，以及在场景中使用较小的道具（例如桶和蜡烛）向环境添加一般的污垢和杂乱。
One of the most effective tools I used for this project was the Spline tool in UE4. The Spline tool in UE4 was utilized for the vines that reach across the rock surfaces – to utilize this, I first created five segments of vines (four unique sculpts and one tiling mesh) in ZBrush, textured them in Substance Painter, and imported them into UE4. I then created a Spline Blueprint (after a bit of digging, I found
this great thread where I got the information to create the tapering vines) that I used to decorate the scene with fleshy vines! This worked great to create lots of different vines using just one repeated mesh while being able to fully adjust them throughout the lighting stage and using just one mesh.
我在这个项目中使用的最有效的工具之一是 UE4 中的 Spline 工具。UE4 中的样条工具被用于跨越岩石表面的藤蔓——为了利用这一点，我首先在 ZBrush 中创建了五段藤蔓（四个独特的雕刻和一个平铺网格），在 Substance Painter 中对它们进行纹理化，然后将它们导入到虚幻4。然后我创建了一个样条蓝图（经过一些挖掘，我发现了这个
很棒的线程，我在那里获得了创建锥形藤蔓的信息）我用来用肉质藤蔓装饰场景！这非常适用于仅使用一个重复网格创建许多不同的藤蔓，同时能够在整个照明阶段完全调整它们并仅使用一个网格。
I also implemented assets such as fog cards at this stage, just utilizing UE4’s basic fog card (found in the starter content) and made slight adjustments as I felt it was better to have more time to focus on polishing my textures and lighting.
我还在这个阶段实现了诸如雾卡之类的资产，只是利用了 UE4 的基本雾卡（在入门内容中找到）并做了一些细微的调整，因为我觉得有更多的时间专注于打磨我的纹理和光照效果更好。
The vertex blending helped to create more variation across the scene massively, and I used some of the rock kit scaled down to help create rubble and more areas of destruction in the scene. Finally, I went in and began to break some pre-existing elements like the banisters and balcony assets to help to make it feel older and more decrepit without having to create more unique assets.
顶点混合有助于在场景中创造更多变化，我使用了一些缩小的摇滚套件来帮助在场景中创建碎石和更多破坏区域。最后，我进入并开始打破一些预先存在的元素，如栏杆和阳台资产，以帮助让它感觉更旧和更破旧，而不必创建更多独特的资产。
I began to render out my environment using some Cine camera actors in-scene. The lighting consisted of a main Directional Light using a purple tone so that it would tint the entire scene, and then I began to light the rest of the scene using smaller area lights and spotlights with limited Light Channels to highlight specific assets such as the altar and the crypt shelving. I tried to focus on working from the largest light to smaller lights so that I wouldn’t lose focus on the overall scene, pinning my viewport so that I could regularly check the effect the lighting was having on the textures and assets. I utilized some general lighting tutorials on YouTube for stylized lighting, but really
enjoyed this one in particular! I also followed some tutorials for the fire VFX and dust motes as I hadn’t had much experience with these elements before this project.
我开始在场景中使用一些电影摄影机演员来渲染我的环境。照明由使用紫色调的主定向光组成，以便为整个场景着色，然后我开始使用较小的区域灯和具有有限光通道的聚光灯照亮场景的其余部分，以突出特定资产，例如祭坛和地穴书架。我试图专注于从最大的灯光到较小的灯光工作，这样我就不会失去对整个场景的关注，固定我的视口，以便我可以定期检查灯光对纹理和资产的影响。我在 YouTube 上使用了一些通用照明教程来进行风格化照明，但我特别喜欢
这个教程！我还学习了一些关于火 VFX 和灰尘微粒的教程，因为在这个项目之前我对这些元素没有太多经验。
In post-production, I adjusted the strength and the bias of the ambient occlusion to really try and get that Overwatch lighting, as well as utilizing a LUT to adjust the final saturation and brightness of the scene. At this stage, I also got some brilliant feedback from some really lovely people, and it helped to elevate the scene a ton by bringing out a lot more color, depth through adjusting the camera angle and also helped to create areas of visual rest using some more vertex blending and decals. The final renders are below!
在后期制作中，我调整了环境光遮蔽的强度和偏差，以真正尝试获得守望先锋照明，并使用 LUT 来调整场景的最终饱和度和亮度。在这个阶段，我也从一些非常可爱的人那里得到了一些精彩的反馈，它通过调整摄像机角度带来了更多的颜色和深度，帮助提升了场景的层次，并帮助创建了一些视觉休息区域。更多的顶点混合和贴花。最终效果图如下！
The scene would not have been the same without all the amazing feedback from my peers – I recommend joining some Discord groups, sharing your work, and reaching out to people for feedback often as it truly helps so much!
如果没有我的同龄人的所有惊人反馈，场景就不一样了——我建议加入一些 Discord 小组，分享你的工作，并经常与人们联系以获得反馈，因为它确实有很大帮助！
Such is the case for a lot of projects, I think the main issue I faced during this project was too many ideas, some of which were conflicting, especially as I wasn’t following a concept directly! This meant I had to spend a large amount of time exploring different compositions, lighting, and planning for key shots that I definitely got carried away with – I created so many blockouts that I felt lacked a distinct personality and it was definitely discouraging at first, and I feel like it was so easy to get sucked into the smaller details that I lost sight of the bigger picture for a little while!
很多项目都是这样，我认为我在这个项目中面临的主要问题是想法太多，其中一些是相互冲突的，特别是因为我没有直接遵循一个概念！这意味着我必须花费大量时间探索不同的构图、灯光和关键镜头的规划，这些我肯定会被忘得一干二净——我创造了太多的遮挡，我觉得缺乏鲜明的个性，一开始肯定令人沮丧，而且我觉得很容易被小细节所吸引，以至于我一度忽略了大局！
Taking a step back and focusing on one or two key areas (in my case, the altar and the crypt shelves) really helped me cut the scene down to its core elements and focus on creating assets that would help support these main structures, rather than overshadowing them. Sometimes you need to just take a minute and remember what your aim was at the start of the project!
退后一步，专注于一两个关键区域（在我的例子中，祭坛和地下室的架子）确实帮助我将场景削减到其核心元素，并专注于创建有助于支持这些主要结构的资产，而不是盖过了他们。有时您需要花一点时间记住您在项目开始时的目标！
Lighting was also a concern as I felt I hadn’t handled darker interior lighting before – however, with the help of lots of references and research, I found that it was just another skill to develop, and not something to feel intimidated by!
照明也是一个问题，因为我觉得我以前没有处理过较暗的室内照明 - 然而，在大量参考和研究的帮助下，我发现这只是另一种需要发展的技能，而不是感到害怕！
I was sure to create a concise checklist of modular assets and stick to it, creating and checking off those before adding on any extra models and pieces – this was due to learning from my past projects to create a solid modular kit before you delve into the smaller details.
我一定会创建一个简洁的模块化资产清单并坚持下去，在添加任何额外的模型和部件之前创建并检查它们——这是由于从我过去的项目中学习，在你深入研究之前创建了一个可靠的模块化套件较小的细节。
Overall, this project took a lot longer than I had initially planned, but that’s okay! What started as a three-week diorama extended to a full scene over the course of around 7 months. This scene was something I really wanted to enjoy, and I was conscious of spreading myself too thin over multiple projects and plans – I did however try to make sure I spend at least an hour every evening on it and did a lot of the work during the weekend while listening to podcasts!
总的来说，这个项目花费的时间比我最初计划的要长得多，但没关系！从一个为期三周的西洋镜开始，在大约 7 个月的时间里扩展到一个完整的场景。这个场景是我真正想要享受的，我意识到自己在多个项目和计划中过于分散——但是我确实尝试确保我每天晚上至少花一个小时在上面，并在此期间做了很多工作周末边听播客！
I sincerely hope seeing some of the production behind this scene has been an enjoyable read, and I’m super excited for whatever project comes next! If anyone had any questions about any of the workflows mentioned above, then please do feel free to reach out on
ArtStation or
Twitter and I’ll try to help out wherever possible! Stay safe and best of luck with your projects!
我真诚地希望看到这个场景背后的一些制作是一个愉快的阅读，我对接下来的任何项目都感到非常兴奋！如果有人对上述任何工作流程有任何疑问，请随时联系
ArtStation或
Twitter，我会尽可能提供帮助！保持安全并祝您的项目好运！
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