Reality Marble

I am the bone of my sword

Steel is my body and fire is my blood

I have created over a thousand blades

Unknown to Death,

Nor known to Life.

Have withstood pain to create many weapons

Yet, those hands will never hold anything

So as I pray, Unlimited Blade Works.

-Archer from Fate/Stay Night

Recently, I created my most ambitious piece in Unreal Engine up to date. For months, I'd been wondering if it's possible to recreate iconic scenes from anime shows, but I didn't pursue the idea further because I believed that my current skill set wouldn't suffice. However, that changed last week!

From the very first time that I'd touched Unreal Engine, I'd deemed the art of creating environments to be my Kryptonite! It always seemed so cumbersome. The scale of the objects in the scene need to be in proportion to one another; the composition has to be perfect; the lighting has to be tweaked constantly until you achieve the right tint; the fog needs to be used wisely to enable depth; the landscape needs to be sculpted, but, you'd sometimes need to use external software like Gaea or World Creator to create realistic custom heightmaps. I can drone on and on, but I think that this rant accurately sums up why I find this daunting.

But, I aspire to be a generalist at Unreal who can build amazing games. I knew that I must be good with environments because level design plays an integral role in enriching a player's experience, and the principles you apply to create environments such as composition and lighting techniques carry over to this domain. Upon further contemplation, I decided that I had to step up my game. The issue now was that I didn't have the slightest clue about where to begin.

Fortunately, I have amazing peers for who I'm grateful! I was in awe of the work that one of my friends from the Pro League, Koushik, used to put out. So, I asked if he could lend a hand and he shared some handy tips on how to get started with environments.

He repeatedly emphasized that creating environments isn't as overwhelming as it seems to be once a good workflow is established. The problems you face along the way need to be approached with a freelancer's mindset. You should do a task from scratch only if you're unable to find a workaround. My most important takeaway was that reference images are essential for you to gain inspiration. They also ensure that you do not stray away from your initial vision as you begin to make progress.

With this newfound clarity, I decided to create my rendition of Archer's Reality Marble. I love Archer as a character because he knew that he was living on the ideals he borrowed from his adopted father. Despite that, he continued to pursue his goal to become a hero of justice and spent his entire life improving his capabilities as a mage. I felt that attempting to realize a monumental dream and being able to dedicate one's life to their craft is a beautiful and exciting way to live life and I desperately wanted to create this piece as a tribute to my favourite fictional character.

Keeping this in mind, I set up a mood board with a handful of images and a color palette.

Soon, I noticed that having multiple images was too confusing for me, so I decided to make things simpler by focusing on a single image for my reference.

Throughout the process, I learned plenty of things that I found overwhelming before working on the environment:

• Unreal's Sculpt and Flatten tools allow you to add more definition to the landscape. Sometimes, it helps to plug in a heightmap so that you have a good starting point. I used one of Gaea's desert heightmaps for this piece.

• Fog sheets come in handy when you're adding depth to your scene. You can obtain them from the Blueprints project available on Epic Games if you don't want to create one from scratch.

• I used the Brushify asset pack for the first time! Although Brushify allows you to easily create your landscape materials, their default ones are exceptional, so you should check if they meet your requirements before heading over to Megascans.

• Good shadows play an integral role in enhancing the realism of a scene.

• Once you've got the lighting figured out, you can begin work with the post-processing by playing around with the contrast, saturation, and gamma of the scene to get the desired result.

• While going through the Unreal docs, I learned that the difference between the 2 types of light scattering, Rayleigh and Mie, is essentially the size of the particles.

• When filming shots, 24 fps is the ideal framerate if you're aiming for a filmy look. This is because it allows motion-blur, which as the name suggests, is the blur that occurs when an object is moving. Although this is subtle, it makes a whole lot of difference in VFX films.

If you're interested in seeing how a professional would go about creating a AAA environment, check out this awesome playlist! It is interesting to see how an expert goes about their workflow with limited time and resources.

I had to go through a ton of iterations and there were multiple occasions where I let self-doubt creep in. I constantly felt that I was out of my depth and was very close to ditching the project. But, I decided to see it to the end before moving on to a new one. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I'm glad that I did!