Creating Stylized 3D Environments for Games

Stylized Environment Art in Unreal Engine 5 - In-Depth Tutorial Course

Learn how a professional environment artist works when creating environments for games and cinematics with Justin Wallace. You’ll learn techniques like Modular Modeling, Procedural Texturing, Prop Sculpting, Color Theory, Stylized Foliage, Level Art & Composition, Advanced Shader Creation, Lighting, and more!

This tutorial is based on the amazing work from John Wallin Liberto

BLENDER, SUBSTANCE DESIGNER / PAINTER, ZBRUSH, AND UNREAL ENGINE 5
The Modeling will be done in Blender, along with foliage modeling via the Treebox add-on. The Materials will be authored with Substance Designer & Paintbox 2. Foliage Cards will be drawn in Photoshop. Prop sculpting will be done in Zbrush & textured with Substance Painter. The environment will be designed, shaded, lit, and rendered with Unreal Engine 5.

The Modeling & Sculpting process in Blender & Zbrush can be replicated in the modeling package of your choice. The same goes for Photoshop, where any drawing application will work. Substance Designer, Substance Painter, & Unreal Engine are critical, however.

In this course, you will learn everything you need to know to create the final results that you see in the images and trailers (excluding particles). This course is designed to give you an incredibly strong foundation in environment art workflows and replicating concept art for video games and cinematics. The goal of this course is to achieve a strong understanding of the entire environment art workflow while building a game environment ready for your art portfolio to level up your career.

TREEBOX & PAINTBOX 2
Developed alongside this course over many months, Shin’s TREEBOX & PAINTBOX 2 are game development tools designed specifically to make foliage and material creation for stylized environments faster and more fun. Only the BASE versions were used in the course, so just the essentials! Install TREEBOX into Blender to get an instant procedural tree creation tool that can convert itself into a game object in one click! Then use PAINTBOX 2 to rapidly iterate painterly materials in Substance Designer to save precious time and make experimenting in designer much more natural. These tools are essential to take us to the final result in this concept art.

When getting this course you will get an automatic 25% off on the plugins!
TREEBOX
PAINTBOX 2

14+ HOURS!
This course contains over 14+ hours of content – You can follow along with every single step – There is only a minimal amount of time lapsing to get through the “loading screens” of the game development process. 
This course has been rehearsed, practiced, and edited to maintain a quick but efficient pace and give students the absolute most! No wasted time: Learn the concept, copy the instructor, explore your own concepts, and move onto the next info packed lesson.

We’ll learn to match concept art with a perspective matching tool in Blender, and then take it into Unreal to create our concept landscape, composition, and first lighting pass. Then we take a deep dive into both Substance Designer & PAINTBOX 2 to create 10 beautiful tiling painterly materials with PBR qualities to bring a unique and stylized look to any professional CG scene.

We switch over to learning about the “high-to-low” game asset workflow by Blocking, Sculpting, UV mapping, & Baking a small collection of Rock assets to populate our scene. We’ll then use Photoshop, Blender, & TREEBOX to create a lush collection of stylized grass, flowers, and procedurally generated bushes and trees for our environment. 

Then, we crack our knuckles and get ready for a modular modeling marathon and to create a beautiful villa set piece while we learn more about Procedural Modeling, Texel Density, UV Mapping for Tileables, & Particle Systems.

Finally, with our asset collections completed, we go back into unreal to learn how to take a scene from a boring blockout into a masterful painterly scene by developing a collection of flexible, powerful, and modern shaders that allow you to take complete artistic control over your scene while being lightweight enough to allow you to stay competitive and fast as an artist. After polishing our assets with the material instances, creating our scene becomes as easy as LEGO bricks, and allows you to be much more creatively inclined as an artist. 

The workflows in this course encourage you to bring your inner artist out while learning a ton of technical tricks as well. It doesn’t get much better than that.

SKILL LEVEL
While this course is suited for all skill levels, it is essential to have a basic understanding of the software listed. I do provide a keyboard shortcut overlay while explaining the process, so hopefully everyone can join along. I would personally encourage finding an environment art course that is advertised for beginners before becoming a stylized master with this course.

TOOLS USED

• Blender 3D (+ Treebox Blender Add-On)
• Substance 3D Designer (+ Paintbox 2 Designer Add-On)
• Substance 3D Painter
• Photoshop
• Zbrush
• Unreal Engine 5

YOUR INSTRUCTOR
Justin Wallace is a 3D Freelance Artist & 3D Art Instructor in the Games Industry with over 5 years experience. Justin runs a YouTube Channel @ShinGidora where he shares his knowledge on 3D Environment Art while building tools and courses for the Indie Game community. He is diligently building his portfolio so he can bring his style to the AAA industry as well. Thank you for taking this course and supporting both FastTrackTutorials and Justin!

CHAPTER SORTING
There’s a total of 41 videos split into easy-to-digest chapters. All the videos will have logical naming and are numbered to make it easy to find exactly the ones you want to follow.