#4 - Building Concept & Breakdown

I have decided to base the building in my scene on an existing piece of concept art. The concept I have chosen is called "Peaceful Home", by "Bartlomiej Choros":

 I chose this concept because I felt it fit a lot of the criteria I was hoping to meet, being a quaint dwelling, sat against the backdrop of rolling hills, with plenty of opportunity for environmental storytelling. I also felt the rustic stylised look and colour palette matched the direction I was hoping to take the scene.

With the concept now decided, I used photoshop to break down the different elements, highlighting important features, and giving myself a rough idea of what assets I would need to make, and where I could optimise with modularity and texture atlases:

This approach seems to be a common way to start a project like this. It is one that I've previously used and found helpful for an interior scene based on an existing concept.

The breakdown of Jasmin Habezai-Fekri's popular "Bird House" project shows a similar visual breakdown of assets.

A lot of the wooden elements don't need to be unique, and could easily be done using a trim sheet with some nicely bevelled geometry. These assets are marked in orange and yellow. 

Equally, a lot of wooden elements can just be made of duplicated parts and slightly modified without stretching the UVs too much.

I'm hoping the sculpted details from ZBrush, plus some procedural masked effects in Substance Painter will do a lot of the heavy lifting for the texture, reducing the need to hand-paint.

The wall sections marked in purple will probably use a single tiling texture, with the small blue detail above the window being applied with a decal.

There are only two stone assets on the building, both of which being rather small. I plan to stick these on the same sheet as some of the smaller rocks I'll be using in the rest of the environment.

The roof is a special case, and for that I'm planning to use a tiling texture made in Substance Designer. With the height map from that texture, I am planning to use Blender's displace modifier to create the geometry for the individual tiles, then decimate this down to a more reasonable polycount. Hopefully with nanite enabled this won't be too performance heavy in-engine.

My initial plan was to try and come up with something entirely unique, but I chose not to for a few reasons:

• I wasn't convinced my concepting skills were up to task.
• At the end of the day, I am looking to demonstrate my ability to create a 3D scene as a portfolio piece, not prove my 2D Concept Art skills.
• Creating my own concept art is not really among my skillset, so whatever I create won't match the standard of quality I would like, and because of this, the end-result in 3D will suffer.
• I'm already filling a lot of roles with this project.
• This project will require me to employ skills across a range of different roles already, from modelling, sculpting, level design, material creation, foliage, shaders, lighting etc.
• Working with concept art will be a part of the job, working in a studio.
• Working closely with concept artists, and being able to break down and analyse concept art will be a part of the job in a real studio.
• Also, looking at existing portfolio pieces by other Environment Artists, most of them seemed to be based on existing concepts done by professional concept artists.