Creating Modular Environments in Unreal Engine 4 (UE4) | ArtStation Challenge EP.003 

Still watching this more than a year later. It all clicks even more now that I got my first junior job as an environment artist. Just listening to this while working away haha. Hope all is well with you Tim, thanks again for these! Peace.

Keep doing what you're doing, this is great, I've learned so much just in the last three videos. You've got a new sub!

I love this breakdown - particularly the roof as I had a similar project that was a challenge to figure out the bend and symmetry arrangement to look right - and this was a nice overview on this style.

Seriously Tim these step by step vids are awesome!! Keep up the great work and I'm also following everything on Artstation so can't wait to see how this turns out :D

I'm a little late to the party but I wanted to say thanks for posting these videos. As someone who's trying to learn environment art. Being able to see these breakdowns and hear about what's going through your head when you create modular environments like these is a huge help for me! :D

This is the best video I have ever seen! Like... man, I've created a lot of sets for UE4, mostly modular environments, all of those full of little details. Thanks to this video I was able to re-package all the assets and remove like... 80% of the content! Thank you"

Waow ! Awesome 3d kit and work here. So efficient, I clearly feel the experience behind all this.

You're a natural teacher, great videos man. Can't wait to purchase the full environment workflow tutorial I think you mentioned you were working on in one of your more recent videos. Thanks, and can't wait for more!

man, I absolutely love your videos. thanks for starting this channel!

This is awesome to see. I really appreciate the knowledge you are sharing. I will be using a lot of your tips in my future projects.

You deserve way more subs, this was a great break down. Looking forward to more of your stuff.

This was an awesome video! I make assets this same way. One big perk to doing larger modular pieces as well is that it will equate to fewer draw calls, and especially on Switch/Mobile games that's really important.

Extremely useful strategies and advice! I've been on the other side of the "too many pieces" kits. Conforming to a simple standard setup makes the entire process more efficient and fun to build and work with.

Subscribed to your channel man.... Your content is awesome. Also watched the greybox part and was blown away by the simplicity and efficiency

Great video man, thanks for this! Quite heartening to watch

buddy, thank you so much, you have no idea how much you simplified my life

i love these series, I learned so much from just 2 vids :D please keep making them :D

When your whooping 6 hours a week of lectures doesn’t teach you stuff so you happen to find amazing channels such as this, keep it coming! ^-^

Powerful stuff. Love how your explaining your workflow; I've been working with max for years but I still learned a couple useful tricks here. Your channel is officially one of my favorite now. Keep making great videos and you should consider setting yourself a patreon page eventually!

i feel silly having written a question in the previous video asking about secondary pieces and I got the answer in this video. thank you for sharing the tips and knowledge.

I need to sleep for work tomorrow but I can't stop watching these great tutorials!

Thank you for making this series, it has been really helpful. :)

Hey Tim! Really great videos! I'm learning a lot!

I just saw your work on artstation yesterday and I loved it. I came across the videos linked in the feudal japan piece and I've watched all of them! Really love how you spoke clearly, directly, yet naturally about everything, it was almost like you were my friend Devon from my university and you were helping me with homework. My favorite part was when showed the scene in unreal with the wall going through the wall and saying 'it's OK for this to happen' I'm always scared cause when I'm in school doing 3D environments my teachers point out my waste of geometry! Looking forward to more of your videos in the future and if you'd be down for doing a twitch live stream one day that would be great too! :D

Amazing! Thanks again for doing this, can't wait to see your vegetation workflow :)

Thank you, Tim, for sharing your Knowledge with us, I'm learning a lot from your videos!

Another great video man! 👌

Awesome work Tim, top class :)

Thank you for making this video! So helpful and easy to follow!

Awesome video!! man this is a great series and help me alot.

Extremely useful . Thanks so much !

Great content! Thanks for your effort! Keep rocking!

Hello dear Tim, I am learning very awesome things from your tutorials. Thanks for sharing this with us. Please breakdown another environment. I am thirsty about your new tutorials.

Great Content man, really useful, Keep it up!

clean and clear

What i like about these videos, is how prepared you seem. You simply beat so many teachers on the fingers. Well done, really well done. Patreon next?

Great videos! Thank you for doing this.

Heyyy! I loved this channel. I've subscribed, keep it up bro!

This is really useful! Thanks for sharing this!

Great video man, really helping me out with my diorama project

I love your videos! I'm a new subscriber trying to become an indie 3D game designer! Thanks so much for all your videos and I hope you keep making them! :)

bro, you are saving lives! thank you so much!

underrated channel IMO

Amazing content! Cannot thank you enough for sharing.

thanks for another great video ;)

One more subscriber! I really like where you place your camera for your videos. It feels like I'm right next to you and looking at your computer. Great videos! Thx!

I found the cnannel today and i am so happy! finnaly some1 to explain 3d max + unreal. Am i dreaming???

This is so useful, I wish it came out 2 years ago

rly rly helpfull, keep going!!

Excellent explanation!! Thabks!Thanks!!

I'm really loving this series, thank you for taking the time to make it! I was wondering, for UE4s LODs, did you have to manually set anything up in unreal to get it to work or does Unreal do that by default already? Cheers!

I needed this video so bad 😂

Excellent tutorial! Thanks a lot

Would be cool if you could make a video similar to the wood one on how to creatw nice looking bricks. Your videos are really nice, love to watch them at night while relaxing

thank bro very good tutorial!

your tutorials are so helpful man! I'm trying to replicate the same but entirely in Unreal 5 :D different type of project tho keep up the amazing work!

I love you. You seriously helped me understand what to pay attention to, and what not :) Personally i am struggling with making too many assets in white boxing and i always feel that all of them are needed.... Then i end up with 30 pieces... What is normally a decent number of models to create a modular environment of this scale? Also could you explain a bit better your thought process on a trim sheet?There is information about how to make it, but there is no information on the thought process, on how to design your trim sheet.

I wasn't aware that agent 47 making 3D Art. ....jokes apart your videos are very useful thanks a lot !

Getting an in-depth look at kit making is really cool, as someone who always uses them but hasnt actually modelled them myself. I always get so frustrated when I receive a kit with 500 length variations for a single pipe or pillar, lol

That lighting on the rooftiles

Very helpful video! I loved the tip on keeping modular pieces as large as possible. One thing I'd really like - could you put the three tips you give in the blurb of each video? This would be good for quick future reference.

Hey! Really loving the videos.. being into this over 8 years now, modularity (specifically textures) have always stumbled me. In terms of textures and draw calls, would the walls, then Windows, then roof all be their own texture timetable of would you put them on an atlas? What's the best industry working practice for buildings with that? Can never find that any where. How in-depth you are in this series is incredible, I really love it! Thank you

Nice Biceps XD thanks for the vid

Tim, don't stop!!!

nice tutorial. keep up the good work.! auto subbed

Love your videos, could you do a video on detailing organic rock in zbrush? Thank you

So good i learned so much from your vlog serie thank you. But I have a question, how do you set up your smoothing groups to your modular pieces when you apply a tiling material? Since you don’t go through the process of baking the low and high poly.

This is great stuff, super helpful for learning a modular workflow. Just a quick question... do you do your graybox on the modular grid as well? So that when you make your kit you can re-import the meshes and everything snaps together? Or do you not bother with the grid during the graybox phase and then when you move on to the kit you factor that in?

Was just wondering if you would do a video on the texturing side of things ? Im having some difficulty on the best way to go about it and understanding trim sheets

Great tutorial! Is the Unreal moss shader that projects onto upward facing polygons available for download? Perhaps with different texture layers for snow, sand, rainwater?

this was awesome!!, please, I'm really searching for a long long modular tutorial like this, but more longer with nice detail about how to create modular UV's or how to set up modules for anything, You could think about to create something like this tutorial but getting more depper about modular kits?

Hi, Thank you for your very nice and useful tutorial!! I am working on a scene that I have created a couple of buildings 3-4 floor each with walls and windows (I used 3m for floor height and 3mx3m for a block). I want to give them an old and damaged style, so I have created a wall (plaster) texture and a couple of other textures with decals (bricks coming out of the wall). These decals textures have different size (from 1.5m to 6m) and shapes for more variation. I am wondering how would you managed to work with large size decals and modularity at the same time. Thank you again.

great! A tutorial for the Trees would be cool too

Please can you a tutorial on modular building. Your tutorials are extremely helpful thank you!

Just discovered you today, though they are long tutorials - they are gold. Thanks for sharing them and also.. thanks for the genuine attitude.

Good old times of Rpg Maker. :D

Hi NEW here, I been looking for a long time for someone who show HOW to build a Scene and not just say "oh you need too block this out first......blah blah" I look forward to watching more of your videos TODAy prilly binge watch them, lol. I'll drop comments off as I go! Thanks and Lets see where it goes!

Could you show and explain the unreal LOD system. How to use etc.?

nice shirt

This video helped me alot to think differently while building the moduls for my environment .you mentioned that you are a self-learner so is there any books you recommend me to read about level design and environment art ?.Really i'm so hungry to watch more videos from you .

Hey Tim, thanks for sharing your workflow, I am really thankful for it. Just had a little question about those modular pieces, have you attaches them together in one mesh in max or they are in a group? Or if you have attached them then how will you apply different material lets say roof material for the roof and wood for the wood if they are in one single attached mesh? Will wait for your reply 😊 Thanks

Hey Tim! First I'd like to say: Amazing videos! Invaluable output/input your putting together. Super enjoyable also. Thanks from the heart for the effort making all these! Instant sub and looking forward to watch all the rest! I have a question which bothers me quite a while, maybe you have some general guideline or advice: When planning for modular environments with big pieces: when is the actual moment where the piece gets too big and you won't be able to bake out a normal from a high poly anymore? Like lets say, I have a huge tree, maybe 15 meters high, and it should have about a certain texel density like lets say 512px/cm or 1024px per cm. But the texture would be huge and actually require a lot of res to get the enourmous size covered with enough density to carry the high res. Like 4k or multiple 4ks or so. Which obviously wouldn't be very efficient. That is, if you are able to cover a tree of that size in the first place, since it's unlikey when staying inside the 0-1 space , which is required for baking. I know such pieces commonly get scaled outside the 0-1 UV space and are textured with tiling textures in engine. Which makes perfect sense. But that wouldn't make it possiblee to bake a HP onto it for unique detail. So my question is: How and when do you decide that you can't use a high res sculpt for your assets anymore to bake them on a big sized object? And need to stick with tiling textures only? I assume working to go round about matching a certain consistent texel density across your assets is key to a succsesfull envirnoment. And I see that with large brick walls you can sculpt the individual bricks and group them together. However, for example, your wood pieces are rather long. How do you ensure they stay inside the 0-1 space ? Being non stretched or nearly non stretched and hit a certain texel desnsity? This always confuses me about environment design. As well as with the design of large Boss like characters. Because I think they do have a normalmap, too, right ? Mabye you could even do a video on this? Talking about texel density in general and maybe on the way cover this special topic or problematic? Would be a total blast! :D

Thank you, really helpful video! I was wondering, when you finish your group of meshes (for example the brickwall), how do you export it? Do you merge all the elements in one? Also, do you make the uvs for the lightmaps or do you use the automatic one of ue4?

Thanks! I was kind of confused on how did you texturing. Are you planning on going more in-depth for texturing?

Hey your techniques are new and i found them very useful but can you do a video on vertex painting

is there any tutorials how to manage unreal scenes in the right way. I mean how to avoid rebuilding the scene after reimport some of the models especially if they have different count of sub elements? how to avoid memory leaks? for example in 3ds max there is instance cheker to save memory and time

nice video....you could decrease amount of poly in your models because even with LOD there are too many poly...your workflow is very helpful, i work in blender there is a modifier called decimate what is does i basically reduce geometry without changing its shape im sure 3DS max have a modifier with same feature....should try it with your workflow and might be able to get more performance

First off, thank you so much for your videos! I can't express how big of an educational gold mine they have been for me, even after studying game art in college. I do have a question about modeling the walls though. If this was a castle wall with smaller stones and a bit of mortar, would you still model the rocks and just crash them through a wall with a tiling mortar texture? Or is there a better way to break up the silhouette? I really want that chunky feel but don't want to raise eyebrows with optimization.

Another great video! I have a question. You said you put the pivot point all in the same place. Where exactly did you put it? The center, bottom, bottom left or right?

I love this style Even because my project is entirely based on this

Super curious about this Z Up shader, sounds like something I could use!

Hi Tim!, I have a question, trim sheet is the same thing that Atlas?... thanks for this videos, keep it up!

Hi Tim! I also decided to go with polygonal roof instead of a tiling texture. But when I mirror it to create corner piece ( like at 7:42), my normal map (on the mirrored side) on the edges starts to look super weird because of the -1 x-axis scaling. Have you had similar problem?

Once again cool video, where can we find that moss? it sounds like a awesome tool. Not all heroes wear capes!

Hey dude, sick video! I had a question about Maya if you know. I know lattices can bend things like your roof tile, but that awesome corner piece - do you know a way to do that in Maya? Like the symmetry deformer you used? This would save me so much time. Anyway, I'm learning too much from your vids my dude. Thanks for that.

can you also make a series on another workflow you go through on your day job? i had to ask this because i do wanna know it

if you have to tweak your models in 3dsmax/maya you have to reimport and reassign all the shaders?

Hello! again sorry a quick question what brush did you use for the roof tiles? please :)

Hi Tim, First of all thanks allot for this tutorial series! I've been working on my own environment and this is helping me learn the best practices! I have a question regarding the modular meshes you used to create your wood on your walls. You mentioned that these were created from a trim sheet, am I correct in assuming that you therefore followed the workflow of your trim sheet series and created one side and duplicated them around to create a whole mesh? Or are these using a unique UV map? If so, when you combine these meshes with the wall, are they sharing the same UV space? And how would you ensure the wall section has enough Texel density? Apologies for the bombardment! Many thanks!

Thank you so much for the insights! How much time did it take you to finish the whole scene, from beginning to end? I often feel anxious about my speed in creating 3d environments and would love to have a rough orientation/comparison.