Environment Design

Initial Greyboxed design:

For the purposes of a presentation, I had created a greyboxed version of the environment to demonstrate my character within it, to give a bit of a clearer view of my end product. This is something I had detailled in my weekly development plan, and the design largely reflects the design I had both pitched and sketched in the pre-production stage, displaying a recently fought battlefield with fallen warriors and other scenery elements populating the scene. The large planes in the foreground are placeholders for Billboards, a method of adding images into the foreground to give the impression of distant scenery. 

It was important that my environment was created in full, spanning a full 360 degrees. This was to accompany the 360 video I am looking to include as a secondary mode of presentation for my project, so that the viewer can explore the environment and the detail of my main character in full control, adding a layer of interactability to my project which should be a large positive in regards to the final year exhibition. 

Before taking this into production, I wanted to gather some more references and inspiration to help shape my design for the environment to get a more various and unique end-product, as opposed to following a singular inspirational image as I had done in my dissertation. 

Reference & Inspiration:

Game of Thrones - 'Battle of the Bastards' 

Here is some examples of scenery from a recently fought battlefield. The battlefield is a cold and gloomy open field, with a bit of snow across the foreground. There is lots of scattered bodies across the floor from fallen warriors, populating the scene and giving a clear indication of its context. There are a couple fires and lots of smoke, adding a layer of atmosphere. 

One thing I wanted to use this reference for was the way the bodies are scattered around the environment, to help give me a clearer picture as to how I could go about scattering the scenery elements created earlier across my scene. 

Lord of the Rings - 'Ride of Rohirrim' 

Here is another reference of a battlefield, taking place in a more fantasy setting. However, it gives some additional context in the scene, featuring a castle in the shot as well as some very epic scenery behind it, making the setting feel more prestigious and glorious, compared to the depressing and morbid connotations of the previous reference. 

The scene shows a lot of the battlefield as the battle is about to take place, not after it has been fought, so the reference was not too helpful for portraying a post-battle battlefield. Though the scenery of lots of mountains and scenery in the foreground was pretty inspiring me, giving more depth to the environment and making it feel more complete. 

Other battlefield examples

Here are a couple other battle examples, one taking place in a generic grassy field, the other in more of a desert plains. The latter did not feel appropriate for my idea of my design, so I strayed away from this. However, the first design of a grassy field - although generic - felt a lot more authentic and realistic, as this sort of scene would probably be one typically fought upon in reality. It is easy to forget how the post-production and lighting manipulates the final result to give different connotations and a specific atmosphere to contexulise the scene it compliments. As a result, I was rather inspired by this scene and wanted to give more of a dilapidated grassy field look a go with my environment design. 

Fantasy/Fictional inspiration

Here is a mood board for some fantasy and fictional inspiration, to further serve as inspiration. The bottom right image is the one I had been using as great inspiration in my dissertation and initial design pitch. Though, I have outlined before that the lighting of this scene might be too dark and thus not show off all of the detail and hard work put into my main knight character. I was quite interested in some of these images, as they gave off a very gloomy, gritty and morbid atmosphere, similarily to the references taken of Game of Thrones. My aim was to combine this atmosphere with a more believable grassy plains environment. 

Realistic inspiration

Here are some appropriate photographs of real grassy and muddy fields. I wanted to try and achieve this look, feeling quite dilapidated and trodden upon to give the indication of a recent battle taking place in the scene. I also wanted the environment to feature some water or rain, for the benefit of adding more reflections and complimenting the character design a bit. Ultimately, I had a clear view of my environment design and started production. 

Environment design #1 - Grassy battlefield (Scrapped):

I started with a simple ground plane, extending it out and adding a lot of sub-divisions to allow me to add some noise to the terrain. 

I was able to add some buminess to the terrain by adding a Fractal noise texture to deform the plane. I did this via the modelling shelf, using Deform > Texture and selecting a Fractal Noise texture. I tweaked the settings until I had something I was happy with, something modetately bumpy but not too much. 

Next, I added a simple grassy seamless texture purely to serve as the background of the grass, as opposed to a grey underneath. I also added a plane in the background to look like some hills in the foreground, though the distance probably needs to be increased. 

In order to create the grassy environment, I used the XGen software within Maya. This allows the placement of lots of a designated shape across the target surface (the ground plane in this instance). I created a new Descrtiption for the XGen to use, creating it in the above image. I used Splines for this. 

Here is the result once added into the scene. Obviously there is some refining to do. 

I started by adjusting the shape of the spline into something a bit more pointed and representative of a grass spike. I did this in the Width ramp section, adjusting the shape by adjusting this ramp. 

I then modified the colour attributes of the splines, chainging all of the different colour attributes until I had something I liked. 

Next, I wanted to create a lot of randomness in the grass to make it feel more realistic and authentic. To do this, I modified the length and bend attributes using random expressions to randomise their varied positions and lengths. To do this, I used the following expression: '$a * rand(1,3,5)'. $a stands for the attribute being changed by an expression, and this is multipled by a random (rand) expression, in which three values are inserted (1,3,5); These values are the values to randomise the length between. I repeated this process for the other attributes of the grass, bending them out of shape significantly as I wanted the grass to feel dilapidated and give it the look of being trodden upon recently, to reinforce the narrative of a recently fought battlefield. 

Here is how the grass looks with the density increased quite a lot. Note that it appears white since it is not being rendered in the current view. The grass shows a lot of randomness and looks quite dense, which is good. 

Here is a current rendered view of the grass. So far it looks pretty good, but it definitely feels quite fake still. It reminds me of artificial grass and I can't pinpoint the cause at the moment. 

I tried testing a different version of the XGen grass to see if I could find a more realistic and convincing design for the grass. I started by finding some 2D images of clumps of grass, creating an alpha for Maya to use to create transparrency. 

When applied into an aiStandardsurface material correctly, here is the result; A variety of different grass clumps applied to planes, with the background transparrent. I achieved the transparrent background by using the alpha and creating an opacity map for the aiStandardsurface materials all of these clumps use. 

From here, I created a new XGen description as before, though this time I used a model instead of splnes to create the grass. I then imported the six variants of grass clumps into the description for XGen to use and populate the scene with. 

Here is the result, still a work in progress. All six types of the grass clump images have been used in this XGen description as intended. However, as can be seen in the image above, the images are not orientated very well and only face a single direction. This is something I could easily fix though. Furthermore, I have applied this description to the foreground plane and not the ground plane, since I wanted to test the look of this for the foreground. I had tested it for the ground plane and the inherent issue was that you could easily tell the grass was a plane and not a solid entity, meaning it would only work in the distance. 

Using the random expression from before, I was able to randomise the orientation of all the grass clumps to give a good amount of variety and break the uniformity from before. I decided to test the result in a render. 

Here is a full test render of my progress of the grass splines for the ground plane, as well as the grass clumps in the foreground. I have imported my main knight character to compare and showcase how it might look like in the final product. However, I was very unimpressed with the result, the grass looked very fake still, especially in comparison to my character. Moreover, the grass in the foreground looked much darker than that of the grass of the ground plane, which was odd as the colours of the grass had roughly matched up when I had prepared the 2D assets in the scene. This is not good as colours become lighter as they become more distant. 

In conclusion, the grass still looked really fake and was not suitable. I could not pinpoint the main causes as to why it looked fake either, making it difficult to salvage. Finally, the time before the deadline of my assignment was getting dangerously short, and I needed to finish the environment design and start animating as soon as possible. As a result, I went back to the drawing board to find a better alternative that worked. If not, I would unfortunately be forced to use this design. 

Environment design #2 - Muddy & Foggy battlefield (Used):

I managed to strike some luck in the form of the program Quixel Mixer, a program issued by Quixel which is a great site for free models and textures. Within the program, the above image is one of the various usable templates for a ground plane, one that can be easily tiled as well. This was not quite the same design as I had initially decided on, but I was really captivated by the muddy and wet aesthetic of the plane in the above image, it looked very detailed and would justify the dirty imperfections used in my models, adding a layer of consistency. I decided to test this in Maya and see what results I could achieve. 

Here is the ground plane in Maya, tiled across a large ground plane. The ground plane texture uses a variety of different textures, but the most important one is the displacement map. This is specifically something that gave me issues in the past, but luckily seemed to work this time. The displacement map uses a 32bit EXR format in order to retain all of the uncompressed detail in the map to get something really detailed and solid. Unfortunately the bumpiness of the displacement seemed to degrade some between Quixel Mixer and Maya, and I couldn't figure out why this was. However, the result still looked pretty solid and I was sold on this design. I decided to continue with this environment. 

Continuing using Quixel Mixer, I was able to source a handful of free assets of dead trees to populate the scene. I downloaded some basic tree models and applied some muddy and wet materials within Quixel Mixer over these models, before exporting them and adding them into my scene. I also added a couple rocks and twigs, all of which can be seen in the above image. I decided these would be good to include in my scene to help create some depth and detail to the foreground of the environment. 

I wanted to include some detail to the foreground of the scene, creating scenery which would continue for a great distance to greatly enhance the depth of my scene. I started by adding a simple forest image to a plane and populating this around the scene,  which I had manipulated and modified with the use of an alpha to mask out the background of this image as mentioned before with the grass clumps. 

I continued to populate the scene with distant scenery, including some mountainous terrain to fill the background. I also populated the scene with lots of the dead trees, twigs, sticks and rocks shown earlier. It was important to make sure all of these elements covered the full 360 degree view of the scene and not just a small section, as the 360 degree video would need the entire scope of the environment to be created. 

Above is the rendered view, with my character imported in the scene. Already this is miles ahead of my design done for the grassy scene, and looks extremely improved by comparison. The scene has a great sense of depth and feels like a full scene. 

Continuing with this environment design, I began to populate the scene with the scenery elements created prior (The warrior character, weapons and shields), starting with the warrior character. Regrettably, I did not find a quick automatic method to populate the character across the environment quickly, so I had to resort to manually placing and posing each one manually. This took considerable time, so I limited it to fifty characters across the scene. I had wanted to include more, but I couldn't justify the time, especially since the further out the characters reached the more would be required to fill the density to the same level as current. 

Here is a rendered view, in which I have tried to vary the poses as much as possible since the character is repeititve. My hopes is that these characters will not be very noticed by the viewer and the intention is they blend into the background. However, the variation of poses definitely helps to blend the characters in without them appearing obviously repetitive, as can be seen in the above image. I have also tried to be creative with the poses, with one of the characters falling into (clipping into) one of the puddles with his arm resting in it. 

I continued with adding the weapons and shields to the scene, aiming for one of each for each warrior character (so fifty warrior characters, weapons and shields, totalling at one hundred and fifty). I tried to vary the different weapons and shields of the characters so that they were not repetitive (I.e.: The same shield design used for five warriors in the same area). I also used the rounded shield in tandem with the Halberd and long Axe, whereas the other two shield designs were used with the Arming Sword variants; The idea was to perhaps create an additional layer of the narrative by creating two opposing sets of this warrior character using a different style of weapon and shield each. 

Finally, it was suggested by my mentor that I could include some form of a banner in my scene, adding perhaps historical context and more variety in the scene. Though, I am not historically educated enough to be able to know what sort of banners were carried in my designated era (late Medieval period), so I took a guess with implementing the St. George's flag and attaching it to an appropriate pole design. I modelled, UV mapped and textured it exactly like the past scenery elements. I also added nCloth to the flag part of the banner and added a wind speed value to allow it to blow in the wind slightly. 

However, upon showing this to my mentor he suggested the banner design I had created may not be appropriate, and it was suggested that it should be scrapped for the purpose of saving time in my assignment, as opposed to perhaps rectifying the design and researching one more historically accurate. This was a definite shame since I had spent the day on this design, which was now wasted. Though this design simply was not appropriate and would detract from the overall realism of my project. 

Lighting testing:

I was quite happy with my environment so far, and wanted to test out some different lightning scenarios. I was strictly using a HDRI (High Dynamic Range Image) to light my scene, a spherical image which is used in an Arnold Skydome light to cover the entire view with this image. This image then determines how the scene is lit in a very realistic fashion. I was able to find a plethora of extremely suitable HDRI options at the following site linked here, which are completely free to use. I decided to test out some options in my scene to find one which lights my scene best in my opinion. 

Option 1 (Current)

This was my current HDRI choice. Though it was a bit stale in colour and I wanted something which had a bit more flare to it. 

Option 2

This is a HDRI of a sunset, but the lighting is very strong here and not appropriate in my opinion. 

Option 3

Here is a sunset, which is better but still feels a bit dark. Although this could be solved by increasing the exposure. 

Option 4

Here is a dark dusk setting I tried, but the lighting is just too dark and difficult to see for it to be suitable. 

Option 5

Here is a very subtle sunrise, otherwise a colder atmosphere. I quite liked this scene due to its subtle nature and added that little extra flare to an otherwise gloomy atmosphere, captivating what I was looking for. 

Option 6

Here is quite a dingy and green-tinted option. It fit the environment well, but lacked the clarity in my character and didn't feel like the right choice. 

Option 7

I tried another dark setting, this time a bit brighter and less strongly coloured. It looked much better than Option 4 but I still wasn't keen on the lighting being very dark, it just made the knight character harder to see which I didn't want. 

In the end, I decided that although Option 3 was a solid choice, I was very pleased with the result of Option 5, so Option 5 is the HDRI choice I ended up using. 

Atmosphere/Weather effects:

One atmospheric effect I wanted to try was fog, since the environment I had designed looked a bit like a bog and thus felt a strong layer of fog would be highly appropriate, as well as blending in the background better. I started by adding an aiFog in the Atmosphere of my render settings. 

Here is the starting result, but this was not practical since the fog was a large wall. I could push it back and increase its value but it would mean that it would not work in my 360 degree video. 

However, I was able to modify the Ground Normal value to chance the direction of the fog to start at the Y axis instead of the X axis, which massively improved the effect. This atmosphere really lifted the environment in my opinion, making it really pop. I only had to tweak the fog value slightly, since I was really pleased with this result by default. Note that this extended across the entire scene, which was suitable for use in my 360 video. 

I had wanted to experiment with a light rain in my scene, where the rain would interact with the armour of my character, enhancing the visual result and reinforcing my success criteria as mentioned in my dissertation. I started by experimenting with 3D particle emitters in Maya, creating something which looked suitable for rain. 

Unfortunately, this hit a brick wall. I was unable to use these particles in an Arnold Render as they were not supported. This is something I encountered across multiple versions of Maya, trying both Maya 2020 and Maya 2022. Reluctantly, I had to shelf this effect. 

At this point, my environment was pretty much complete. I was ready to begin animating my project.