Thank you. I have experience with large projects, sustaining motivation and burnout (I'm a software developer), but since I'm starting to get into 3D art in my free time, seeing this gives me good, reasonable expectations about what my progress could look like over the next few years. I took away many, many other things from this video, but that part alone is very valuable. Thank you very much for this video, and good luck with your future art projects! :) I will watch whatever you put up here in RUclips (and ArtStation!).
This kind of insight and reflection into one's project work is rare. Thank you for sharing your perspective, I picked up a few things from this that I'll use for my own projects!
22:35 that is note to myself too, is just too common to do it once you have lost the "new feel" of art after the years, you forget how satisfying is to fishing something even if it is way less than what you originally planned, great video btw, beautifully sectioned
Is nice to see that I'm not the only one struggling in different stages, even if I'm supposed -to know- what I'm doing because I work in this proffesionally. Every environment has their unique approach, even if you have done the same thing before in terms of structure, weather, nature, etc... Before I felt like maybe I was a bit of a "bad artist" just because, sometimes the project still asked for some good amount of effort on my side to get it done... but this video remind me that is part of the process, that other artists go through this stuff too and it's okay C: thank you for this honest story!
This is pure gold. Subbed. I can tell how transformative it was when you showed your rescope angle. I was stunned by it. And if we rescope that again, you could just include that as supplementary shots wherever you're showcasing it.
I clicked on this video ready to rage at you for trying to be "edgy" and "different". You know like those guys on RUclips shorts making you feel like crap for doing certain things in Blender a certain way and what is the "correct" way. Instead what I got was a very compassionate, relatable, understanding video of someone who encapsulates the struggles and burnout of Environment Artists that we all experience. The inferiority complex of comparing our "shitty" work to those clean and crisp Masterpieces on Artstation. How we desperately want to just get things done with and start cutting corners or we lose our discipline. And that its okay to feel like that. Fantastic video my dude! Loved it! Ill be applying these tips on my next project and see how it goes :)
Thank you very much for sharing! Biggest tip for me was not getting lost in textures. I tend to waste SO much time on textures and will definetly work on that from now on
This video was super helpful to watch, I am only a self taught junior artist and haven't any experience in the industry as of yet, and I already have struggled with all of the problems mentioned in this video. To be fair though it's my fault that I keep choosing unclear references that are far too complex for me to finish before burning out, and also that aren't good for modularism. It's taken this video for me to recognize that. I have shot myself in the foot every step of the way and very much need to take every bit of this advice. Thank you very much.
Great video!, this is very insightful as always , big fan of your art, the "stylized materials" video series was my introduction to designer years ago, I watched them over and over, I hope you have the time for more tutorials , they are always very appreciated
There are some really valuable tips in here that I had to learn in a much more time consuming way. Especially the neutral materials scene is super important. I would also mabey add to always use human reference, even if you are thinking "naw it doesn't really make sense here" I made that mistake once and won't make it again.
I had recently reconstructed a chateau based on old, blurred photos and the result was okay, but not satisfactory. Last weekend I walked through the city looking for similar buildings and segments and the result (not yet finished) looks much better and more realistic than before. Therefore, a valuable tip!
Thank you very much for your insight of this! As a student, it's so inspiring and informative, I'll definitely use this video when i'll try to do an environment
This is a really great breakdown, thank you for sharing and taking the time to put it together. It was both inspiring and informative. I would like to test out your suggestions on noting mistakes down, as well as winds - it could definitely improve the flow.
First, I think you're environment turned out fantastic. Second, thank you for sharing your wisdom. This could save many people from failing and becoming discouraged. I have been committing many of the same sins over the past year and this made those stand out and make sense as to why they were causing me to struggle.
No idea. Am finding polygon counting to be the last thing on my mind these days, it’s more like ‘make sure all your verts are having a positive impact’ i.e avoid wasted verts that add nothing.
I just started with 3d concept art of landscapes and i was just looking for any tips, this helped a lot. I started bc i didnt enjoy time drawing characters bc they will never turn on paper as i want or imagine etc...+ it makes perspective much easier, but im having problems with textures. Im working in cinema4d and our teacher is doing everything so fast that u cant catch anything, litterally. I would actually needed some help with how to do textures.
It's flickering in the corner, why is it flickering. I dont know whats going on with the flickering...haha wanted to cry there so true. Thank you for this encouraging and empowering video to pull us out of imposter syndrome at times and show us there is yet hope
To be honest, I still don't 100% understand it either - especially in regards to how it syncs with the original scene. I need to go through it again BUT the main point really is having a separate scene with default lighting.
@@adamcapone2222 Absolutely. I'll have another crack at it, but as you say having the lighting separated is really useful. Being able to check the different lighting conditions and how your material reacts is very valuable.
Yeah if you can find good concepts that shows everything you need that’s going to be a big help. Sometimes you just don’t have a ‘complete’ concept and have to combine concepts/reference. Worst option I think is just aimlessly looking for a full concept piece for hours to work from, I never find it. Best to collect concept regularly in small bursts and hope you have something relevant when the time comes to create.
@@caponeart3596 yeah what i do is on artstation when i find a cool concept art i save it in a collection for future projects Then after you are used to do concept arts in 3d you can create a scene without any concept, but you have to do some concept in 3d first! its so much easier and you learn so much good things
I’ve put your video 1st to watch ONLY because it’s SHORTER than others and talked about HOW NOT TO. I thought “let’s get this one quickly out of the way while eating”. Now I wish it was a lot longer with a lot more mistakes. I was about to make exactly one of these mistakes, a fatal one, in a project I’m about to start. You have absolutely no idea what you’ve done by making and sharing this video, not the slightest idea. Now, go make more mistakes!
@@teamtomii thanks for letting me know. It seems I can’t replace the video without creating a new link. Perhaps there is a way to edit audio so I can just mute those parts? Let me know if anyone has ideas for solutions.
@@adamcapone2222 music is excellent. There's no need to change anything. Thank you so much for your video! It's incredibly useful. I'm just starting my new project (I'm a beginner) and I've already gone back to review my ideas. I definitely don't need an epic project =) Thank you again for sharing.
@@adamcapone2222 one man's opinion. Not like everyone's hounding you about it. If it is, then there must be really something there. No need to do any changes for this particular vid.
You know you can spend your entire life making the perfect most realistic environments and or game but has anybody actually learned from Nintendo? And how they don't go to that length to give you a great game yet they make it beautiful enough that you don't really need a super hyped up realistic environment although I appreciate that because I really want to say just how realistic a game can actually get to and I guess that might be the drive the drives everybody to do realistic games but when you're Indie developer you know full well just how much time this is going to take you specifically if you're working on your own so maybe it'll be a great idea as an indie developer to find your common ground of what should be standard for you.And that's what we have to do as in the Developers it's to find what is common and fair for solo Developers or a small Team therefore we should not scale to industry standard because it's out of our capacity to do so so we have to scale everything down for example when you are an animator instead of doing a 22 minute episode you have to scale that down by half if you have a small team and if you're by yourself scale it down one more time from that equate it to about 6 minutes and that should be your scale down if you are solo Making the animation project yourself So this idea and our model has been scaled down three times to be able to fit within your capacity so it's 6 minutes of animation that you can produce which is plausible 12 minutes if you have a small team which is totally possible and 22 if you are standard. Now it's not just the time like that needs to be scaled down as well for example because of this we don't have the time for adding in fillers we just straight up get to the story you could probably get away with it by doing a complete filler on one episode throughout the series or maybe two or maybe once per season to fill in all the necessary information that is needed in order to get the story going in the right direction but if you can condense everything to a proportional scale to words something you could actually achieve that you won't be killing yourself and trying to do it and then making it as you would if you had a normal team to build this. And so the same principles can be applied here or pretty much anywhere just scale down to a simplified but yet quality and most importantly having fun doing it cuz if you're trying to do something too big you're going to end up giving up you're going to burn out you probably won't even get far the first place!
Thanks. Can't edit the video unless it's a new link unfortunately, wish I could! Bit of a learning process for me so this is great feedback, will make sure any future videos avoid this.
Most videos are 24 - 30 frames per second. This appears to be one of the two. RUclips doesn’t let you upload videos at weird frame rates like 20fps. If you’re talking about the stuttering when he’s showing us the environment, that’s because he’s in Unreal Editor and using screen capture software, which is going to naturally be less performant than a final build.
It’s difficult to explain. There were some weeks I didn’t touch it for example and I already have a challenging full-time job. Something I’m thinking to do next time is record the amount of hours (inc days) spent on an environment. Though I don’t know if that’s really useful for anyone? This stuff is so arbitrary, depends on all sorts of things. If I knew Houdini for example. A year was just my experience, some could do it in a week, some would take much more than a year.
An _hour or two?_ Methinks you are not so qualified to tell people how to make environments either. Going from reference gathering, sketches, initial blockout, figuring out camera angles, refined blockout, basic lighting pass, modelling, uv unwrapping, texturing, importing, assembling, applying and tweaking shaders and materials, sculpting terrain, scattering props, adjusting skybox and atmosphere, finalising lighting, adding particle effects, fine tuning post processing and getting the final screen grabs in around 60 - 120 minutes might be theoretically possible, but you’d have to either be a caffeinated wizard prodigy who skips their sister’s wedding to practice trim texturing, or just being very sloppy. A year to do this, while juggling other parts of life like work or study, is quite reasonable if you’re teaching yourself as you go. That’s why this video is helpful. It’s coming from someone who is a learner himself and has recently realised some mistakes he was making. Mistakes that were holding him back from working as efficiently as the industry professionals we see on ArtStation. These are valid insights from someone who learned the hard way. Someone who is humble enough to make himself vulnerable in the interest of helping others on their journey. A great deal more humble than you, I might add, Mr. _I Could Do This In An Hour Git Gud Lol Laughing Emoji Laughing Emoji Laughing Emoji Laughing Emoji Laughing Emoji_
@@joa1401 I suspect they're the type of person who downloads everything, glues it together and calls it a day, thinking they're a pro at environment design. Or they're a child.
So refreshing to see a video that goes over the problems everyone has when making stuff! Some great tips here for getting through.
Thank you. I have experience with large projects, sustaining motivation and burnout (I'm a software developer), but since I'm starting to get into 3D art in my free time, seeing this gives me good, reasonable expectations about what my progress could look like over the next few years. I took away many, many other things from this video, but that part alone is very valuable. Thank you very much for this video, and good luck with your future art projects! :) I will watch whatever you put up here in RUclips (and ArtStation!).
This kind of insight and reflection into one's project work is rare. Thank you for sharing your perspective, I picked up a few things from this that I'll use for my own projects!
22:35 that is note to myself too, is just too common to do it once you have lost the "new feel" of art after the years, you forget how satisfying is to fishing something even if it is way less than what you originally planned, great video btw, beautifully sectioned
Is nice to see that I'm not the only one struggling in different stages, even if I'm supposed -to know- what I'm doing because I work in this proffesionally. Every environment has their unique approach, even if you have done the same thing before in terms of structure, weather, nature, etc... Before I felt like maybe I was a bit of a "bad artist" just because, sometimes the project still asked for some good amount of effort on my side to get it done... but this video remind me that is part of the process, that other artists go through this stuff too and it's okay C: thank you for this honest story!
Great vid man, looking forward to the next environment!
This is pure gold. Subbed.
I can tell how transformative it was when you showed your rescope angle. I was stunned by it.
And if we rescope that again, you could just include that as supplementary shots wherever you're showcasing it.
I clicked on this video ready to rage at you for trying to be "edgy" and "different". You know like those guys on RUclips shorts making you feel like crap for doing certain things in Blender a certain way and what is the "correct" way.
Instead what I got was a very compassionate, relatable, understanding video of someone who encapsulates the struggles and burnout of Environment Artists that we all experience. The inferiority complex of comparing our "shitty" work to those clean and crisp Masterpieces on Artstation. How we desperately want to just get things done with and start cutting corners or we lose our discipline. And that its okay to feel like that. Fantastic video my dude! Loved it! Ill be applying these tips on my next project and see how it goes :)
Thanks for articulating your thoughts so well, it’s exactly what I was aiming for. Good luck with your next project!
Thank you very much for sharing! Biggest tip for me was not getting lost in textures. I tend to waste SO much time on textures and will definetly work on that from now on
This video was super helpful to watch, I am only a self taught junior artist and haven't any experience in the industry as of yet, and I already have struggled with all of the problems mentioned in this video. To be fair though it's my fault that I keep choosing unclear references that are far too complex for me to finish before burning out, and also that aren't good for modularism. It's taken this video for me to recognize that. I have shot myself in the foot every step of the way and very much need to take every bit of this advice. Thank you very much.
That was so helpful to my mental health! Thanks for that! Good luck with everything!
Really enjoyed this breakdown, please do more like this!
Great video!, this is very insightful as always , big fan of your art, the "stylized materials" video series was my introduction to designer years ago, I watched them over and over, I hope you have the time for more tutorials , they are always very appreciated
I am planning to do a new SD tutorial series, have changed my pipeline quite a lot since my old videos! Probably around December to February.
I appreciate this kind of video! Really cool info and process insight :)
There are some really valuable tips in here that I had to learn in a much more time consuming way. Especially the neutral materials scene is super important. I would also mabey add to always use human reference, even if you are thinking "naw it doesn't really make sense here" I made that mistake once and won't make it again.
I had recently reconstructed a chateau based on old, blurred photos and the result was okay, but not satisfactory. Last weekend I walked through the city looking for similar buildings and segments and the result (not yet finished) looks much better and more realistic than before. Therefore, a valuable tip!
Thank you so much for sharing your insight! I'll definitely watch this everytime I start a new project ^-^
Every sentence was totally on point🤟
This was a really good video, thank you!
Thank you very much for your insight of this! As a student, it's so inspiring and informative, I'll definitely use this video when i'll try to do an environment
This is a really great breakdown, thank you for sharing and taking the time to put it together. It was both inspiring and informative. I would like to test out your suggestions on noting mistakes down, as well as winds - it could definitely improve the flow.
this was very useful, thank you
super useful stuff
Wow! Thank you so much! Your scene is so beautiful and atmospheric. I wish I could do such things too!
Amazing video. Thank you for sharing your experience!
First, I think you're environment turned out fantastic. Second, thank you for sharing your wisdom. This could save many people from failing and becoming discouraged. I have been committing many of the same sins over the past year and this made those stand out and make sense as to why they were causing me to struggle.
I had no idea you had a channel mate, consider me subscribed :)
Nice breakdown and congratulations on finishing your project! It looks great. What was the approximate number of polygons in your final scene?
No idea. Am finding polygon counting to be the last thing on my mind these days, it’s more like ‘make sure all your verts are having a positive impact’ i.e avoid wasted verts that add nothing.
Thanks for sharing
Great advice! Am I a hobbyist and seIf taught , and guilty of all of these. Iwas not familiar with your method of materials planning, thank you!
I just started with 3d concept art of landscapes and i was just looking for any tips, this helped a lot. I started bc i didnt enjoy time drawing characters bc they will never turn on paper as i want or imagine etc...+ it makes perspective much easier, but im having problems with textures. Im working in cinema4d and our teacher is doing everything so fast that u cant catch anything, litterally. I would actually needed some help with how to do textures.
It's flickering in the corner, why is it flickering. I dont know whats going on with the flickering...haha wanted to cry there so true. Thank you for this encouraging and empowering video to pull us out of imposter syndrome at times and show us there is yet hope
Thanks for the video! I could never get Romain's setup to sync the sky with the camera direction :(
To be honest, I still don't 100% understand it either - especially in regards to how it syncs with the original scene. I need to go through it again BUT the main point really is having a separate scene with default lighting.
@@adamcapone2222 Absolutely. I'll have another crack at it, but as you say having the lighting separated is really useful. Being able to check the different lighting conditions and how your material reacts is very valuable.
what helped me avoid this problem is just using concept arts that i recreate
Yeah if you can find good concepts that shows everything you need that’s going to be a big help. Sometimes you just don’t have a ‘complete’ concept and have to combine concepts/reference. Worst option I think is just aimlessly looking for a full concept piece for hours to work from, I never find it. Best to collect concept regularly in small bursts and hope you have something relevant when the time comes to create.
@@caponeart3596 yeah what i do is on artstation when i find a cool concept art i save it in a collection for future projects
Then after you are used to do concept arts in 3d you can create a scene without any concept, but you have to do some concept in 3d first! its so much easier and you learn so much good things
What's up with the red triangle in the top left that hides the icon of the program you're using?
lol that death stranding notification sound
I really regret it now but I’m impressed you recognized it!
Am impressed that anyone recognizes it, I love that game
nice video!
What software do I need to learn?
Isn't it easier to kitbash instead of creating everything from scratch?
That took you A YEAR!!?? Seriously, man, I could do that in Blender in a couple of days. I can't imagine what your process is like.
Thanks for your feedback. Would love to know your process!
I think he was learning.
I’ve put your video 1st to watch ONLY because it’s SHORTER than others and talked about HOW NOT TO. I thought “let’s get this one quickly out of the way while eating”. Now I wish it was a lot longer with a lot more mistakes. I was about to make exactly one of these mistakes, a fatal one, in a project I’m about to start. You have absolutely no idea what you’ve done by making and sharing this video, not the slightest idea. Now, go make more mistakes!
Interesting video but not a fan of those jarring sounds between chapters.
@@teamtomii thanks for letting me know. It seems I can’t replace the video without creating a new link. Perhaps there is a way to edit audio so I can just mute those parts? Let me know if anyone has ideas for solutions.
@@adamcapone2222 music is excellent. There's no need to change anything. Thank you so much for your video! It's incredibly useful. I'm just starting my new project (I'm a beginner) and I've already gone back to review my ideas. I definitely don't need an epic project =) Thank you again for sharing.
@@adamcapone2222 one man's opinion. Not like everyone's hounding you about it. If it is, then there must be really something there.
No need to do any changes for this particular vid.
Didn’t bother me in the slightest.
You should play Death Stranding 😅
You know you can spend your entire life making the perfect most realistic environments and or game but has anybody actually learned from Nintendo? And how they don't go to that length to give you a great game yet they make it beautiful enough that you don't really need a super hyped up realistic environment although I appreciate that because I really want to say just how realistic a game can actually get to and I guess that might be the drive the drives everybody to do realistic games but when you're Indie developer you know full well just how much time this is going to take you specifically if you're working on your own so maybe it'll be a great idea as an indie developer to find your common ground of what should be standard for you.And that's what we have to do as in the Developers it's to find what is common and fair for solo Developers or a small Team therefore we should not scale to industry standard because it's out of our capacity to do so so we have to scale everything down for example when you are an animator instead of doing a 22 minute episode you have to scale that down by half if you have a small team and if you're by yourself scale it down one more time from that equate it to about 6 minutes and that should be your scale down if you are solo Making the animation project yourself So this idea and our model has been scaled down three times to be able to fit within your capacity so it's 6 minutes of animation that you can produce which is plausible 12 minutes if you have a small team which is totally possible and 22 if you are standard. Now it's not just the time like that needs to be scaled down as well for example because of this we don't have the time for adding in fillers we just straight up get to the story you could probably get away with it by doing a complete filler on one episode throughout the series or maybe two or maybe once per season to fill in all the necessary information that is needed in order to get the story going in the right direction but if you can condense everything to a proportional scale to words something you could actually achieve that you won't be killing yourself and trying to do it and then making it as you would if you had a normal team to build this. And so the same principles can be applied here or pretty much anywhere just scale down to a simplified but yet quality and most importantly having fun doing it cuz if you're trying to do something too big you're going to end up giving up you're going to burn out you probably won't even get far the first place!
Those loud transitions are so unnecessary.
Thanks. Can't edit the video unless it's a new link unfortunately, wish I could! Bit of a learning process for me so this is great feedback, will make sure any future videos avoid this.
@@adamcapone2222 Good call. I think your video was pretty good otherwise.
I can't watch videos at that 20fps.....
Thanks for the feedback. It was exported at 30fps, is there a way to determine what the actual fps is?
Most videos are 24 - 30 frames per second. This appears to be one of the two. RUclips doesn’t let you upload videos at weird frame rates like 20fps. If you’re talking about the stuttering when he’s showing us the environment, that’s because he’s in Unreal Editor and using screen capture software, which is going to naturally be less performant than a final build.
Why do you sound like you're crying?
@@andreww4751 interesting, not heard that before! I do have a strained voice, something I’m working on. Thanks for your question.
Did you just say you did this in a year ?
And you want to tell people how not to make a environment 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
This is max a hour or 2
It’s difficult to explain. There were some weeks I didn’t touch it for example and I already have a challenging full-time job. Something I’m thinking to do next time is record the amount of hours (inc days) spent on an environment. Though I don’t know if that’s really useful for anyone? This stuff is so arbitrary, depends on all sorts of things. If I knew Houdini for example. A year was just my experience, some could do it in a week, some would take much more than a year.
Sure buddy, an hour or two 🙄
Guess what, I can tell Midjourney to generate a few still shots like this, and then claim victory.
An _hour or two?_ Methinks you are not so qualified to tell people how to make environments either. Going from reference gathering, sketches, initial blockout, figuring out camera angles, refined blockout, basic lighting pass, modelling, uv unwrapping, texturing, importing, assembling, applying and tweaking shaders and materials, sculpting terrain, scattering props, adjusting skybox and atmosphere, finalising lighting, adding particle effects, fine tuning post processing and getting the final screen grabs in around 60 - 120 minutes might be theoretically possible, but you’d have to either be a caffeinated wizard prodigy who skips their sister’s wedding to practice trim texturing, or just being very sloppy.
A year to do this, while juggling other parts of life like work or study, is quite reasonable if you’re teaching yourself as you go. That’s why this video is helpful. It’s coming from someone who is a learner himself and has recently realised some mistakes he was making. Mistakes that were holding him back from working as efficiently as the industry professionals we see on ArtStation. These are valid insights from someone who learned the hard way. Someone who is humble enough to make himself vulnerable in the interest of helping others on their journey.
A great deal more humble than you, I might add, Mr. _I Could Do This In An Hour Git Gud Lol Laughing Emoji Laughing Emoji Laughing Emoji Laughing Emoji Laughing Emoji_
@@joa1401 I suspect they're the type of person who downloads everything, glues it together and calls it a day, thinking they're a pro at environment design. Or they're a child.
2:40 lol is that prince of persia?