Creating your own Stylized 3D Environments for Beginners in UE4

In this tutorial/breakdown, the wonderfully talented Melissa Miller stops by Stylized Station to share some of her work, and to share her full workflow that she uses when it comes to making stylized environments un Unreal Engine 4, and a ton of cool tips and tricks that beginners should know when attempting to create their own environments.

This tutorial will cover a ton of cool stuff, such as sculpting, texturing and foliage creation.

This is a very in-depth tutorial, and will contain lots of software, but the important thing is that you take the general ideas and concepts, and add them to your own knowledge within your own software.

Software used: Zbrush, Substance Painter & Designer, Maya, Photoshop & Unreal Engine 4!

you want to check out more of Melissa's work, be sure to check her work out on Artstation:

Link to the scene from the tutorial:

🎨The 3D Coloring Book🎨
Transform your Substance Painter texturing skills with HUNDREDS of professional-level assets, and hours of high quality tutorials 🎉

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[StylizedStation]

To any beginners who are really struggling with Substance Painter, I've been there. I created the 3D Coloring Book for people like YOU, so you never have to feel stressed or anxious about tackling your next texturing project. Transform your Substance Painter texturing skills with HUNDREDS of professional-level assets, and hours of high quality tutorials.
I'm also releasing a Substance Painter for Complete Beginners section soon as well, so make sure to get it now before the prices goes up!

[pwhite]

Her use of substance designer is really awesome!

[AndresSepulvedaDonFrag]

This is a great tutorial. I discovered a lot of new information and the pacing and tone to explaining made this easier to understand.
1- I didn't know the trick of creating a new camera and locking it to a different viewport for preview. That blew my mind.
2- I didn't know how to bake 3d models as texture on substance designer. In order to get the transparency you exported the model without the plane background in maya right?
3- When you choose to cut models as simple planes (or as simple as possible) because performance, i would like to point this. For a diorama point of view i can get it. However in a game point of view, if you create grass for a bigger scene you can loose performance becase multiple transparency overlapping. This is called overdraw. And some recommendations point that, considering the 3D hardware available today, it is better to have a model with some more polygons than a polygon with less vertex count and transparency.
4- You can disable autexposure in editor preview, but for a scene render this could not become disabled. In that case you can disable it from project settins, or from the post process volume.

[buddhathegod]

I've seen the technique for making vegetation like that briefly introduced but I was so happy to finally see it step by step! THank you so much! That was amazing!

[brunochiroleu]

This tutorial was amazingly useful. Even as a first time Substance Designer user, I could manage to get it right. Thank you, people!

[ferdicetin]

For some reason I started to like this channel.😍😍

[natanescarpi]

Awesome tutorial! very well explained! love it!

[jonatanolavarria]

Amazing! I was looking for some foliage tutorial for stylized texturing and this is a great one! Thanks!

[raajratna]

this tutorial was amazing i love making Stylized 3D ART and this tutorial helped me learn advance level of substance designer thank you :)

[rouzvegogh]

U Have One of The Best Game Art Channels!
Keep it Up Man...
U Deserve +10 Mil Subs <3

[heRmine]

Thank you for this tutorial, super helpful! :)

[manuelscheller]

Great tutorial. Thanks for the detailed steps in Designer, what's really helpful :)

[gavynthomas]

Melissa has a nice voice and it seems she knows what she’s talking about. Sakura scene and the dagger on her art station were really cool too :) nice job if that means anything from me lol

[g.byronwilliams]

This was really useful! Thanks so much. :D

[clementv]

A big thank you for you work, it give me a lot of inspiration and help.

[LaszloIvanyi]

This was good. Now that I went through the basic substance painter tutorial I actually understand it better. Would be good to see how the model was assembled from the parts.

It wasn't too clear if you need any special setup in the 3D modelling tool after making the foliage so the Substance will be in "Top view" for the texture making. You are making a top view texture from a 3D object after all.

Also I know the setup was from a specific camera angle, it would be nice to see a walk-around the scene in Unreal to see how it'd look in a game perhaps. :-)

[darklingscreativestudio]

I honestly wanted to see it animated, but it’s nonetheless an amazing job ❤️

[gametech]

Keep it up congrats for you to have 10 million sub faster

[mewly]

Hi, great tutorial, I seem to be stuck on the foliage bit, my substance designer is saying "Linked file not found" and then listing the maps, I don't understand why that's happening when I've done exactly as you did in the video? Any idea? on how to fix? Thanks!

[joseignacioreallozano]

Ow, its amazing
But my problem is when I have to place the folliage and everything, it appears always... Artificial, and its too obvious im using planes... Any advice?