Snow Church (Capstone Project)
My goal for this project was to create a stylized 3D environment inspired by the concept work, "Church in the Snow," by artist Joshua Jay Christie.
I would like to thank my mentor, Amanda Wood, for providing valuable feedback, my professor, Caleb Kicklighter, for additional feedback and guidance, and all my peers who helped me throughout the semester.
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Software: Maya, ZBrush, Substance Painter, Unreal Engine 5
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Table of Contents
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Ideation Process
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Project Inspiration​
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References
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Layout and Concept Ideation
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Modeling
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Church Asset - First Pass​
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Church Asset - Second Pass
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Updated Layout
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Lighting and Surfacing
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Church Asset - First Surfacing Pass​
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Lighting First Pass
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Church Asset - Second Surfacing Pass
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Lighting Iterations
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FX and Compositing
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Snow VFX​
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Object Blending
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Lantern Animation
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Reflection​
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Ideation Process
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Church in the Snow, Joshua Jay Christie
My motivation behind this project was to more closely study the workflow differences between stylized works and works of realism. I knew initially that I wanted this project to take shape as an environment made in a similar style to games like World of Warcraft or Overwatch and that I wanted snow to be a major component of it. A digital painting of my own featuring a snowy environment provided the general landscape and color pallet I desired to work with, I was inspired by some of my own travel photography to study different architectural forms commonly seen in western cathedrals and chapels, which led to the idea of having this project center around a church in a snowy environment.
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I picked Christie's concept because it includes a variation of church concepts that each combine different traditional architectural styles to successfully create appealing stylized designs. I was also drawn to the colors in this concept, which draw the attention to the centerpiece of the painting through contrast. Though my plan was originally to recreate the main church design (design 2), I found myself inspired by elements of designs 1, 4 and 5 as well and decided to expand on the possibilities of combining features from each.
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Church Variations; Window, Door, Pillar Callouts, Joshua Jay Christie
After taking note of my favorite elements from each church design, I did some research and reference collection on World of Warcraft buildings I found online featuring similarly-designed buildings in heavily stylized environments. Below are the images I ended up taking the most inspiration from as I drafted the final design of the church I would model.
reference images, all rights reserved to the respective owners
While reference gathering, I found myself increasingly drawn to the idea of incorporating wooden elements of Scandinavian Stave church architecture in the final design as I figured it would fit well with the idea of a northern, snowy environment. In my research on western architectural movements leading up to this project, this was a building style that caught my eye due to its real-life exaggerations of shape and stylish woodwork.
Scene concept draft; whiteboxing
With a better sense of direction, I created a very basic layout in Unreal Engine and did a quick paint-over to help envision a more interesting composition that included the additional elements that would make up the scene. Though my initial goal was to recreate Christie's concept piece for piece, I experimented with other composition ideas and decided to go for something with more depth and variation.
I wanted the foreground to be populated with various objects like shattered pots, discarded weapons, and torn flags, but this idea would later be reduced as the scene composition evolved. I decided for the background to mainly consist of mounds of snow, trees, mountains, and a sky dancing with northern lights. The next step was to create a more detailed reimagining of the original church design, exploring the shape language and combining elements from references and Christie's other church variations to use for reference in modeling.
Concept Draft 1
Modeling
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While not heavily detailed, this reference sketch was enough for me to capture the general shape of the church and the structural pieces I wanted to include. From here, I began with a simple shape block-out in Maya.
Model Blockout
As I modeled the details, I found myself drifting away from Christie's mostly Gothic design in favor of something more of a cross between a Scandinavian Stave church and a medieval castle or tavern. Elements like the chain-linked lanterns, loose rope coils, and roughened shingles give it a more weathered look. Details like this would open up more room for environmental storytelling later on.
Completed model - first pass
Completed model - first pass, various Arnold renders
After receiving some feedback on the model from my class and mentor, I made some changes to the design for the second pass, mainly to the roof and entryway, and began blocking in colors for different material groups before adding the updated model to my layout scene in Unreal with some basic lighting.
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Completed model - second pass
Throwing the church model into the layout scene really helped me better visualize the different components I wanted to later see filling up the space and gave me a basic sense of where to begin with lighting. However, the thing that lacked here the most was depth. I knew a combination of camera adjustments, sky and fog details, and further terrain work would give the environment more volume.
First layout pass with proxy lighting and materials
With the final model for the church complete after a few final tweaks, I added to the layout by implementing various additional pieces, such some quickly sculpted trees, shrines, and Quixel assets to fill in the space. I corrected the camera placement and field of view and enhanced the blue values of the shot to provide better contrast and a moodier overall appeal. The addition of a fog volume helped separate the mountains from the midground into the background.
Finalized layout with a first pass on lighting
Lighting and Surfacing
With my layout complete, I UV unwrapped the church and started texturing. To save time, I created procedural materials that achieve the hand-painted look I'm going for. Extra hand-painted details were added manually as needed. As I worked, I found some UV issues that needed to be fixed, but remained focused on the colors and overall look of the model before doing any fine-tuning.
Church - first texture pass
Though still in need of some adjustments, the completion of the church textures set the basis of the workflow I used for texturing the smaller assets. The technique uses bottom and top gradients alongside some general color offset to give a slightly worn look, and heavy use of the curvature map allowed for exaggerated color details on the edges. I gave everything a slight blur effect to achieve a hand-painted look. Additionally, various texture patterns such as those on the wood and building surface were blended to provide subtle extra details. With the bulk of the first round of textures complete, I assembled everything in scene, set up vertex painting, and made some lighting / camera adjustments. The terrain was also set up for vertex painting.
Updated layout with first-pass textures
For vertex painting, I set up three layers for surfacing the terrain after sculpting using vertex paint. The landscape layer blend node allowed me to add layers that referenced all the texture maps I needed. I made layers for rock details, snow, and hand-painted ambient occlusion.
Master Landscape Material
After receiving some feedback on the church textures, I did a second pass to add some color adjustments, mostly on the roof, glass, and stones to make it look more icy.
Church - second texture pass
Scene update, second pass
The above shot includes some more minor adjustments made to composition and the terrain. The totems in front on the church were getting lost, so I moved them next to the altar, an area I would later add more focus and detail to. The terrain and mountains still needed the most work, so I planned to add a more neutral vertex painting layer that would help with reduce stretching. Another idea was to model and texture the mountains separately from the terrain, as seen in the example from Overwatch below, but this proved to be unnecessary.
Adding additional vertex painting layers for the mountains proved to be helpful in blending them better with the background. I had to trim them down even more to further reduce stretching, but they reached a point that I was happy enough with to move on. The main adjustments at this stage would be lighting and the adding of small assets to populate the table/altar area. The overall image was also looking very blue and because of that, some of the elements got lost, particularly in the midground, due to that light's ambient nature. Some additional direct light would help frame key elements like the altar and church entryway and give the piece more dimensionality. I also planned to add a pathway around the terrain in the foreground to help break it up more. To help with the sharp contrast going on between prop elements like rocks and the snowy ground, I planned to look into object environment blending.
Scene render, third pass
Scene update third pass
The most recent adjustments to the scene included lighting changes that added warm light to the altar and church entryway. Placeholder models were added to the altar as well. Cloud opacity was increased to highlight the pink/purple tones more, and some extra lights around the treeline were removed to prevent unnecessary light bouncing.
Scene update fourth pass
FX and Compositing:
With only a short amount of time left to finish the project, I shifted my focus to polishing and adding final touches. The first thing I wanted to explore was adding snow vfx. I found a great tutorial online that helped me set up a Niagara system that simulates light snowfall blowing in the wind. Another detail I wanted to change was how the rocks and structures on the ground blended with the terrain. Since it's snowy, the edges of these objects should have a kind of blend that decreases the contrast between their edges and the ground. I was able to achieve this by using a dither effect on the pixel depth offset of each material, which fades the edges touching the ground. I felt that the sky was also feeling a little empty on the left side, so I added more clouds and increased their saturation slightly. The proxy models on the altar have almost all been replaced with surfaced versions. Finally, I completed my final pass on lighting, emphasizing the warmer tones around the church and altar to help them stand out more.
Render with Snow VFX
Snow Material in Unreal
I found a super helpful tutorial that covered how to make a dissipating snow effect. The snow material creates a 2D circle with a partial gradient and low opacity. When applied to the Niagara system, it creates snowflake-li with a motion-blurred effect. The Niagara system uses the Simple Sprite Burst template and adds control for various motion behaviors such as wind direction and speed
The solution to my object blending problem turned out to be deceptively simple. An easy fix for sharp ground edges was to add a dither effect multiplied into the pixel depth offset. The shader would then apply the effect to the part of the mesh intersecting the terrain, which worked well with the snow environment.
With Object Blending
Without Object Blending
The final detail I wanted to add was a swinging effect to the lanterns so that they'd fit better in the windy environment. This was simple; I made a blueprint actor out of the lantern, set the pivot point to the center top of the handle, and made a sine wave animation that rotated the object about the x-axis on loop. I was able to adjust the speed to make it a subtle effect.
Lantern Swinging Animation
After exporting the final render, I took everything into Premier Pro to do some minor depth of field, lighting, and color work. First, I blurred the mountains and tops of the more distant trees to give the illusion of distant snowfall. I darkened the render to make it feel more like dusk, and added additional lights to the church and altar to make them the center of attention and better highlight their contrasting colors. The final result is shown below.
Final Render after Compositing
Reflection:
Overall, I enjoyed working on this project. I think the final render turned out nice and met most of my expectations, but there is still room for improvement. I would have like to have created more variations for trees, rocks, grass, and small props if time had allowed and added more animation. If I were to continue working on this project, I would spend more time looking into animations for the trees and grass and would have added other elements like flags to add more motion to the final render. From a technical standpoint, I had to cut corners in terms of optimization for the sake of time. If I were to continue work, I would want to explore ways to optimize the models, vfx, shaders, and lighting as that was part of my initial goal.