Creating a Forza Horizon-Inspired Nostalgic Garage in UE5

I'd like to share the workflow behind my personal project in this article. Due to the image file restriction, I recommend reading via this link: https://silken-dancer-ab4.notion.site/Creating-a-Forza-Horizon-Inspired-Nostalgic-Garage-in-UE5-1057ebacc6e6806cace1ed0eeaec99be

Introduction

Hi, folks! My name is Yuting Chen, currently looking for opportunities to break into the video game industry as an Environment / Prop Artist. I started learning Maya since October 2019. Before that I knew nothing about CGI. After graduating from the school where I studied Maya in Osaka, I became a self-taught artist and explored different disciplines in 3D. During the time, I found out that Environment Art resonated with my passion the most as I’ve always been fascinated by the world building in video games. I enrolled in a few online workshops and mentorship to learn more about level art in unreal engine. Then, I joined Linkedin and discord communities to continue growing with like-minded 3D artists.

Reference

I’ve always been a big fan of Forza Horizon series and loved the Barn Find in the game a lot. After I decided to make a scene inspired by it, I searched on Artstation, Google and generated references with Midjourney. To better envision the final result, I categorized reference images with different sections like Concept Art, Target Quality, Lighting and Mood, Photo References and Specific detail reference for each prop.

Composition & Background

My first blockout in maya was bigger but after discussing with my mentor I narrowed down the shot to reduce the amount of asset creation, which allowed me to focus fully on the quality of the scene. Not only using primitive geometries, I also downloaded free models online as proxy in order to enrich the silhouette of the blockout. Setting up your camera with proper width height ratio, focal length is also important for it. A nice tip here is to turn on Composition Overlays in the top right corner of the Cinematic Viewport. I usually use Grid (3x3) because it follows the rule of thirds.

For the background, I placed a large curved image plane outside the barn. I generated the daytime image using Midjourney, then converted it into a night version using Photoshop's Color Lookup and generative fill features.

The image plane material was set up as below:

Sculpting

This is my first time sculpting wood and I find this tutorial very useful. The key elements to make your sculpting look realistic are edge damage, wood grains, and cracks. I recommend writing down each brush’s feature so next time you don’t have to test all the brushes to achieve the effect you want, which’s why I wrote this memo. Zbrush Wood Sculpting Notes

Modeling

Though I've attempted car modeling before, I still find it quite challenging. Fortunately, this article on 80 Level was incredibly helpful. The most valuable lesson I learned is this: after modeling the overall car shape, don't rush to add local details. Instead, smooth the model to create more subdivisions, then start adding smaller local details. This approach helps avoid unwanted lumpy surfaces or artificial pinches on the mesh. Once you've completed the high-poly model, you can reduce the polycount to create a low-poly version.

One of the trophies has a complex curved shape, so I figured using deformers would make modeling easier. I learned how each deformer works through the tutorial below and utilized the Bend and Flare deformers to achieve the desired shape. Note that deformers can be applied to both entire objects and selected faces.

Cloth Simulation

I used to create fabric assets using cloth simulation in Maya. However, I find it more flexible to do in Marvelous Designer as you can drag and move the fabric even after simulation. When it comes to cloth simulation there’re always so many parameters to tweak so it might seem to look overwhelming. In fact, I only played around Pressure and Physical Property, sometimes with mouse drag to get desirable looks. When I was happy with it, I simply lowered Particle Distance to obtain higher quality meshes.

Here are two tutorials I would like to recommend: one is good for creating simple fabric assets for environments. The other one explained Physical Property very clearly. Apart from them, official YouTube channel also has tons of valuable tutorials.

Texturing

For car texturing, not just roughness, it’s great to increase metallic to get nice highlight on the car paint and glass surfaces. When creating holes, not only opacity channel but also turn on height channel to give it more thickness.

For wood texturing, I find the tutorial below very helpful, as well as Javad Rajabzade’s YouTube channel.

Generic texturing tips:

• enhance texturing clarity: add sharpen filter on top and set blend mode to Passthrough.

• Color variation as final touch: add a texture on top with only albedo turned on; then tone down opacity to add a subtle tint.

Here’s another approach to achieve it without a texture.

• Gradient: add gradient to make assets look more like sitting on the ground

Material Setup

It’s very likely that your textures in Unreal Engine look different from it in Substance Painter or other software. So I set a few variables in material editor and expose them into material instance, allowing me to adjust textures realtime.

Using RGB masks can save your time when you already have nice materials and only want to add some variations, dirt and imperfections and so on. FastTrack Tutorials showed very clearly how to create them. The process is quite simple, usually the default smart masks in Substance Painter would do the trick.

I applied this technique to my car cover fabric and the planks at the corner. This is my nodes setup in the master material, allowing me to control the color, roughness, intensity and contrast of the grunge.

Leverage Quixel Library

Create broken assets in just a few seconds. This hack is inspired by my favorite environment artist, UE班的小学生. The most powerful thing is that it'll map the material automatically to the cut, without generating n-gons.

Create assets using UE5 modeling tool. This method was inspired by Quixel environment artist, Jakob Keudel. I displaced a subdivided plane using Quixel decal’s displacement map and cut off unnecessary faces and then changed the decal’s albedo map a bit. In this way I converted Quixel’s paper piles into my customized newspaper piles.

Lighting & Post Process

In order to have god ray effect and raytraced shadow at the same time, I placed two directional lights in the scene. This method is inspired by my favorite artist, William Faucher.

I created two directional lights: one is for god ray; the other is for raytraced shadow. I increased Volumetric Scattering Intensity for the god ray directional light to make light shaft more visible. I set it 0 for the raytraced shadow one. To make them work and get rid of yellow text warning, I adjusted Forward Shading Priority. The god ray one I set to 1, the raytraced one I set to 0.

I was torn about using day or night lighting scenario and then decided to have both of them. To separate my level and lighting, I created empty levels and migrated existing light sources into them.

I find Karim abou shousha’s lighting tutorials very helpful as it dramatically boosted my lighting. For instance, to have this asterisk shape bloom effect, in Post Process Volume, change the bloom method to Convolution.

Color grading is very important for me because I intended to create nostalgic vibes in my daytime lighting. This article helped me a lot on color grading. I did color grading in DaVinci Resolve and exported the LUT to Unreal. I inserted it to Post Process Volume and toned down the intensity a little bit.

Conclusion

I started this personal project about a year ago and I didn’t fully make most of my time. Some accidents happening to my hard drive and my lack of time management caused such procrastination. I learned a big lesson that data backup and keep tracking on your time is so important. Also, asking people would be much faster than you think alone when you come across any problem. Writing down notes or making tutorials would also help as you can always check out the tips you’ve learned in the future. Not to mention it can help others too so why not.