WoLD Insider Newsletter: Burnt Out, Taking Breaks and Coming Back to Creating Again

Category: Newsletters

October 23, 2024

Back to Building, Back to Creating

After a self-imposed break of 3-months, I am back.

Sometimes it's good to take a forced break; away from the thing you love the most - environment art and level design.

I see many people who get burnt out when working on 3d art and game art. You do this for long enough and you'll reach a point when you have to take some time off.

I don't take these breaks very often. Last time I did was in 2013 when I took 6 month break.

The key is to have something you can focus on other than environment art and level design. And then completely disconnect.

With time away you will refuel.

The inspiration to create and wanting to work again will come back. It always does because creating environment art and level design is in your DNA.

One of the best ways to disconnect and refuel is to take a trip somewhere you haven't been.

So I took a trip to UK.

UK Trip

Travel always creates new ways of looking at the world. The influx of ideas you want to create rush in without you having to force it. You can't help but start capturing them. Writing down ideas and taking photo references of locations.

I went from urban London to downtown Liverpool to all over rural landscapes of UK. From train station to train station. From one small town to another.

There was never a shortage of ideas and locations. Just limited by time to capture it all.

One of the inspiring locations was Westminster underground station in London. As soon as I saw in, fell in love with its modern, sci-fi architecture. Felt like I was on a movie set of Total Recall, 1990s version. Could have spent days here taking reference photos. But only had a few minutes walking through it. It was enough to want to create it.

Here are some photo references I took:

Even though I've seen this location through photos collected online before, being physically present and walking through it CHANGES EVERYTHING.

If you can, always visit locations in person.

Coming Back to Creating

The hardest part returning to work is remembering where you left off.

I don't recommend jumping back into that big project you were working on that made you burnt out. Instead, start a new small project from things you were inspired by during your hiatus.

One that will get you started back to creating.

Because I've seen so many old brick buildings in UK and my affinity for urban industrial environments, I decided to do something with brick. More specifically brick and steel combination.

Here was one of the side street alleys in Liverpool:

So I jumped back into Substance Painter to create some tiling brick textures.

There are many brick materials to download and use from Adobe Marketplace.

See this tutorial for how to download, import and use new materials in Substance Painter.

With some tweaking you can make these brick textures unique. Combine that with vertex painting, decals, props and good lighting in UE5 and you have an environment created.

UE5 Vertex Painting

Once I had few tiling brick textures I started to experiment with Vertex Painting in UE5.

As of UE5.5, it now supports mesh painting on Nanite instanced Static Meshes using Virtual Textures.

However, I wanted to use the standard Vertex Painting that has been around since UE4 and since UDK.

I quickly put together a test material and started to experiment with Vertex Painting.

One thing that you'll need to Vertex Paint is a texture mask. This will allow you to only paint into certain parts of the texture first. Such as into the mortar and the grout of the brick.

But I had a problem.

Because I was using downloaded base materials, I didn't have an option or controls to generate a custom Mask from Painter. So instead I decided to use Substance Sampler.

Converting Normal Maps to Height Maps, AO and Masks with Sampler

Sampler is great for converting Normal Map to Height or to AO or in this case a Mask to be used in UE5. Just run few filters and BAM. Mask is done.

See this step-by-step tutorial for How to Convert Normal Maps to Height Maps to AO or to Masks with Substance Sampler.

Always Be Coming Back

I don't like taking long breaks away from creating art. But sometimes they are necessary to refuel and to recharge. Make sure you recognize when you need to and take a self-imposed hiatus to do something else.

Take a week, a month or more.

Do something else that completely disconnects you from what got you burnt out. You will come back with new found energy to want to create again.

This small project is not done and I'm not sure if it will be.

But sometimes the purpose of a project is to help you get back to creating and sharing. A stepping stone along the process to something else.