Rainbow Six Siege: Chalet | Fireplace (Remake)

As someone who's soon going to hit 1K hours in Ubisoft's competitive FPS, Rainbow Six: Siege; I decided to have a go at one of my favourite map in the game, Chalet and it's section Fireplace.

It has been a long time since I worked on an Environment piece with a direct reference, as most of the scenes I had worked (whether for portfolio or project) had been mostly the result of my own imagination and concept thoughts. So this time, I wanted to worry less about 'what's next' and focus on well optimized, remake of the Fireplace in Unreal Engine. Bringing in the power of Lumen to the R6.

I wanted to get more in-depth with Designer with this project, as well as finally introduce myself to foliage work for games as it hasn't been something I worked on before. The extremely friendly modular flow allowed me to set out the block-out quite fast (especially given that the reference was something I could directly measure by playing the game) and start iterating on the scene.

There are still certain changes compared to the original scene, some derived from my own artistic idea and some to proceed faster. I'm quite pleased with how it turned out!

This project allowed me to focus on block-out, materials, colour and light alongside with great optimization. 

The first thing I did was to open the R6, create a custom match and walkaround the Fireplace section of the Chalet. Even though the FOV of the player made it somewhat difficult to measure, I took rough estimate notes for the size of the walls and the ground. Through there, I created my first block-out in Unreal. I had taken 4M as the height of the walls and started blocking out with variations (1x4 - 2x4 - 3x4 - 4x4 - 6x4). I then brought them into Blender. 

After creating the block-out that mostly focused on walls and ground floors, I shifted my focus to creating the main 4 tiling textures; Brick Wall, Parquet Ground, Plaster and Column Wood. I had planned the rest (white plaster, lime and top wall paint) would be variations achieved through shader in the engine. 

Brick Wall, Plaster and the Parquet was made completely inside Substance Designer. For the Column Wood I used Substance Painter mixing various maps (Normals and Albedo) both from Quixel Megascans and few personal scans I had collected over time. 

Next up was to start building the walls with their variation (size, doorway and window). It was a fast process as they had barely any detail, just the baseboard (top and bottom) and door frames. Most of the detailing was just leveraged through the textures themselves. And since I wanted to stick with the original, (both looks and optimization) I didn't think of using things like displacement. 

For the ground, I decided to create 4x4, 2x2 and 1x1 tiles for the top floor and a whole single mesh for the entrance. It made it easier to build the metal trim around the floor. 

Once the main structure was finished, I moved onto creating the wooden beams that actually gives the main silhouette and the overall structure to the scene as they've been used extensively in it. I once again went for low poly rectangle blocks with small bevels on their edge. I created 4 variations for the thick beams and 4 other for the thinner beams that would cover up wall gaps. Most of the detailing was once again utilised through the texture itself.

The variations of the wood beams was just made through shifting and rotating the UV space for each individual mesh and utilising every bit of the texture. This has really helped me with breaking up the tiling along the beams. This approach of course made certain connections to have visible seams, but I decided to cover them up by creating a metal ring around them that would look like connection/support point. 

I then started building up rest of the detailed block-out with the wooden beams and finished the structure. It was time to focus on props. 

There weren't many props in the scene to begin with. I divided my workflow to three:
- Tertiary Props (mostly on desk)
- Big Meshes (Couch, Bookshelf, Console Desks, Foliage, Books)
- Barricade.

I decided to treat the Barricade as a hero prop in this as it both holds an iconic element for the game and also the fact that there were no other props I could treat as one. Low poly was made in Blender (just bevelled rectangle blocks) and the detail was sculpted in ZBrush. I also kept each plank separate, both to break up tiling when using it for wider doors and also thinking of destruction (if it were to be implemented). 

Tertiary props were exported as single FBX file and I painted them over in Substance Painter. The texture density held up pretty well as there weren't too many of them. 

I used mirrored UV's for Couch, Bookshelf and the Desks. Since I knew the player wouldn't be able to see both sides of the couch at the same time, I mirrored the UV and saved space (same was done on couch and the bookshelf). I also painted only one of each cushions and just duplicated them around varying their rotation. 

I moved onto books and the foliage next as the remaining props of the scene. 

I had never worked with foliage before. So I started diving into SpeedTree and getting myself acquainted with it. If I were to be brutally honest, I got pretty frustrated at first since everything was built in an unfriendly way to me (viewport, panner etc). I just followed along certain tutorials and crafted my leaves. Even though the scene originally had few more variations of foliage, I just decided to work on the hanged ones and the vertical plant wall. 

As it was winter time and I had never taken any scans before, I used my Adobe Stocks subscription and downloaded one of the leaf atlas I could fine. I tuned them in Lightroom for removal of any shadow and reflection, colour corrected it and brought it in Substance Sampler to give me the Normal Map I could work with.

The stem texture was imported from Megascans and colour edited to better suit my needs.

As for the books, I decided to create a object position shader that would give me variations between 16 different covers. It was both time saving and allowed me to use single draw call. (Since I'm unable to add the short video of demonstration, it can be found on my ArtStation post. 

I decided to use vertex paint on the blue wall paint to break up some of the tiling and give the edges where the wood contacts a little wear.

I also created a POM decal shader that I only used on one decal (base imported from megascans). The purpose was to add slight variation and improve my shader workflow. 

As mentioned before, I also built shader for the plaster walls that I could toggle whether to use the hard limestone wall or stick with plaster look as well as tinting so I could create the white plaster out of the black main tiling texture I created in Designer. 

Lastly was the Fireplace shader. For me, the original felt a little 'unusual' inside a mansion like this and decided to go with an easier approach, to mimic the 'fake digital fireplace' effect. I just created a shader using a flame mask and panner it on Y, as well as a slight X offset to break it up from repeating over. 

(Again, since I can't upload the small demonstrations, they can be found on the ArtStation post)

Last remaining bit was the lighting. However during the production, I had shifted between various light settings to see what would suit me the best. After building the light blueprints, setting the correct intensity and the colour, I moved onto engineer the light towards a better optimization. I used spot lights with smaller radius and decided to leverage the power of Lumen by increasing both the indirect lighting and the albedo multiplier in the post process. This allowed me to have relatively well lit scene with better light complexity.

I also imported most of my textures in 4K and downscaled them in Unreal. The only texture using the 4K is the Brick Walls as wanted them to hold their as much as possible. 

Wooden Beams: 2K In-Game
Plaster: 2K In-Game
Tertiary Props: 1K In-Game (Including Foliage, Some other 512px)
Barricade: 2K In-Game
Brick Wall: 4K In-Game

Overall, I quite enjoyed working on this scene as it made realise all the details here and there in a game I've given hundreds of hours yet barely noticed any. It was great to see the power of Lumen re-imagining the Chalet from Rainbow Six: Siege.

Max Lumen GI & Reflections / Cinematic Quality Gameplay Test