Flowers Grave

Workflow:

For this Project I wanted to show some basic modeling, sculpting and texturing skills alongside my design fundamentals.

References were very important for all stages of development. I used most of them for my design and modeling phase. Some helped me with the level art and I used screenshots of Megascan assets to match the texturing style.
I also used Master Paintings to aid my post processing and exposure settings.

I took a lot of notes and defined the backstory of my project. It was supposed to be a military graveyard and my goal was to use symbolism in parts of the design.
So I looked for architecture references and mainly stuck to Brutalism due to its simplistic style.
I then decided to cross that style with a flowers form language and a circular shape language.
Brutalism was supposed to represent strenght and power while the flowery aspect was supposed to stand for honor. Circles usually represent friendliness and in this context something closer to support.

I analyzed my newly established ref board and started drawing my landscapes and buildings.
I ended up with 5 landscapes and pushed through to design 30 different gates.
I used the sketch as an image plane in maya and started modeling.
After finishing the first block in I added a few, big deformations.
I Then worked on the Uvs, brought it back into Z-Brush and created the High Poly.

I baked the High Poly over the Low Poly in Substance Painter and used a smart material for the base. Then I added a bunch of fill layers on top to slowly add to the rock texture.
Once the texturing was done I added all my files to unreal and worked on the environment.

I had to scrap my first version cause it just didn't look good on camera. For the 2nd version I started with a graybox level and decided on my cameras from the very beginning.
That saved me a lot of time and replacing the boxes with proper assets didn't take too long either.

While lighting the scene, I mostly focused on highlighting my gate asset. For the post processing I wanted to achieve the kind of value grouping / exposure that is often seen in master paintings.

The biggest challenge was part of the texturing process. I had so many different assets that I didn't want to texture them one by one. That would have been a waste of time and it would have made it harder to figure out what they look like next to each other.

So I divided my gate into 3 groups. The stairs, the entrance and the gate itself.
It was incredibly slow because all of them were supposed to be textured at 4k res.
Lowering my Viewport resolution did solve that problem. And luckily there was no problem upscaling the textures later on either.

I used Procreate and Photoshop for drawing. Pure Ref for my Refboards. Modeling and Uvs were done in Maya, sculpting in Z-Brush, texturing in Substance Painter and everything else in Unreal Engine. So a pretty typical pipeline.

Planning the level ahead of time was incredibly helpful. I should have done that from the very beginning... I wasn't able to stick to the floorplan I first had in mind. But thanks to my environment sketches I was still able to implement it to a smaller degree.