Kris Yu - 3D Environment Art Collection

BLOOD MOON VILLAGE 

This is my most recent project using Unreal Engine 5 and is my first exterior environment. I challenged myself to finish this piece in a month. My goal was to achieve a realistic with a stylized look, as all my previous environments are interiors and The Last of Us/wasteland look. I wanted to challenge myself to create an exterior environment with a different mood.

My foliage assets are hand sculpted include rocks, stone stairs, and different grasses. The process was really interesting! I created a landscape material as a base layer and then blended them with Megascan materials as well as 3D assets to make them realistic. On top of that, I also added hand-sculpted grasses to achieve a rich looking landscape!

This project is inspired by 茄茄's concept.

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The lighting process went wild in the end, since Lumen is powerful in testing out different lighting with one click. I decided to experiment with different lighting situations to see which was the most interesting. Besides skylight, I applied lots of traditional lights including point lights and spot lights to highlight the edges on assets and fill the area.

TAKEOVER 

- Abandoned Factory-

The Last of Us is my favorite game, the beautiful nature and realistic environment drove me to learn game art which had a huge impact on my art style for sure!

This was my first project created with Unreal Engine 5. I experimented and learned lots of new techniques and skills. All the assets are modeled in Maya, sculpted in ZBrush, used both tiling and baked textures with Substance Painter and Designer. In addition, I used Houdini to simulate broken glass and baked them down.

The models are created as modular pieces. With a limited amount of assets, I found myself focusing more on compositing. I had a lot of fun creating my custom foliage  using ZBrush to sculpt high poly and baked down to low poly, and then modified some variations both inside SpeedTree and composed by hand.

For lighting, I rely heavily on rectangle lights and point lights since they give me more control. The old-school technique is applied by using a mesh to block the light in the foreground. Hence the middle and background are brighter and stand out more. This project was featured on SpeedTree and Best of Term at Gnomon.

The falling leaf effect was created using the Niagara System. The leaf albedo is from Megascan. I tried to recompose the textures in a flipbook format, then set up the VFX material inside Unreal Engine, and finally applied different settings within the Niagara System. I was able to adjust the size of the spawning leaves, so it not only exists on the front side of the environment but also fills the entire area in space.

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ABANDONED BUNKER

The abandoned bunker interior is a sandy preserved world that takes place in the desert. The lighting was very simple, I used directional light and point lights to fill the room. 

I really love the mood for the concept. The contrast between the dark interior and bright sunlight is amazing. When I first saw this concept, I knew that I wanted to do this project! The amazing concept was created by Gabriel Nagypal.

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For the materials, the shaders are basic. When I started this piece I had no idea how to create complex shaders. Instead, I relied heavily on applying roughness and dirt decals to push on the details. All of the roughness decals are from Megascan and the rest were created using Substance Designer. I also created some of my own labels and customized them in Photoshop. These may have been easy to create but the effect of the labels produce the effect I wanted.

TYPEWRITER WORKSTATION

This is a vintage typewriter workstation. I am very proud of this project. This was my very first time creating a complex, fully textured prop. The project is featured on Gnomon School's Best of Term. It was such an encouragement for me when I started my 3D journey! 

Everything is modeled using Maya and textured in Substance Painter. Creating the letters on the keyboard was the most enjoyable part because I had to create a separate layer for each letter.

The challenge was to texture a new typewriter that had to show some wear to indicate the typewriter is being used. I focused on subtle details like fingerprints on the keyboard, dust on the sides, and scratches on the edges. These are very tiny details but you cannot miss them. The lighting works perfectly to highlight these details.

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Thank you for taking a look at all my works!

Here is my link to Artstaion and LinkedIn