Oliver Britland - Environmental Art Projects 2022

Hello, I'm Oliver,  an environment artist studying at Falmouth University. Over the course of the second year, I've had the chance to work on a few projects that I'd like to share with you.

Rivendell was the first project I produced during my second year of university.  I wanted to take the original home of the elves seen in the Lord of the Rings franchise and alter the aesthetic to that seen in the dreamy scenes within the film. 

I gathered a plethora of reference from both the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies, google etc. Due to the age of the movie, I wasn't able to gather that much reference, so doing multiple blockout passes to ensure correct architectural proportions was key. I tried to save time where possible by using modularity, trim sheets and tiling textures produced in Substance and ZBrush, but a lot of the scene required unique assets.

Apologies for the crackling audio, couldn't fix whatever was causing it.

For my second project of the year, I decided to focus on a smaller and more individual asset. For this, I chose the War Rig from Mad Max, as it involved a lot of hard surface modelling, a key skill which was quite different to those involved in making Rivendell.

Throughout the many challenges in making this vehicle, the wheels where without a doubt the most complex part of the process, as the tyre tread pattern involved very dense geometry that was hard to wrap my head around topology wise. Utilizing multiple UDIMs, and the workflow it entails in Maya and Substance was also a great challenge, as I was baking by mesh name, a process that required me to split the rig up into a lot of different components that all had to be named correctly.

ID maps helped me cover a lot of ground when texturing, as they allowed me to quickly mask sections of the mesh based on parameters baked in from the high poly. Another thing I found particularly useful was the use of Anchor Points, a feature that behaves like a mask that you can apply to multiple layers, changing parameters to affect each layer in the stack.

Turntable and Renders created within Marmoset 3.

RTX Realtime lighting test scene within Unreal Engine.