Elsa Söderpalm Patel Rookies 2022 Entry

Fluffenburg

For my first portfolio project that spanned for 5 weeks on half time 4/h a day, I wanted to make a modular town where the citizens were cute bunnies. To add variation while still having an easy workflow I used tiling textures and made material instances where you can change color, size and amount of grunge applied, if there should be moss patches and/or if there should be exposed brick patches.

I used Maya for all the modelling, Zbrush for highpolys, Substance Painter for texturing with some hand-painted touches being done afterward and rendered in Unreal Engine 4.

To add more life to the project I made particle effect using Unreal Niagara System to make wind swirls, dust particles and chimney smoke. To add more realistic cozy environmental lighting, I used a Light Function with a light panning cloud texture to simulate outside weather.

To break up materials like the stand roofs I used world-based placed grunge which with parameters can change the tiling size, color and opacity of the spots and color gradient which can change color, opacity, and placement.

With parameters you can change color, add moss, add different exposed bricks, add a colored gradient and add tiling grunge which you can change color, tiling amount and intensity of.

Peaceful Pond

For my second portfolio piece I wanted to make a stylized forest and test out making more shaders. With the inspiration from the beautiful movie Wolfwalkers I decided to make a painterly feeling magical pond scene. This scene took 4 weeks halftime 4h/day to complete.

The programs I used for making this was Maya, Zbrush, Substance Painter and Unreal Engine to render the final product.

To add more life to the scene I made butterflies, fog, falling leafs and fireflies particle systems and made an animated water shader to add further motion to the scene.

The water has depth fade for adding different colored depth tint and adds foam around intersecting objects. With help of virtual texture sampling the grass picks up the color of the ground and the same goes for the little hill.

For my water I wanted to make it editable with parameters to make changes easier along the way to make it fit the style.

To add more of the watercolor painterly style, I used postprocess to add light paper grain and also sharped the contrast in my final result.

Here is the difference.

The Abandoned Carousel

For my last project I wanted to make something different from my other pieces and decided to make an eerie carousel as an environmental hero piece. This project took 4 weeks halftime 4h/day.

The piece was made using Zbrush, Maya and Substance Painter and is presented in Unreal Engine 4.

As this was such a huge piece, I wanted to make sure the textures were not too big while still having a high level of detail. To make the textures smaller each repeated element is packed on each other and with a mask the shield paintings are applied breaking up the repetition. To make it less obvious I used decals to hide the repetition.

The pennants are placed using splines.

Ivys, ground material and some of the decals are by Quixel and the trees are from Unreal marketplace - temperate Vegetation: Spruce Forest and Landscape Pro 2.0 Auto-Generated Material. Everything else was made by me.

Total tris count is 65282 tris.

The carousel shell cost 18078 tris and all the carousel horses and their poles cost 47204 together.

The horses uses the same model and were posed later for more variation.