Sam Hipwell - Game Art Collection

HALL OF MIRRORS

3D Environment in Unreal Engine 5

This project involved recreating a place which was very personal to me, and really pushing my learning in a lot of key areas. The whole project took 3 months, and involved modelling in Maya, sculpting in Zbrush, texturing in Substance and assembling and lighting in UE5. The only assets not created by me are the statues and the green dress, which fall under character art.

Using a Modular Workflow

I wanted to demonstrate in this project that I understand how to break down a complex environment into multiple reusable components. By using instancing and snapping in Maya, I was able to create the blockout for the full room with just a few parent pieces, which can be detailed out as a modular kit.

Creating Complex Objects

With the ornate furniture and mirrors, I really pushed my modelling, sculpting and unique texturing skills. Starting with quad draw in Maya and leaning heavily on its crease tool to create my high poly models, I would then take things into Zbrush to add sculpted detail.

After texturing and baking unique textures in Substance Painter, I was then able to assemble a shader in Unreal which allowed me precise control of the gold material which is so important to the scene.

Material Creation: Tiling and Trimsheets

I built custom trim sheets for the walls and arch panels in Photoshop, many of which involved hand painting. The elaborate ceiling painting was created entirely in Photoshop, designed to be a flat unwrap.

I created the tiling floor brick pattern from scratch in Substance Designer, which allowed me to generate different patterns like herringbone and rows, which I mapped to different parts of the floor,  as well as dirty variants for the room's edges, which could be blended using vertex painting.

Set Dressing

To pull together the scene I went through many lighting passes, changing from baked lighting to Lumen mid project. Listening to rounds of peer feedback on Discord channels was really helpful in nailing down my composition, while I built many extra assets and applied a lot of decals.

I carefully documented my whole process, which was featured in an article for 80 Level. Here's a slider to show my progress as I made the Hall of Mirrors, and some closeups of some of the final assets.

F1 - MOBILE MEDICAL UNIT

I made this vehicle asset as a challenge to push my learning in hard surface modelling, as well as a lighthearted tribute to a friend who is a junior doctor. These renders are captured realtime in-engine in Unreal 4, in a test environment I created using Megascans assets.

Storytelling Through Functional Design

I wanted the vehicle to tell a story simply through its construction and wear and tear, drawing on shape lagnuage and materials from real miltary vehicles. 

I made sure to include functional details like fog lights, storage hatches and a radio antenna, a defibrilator compartment, a winch hook and a refueling cap. I think grounding the sci-fi design in real functions made the result much more fun and believable.

Below you can see some models in Maya which show my process of discovering the shapes I wanted to use.

The finished low poly asset was 31,300 tris, which I thought was about right for a hero asset.

In Substance Painter I baked my normal, curvature and AO maps to allow me to use generators to get my base textures done, then hand painted detail and damage, as well as creating text and symbol decals. I was able to make a quick dark blue material variant for when the vehicle operates in different biomes. These final renders are using Substance's Iray.

Thanks for reading! The Rookies have been a big source of inspiration for me, so it's a real joy to be able to enter this year.

My Artstation and LinkedIn