Jillian Ubando | 3D Game Art Showcase

THE BRADBURY

The Bradbury Building is a beloved building in downtown LA, and I wanted to do it justice by replicating the ornate details and capturing the iconic lighting to the best of my abilities. I have been looking forward to creating this piece in 3D for some time, and it being my first unreal project, I am happy I got to learn as much as I did from it!

Breakdown

To tackle the ornate details, I found ornament brushes in ZBrush and drew them out one by one on a plane. I exported them one at a time, so I could bring them into Maya as little pieces. I designed the railings and doorknob in Maya, because it was easier for me to block out shapes and sizes and then rotate and deform the smaller pieces to create the larger object.

For the "LETTERS" sign, I typed it out in Maya and combined it with the plaque. After, I brought it into ZBrush, dynameshed it to get the rounded edges, and decimated it to get the desired polycount.

I was pretty keen on replicating one of the trims in the Bradbury Building, so I sculpted one tile in ZBrush, grabbed the height, and brought that into Substance Designer. Even though I only ended up using that small portion of the trim sheet, it was a great learning experience and incentive to try out Designer!

I textured using 3 main methods: Quixel Mixer, RGB Packed Masks & Vertex Painting.

I used Nuke and After Effects to composite. I defocused in Nuke through the Unreal to Nuke server, where I rendered the background separate and then used the cryptomatte and defocus nodes to blur the foreground without the ghosting that you may get if you defocus in Unreal.

Lastly, I softened the images slightly, added grain, and then brought the shots into After Effects to stitch together with music.

THE BAKER

As a fan of Linda Lomelino, I wanted to pay tribute to her charming food photography and replicate the messy yet beautiful process of baking. Enjoy!

Breakdown

After sifting through Lomelino's archives, I spent my early time building out much of the kitchen and finding shots that I could zero in on. Below are a few test shots:

I ended up wanting a close-up & aimed for one photorealistic cupcake!

I textured the cupcake using the RGB Mask Method because I wanted to define the materials in Unreal. All other assets were textured using either Substance Painter or Megascans.

SERAPH'S HOLLOW

Seraph's Hollow is based on a 2D concept called "Suspended Place" by SiChen Wang. I found the perspective interesting & viewed the volumes as a fun challenge! Even tho Wang's lighting is beautiful, I sought the opportunity to play with mood & different lighting scenarios. I went with golden hour & a more colorful palette, reminiscent of one of my favorite childhood movies: Tangled. The final lighting & overall mood reflects a lot of my style & references I hold dear to me.

Breakdown

Progress Shots:

Using the displacement maps from Mixer, I displaced my assets in Mudbox and then decimated them in ZBrush. Then I layered the albedo and normal maps with underlying textures in a shader so I could vertex paint and break up the tiling. These are then topped with decals and ivy to add an extra level of complexity.

Bird & Cloud Card Placement:

As with my other projects, I brought the raw renders into Nuke & used the soften & grain nodes to achieve a more filmic look.