Rookie Awards 2023 | Brenda Santos | 3D Environment Artist

This project was made with Unreal Engine 5. This environment challenged me in all ways, specially sculpting wise, but I really enjoyed creating every single rock and stone of this environment. Everything really.

I knew from the beginning that I wanted a melancholy and magical vibe when I started working on this scene. A lot like God of War. Everything has to portray the feeling of being outdated, forgotten, or damaged. Because they required that "personalized" look of "old," I sculpted almost all of the materials, props, and assets.

I separated the environment into various modular groups. To give the scene a bit more energy and to add some more variety between the modular sets, I created decals. I created the leaks and cracks decals in Substance Designer and Zbrush, respectively.

I made an effort to keep the polycount of the majority of the assets low because there would be a lot of them scattered across the scene (especially rocks, debris, etc.). However, I thought the altar and the statue of the snake to be more like hero props.

I also sculpted the tilling textures of the bark and the trim sheet of the floor. The remaining materials were entirely generated by me using Substance Designer. I made an effort to keep them simple because I intended to combine and vertex paint with other materials afterwards.

It was a challenge for me to sculpt everything because sculpting in Zbrush was not one of my strongest skills. Now, after the 100th rock, I feel way more confident around Zbrush. 

The tree was a challenge. I wanted to have complete control in Speedtree because the environment required a very specific shape. Because the original tree version was too generic and uninteresting, I eventually grabbed it and added sculpture on top of it. Below you can see one of the early versions of the tree.

I truly enjoyed texturing the tree. To texture the tree, I utilized the base bark material, the base wood material, and a moss material I myself made. The tree is divided into 5 materials because it is so large; else, I would not have had adequate texel density. I knew the tree was worthwhile since it adds so much to the environment.

Finally, I created 3 master materials. Because there is some snow in the scene, I wanted to add snow to some of the rocks in the scene.

Then, I used a RGB Mask material and a 3-layer blend material to break with the tilings across the scene. 

This material, I basically used it for the modular set. I textured 2 different versions of each of the modular sets, one standard rock version with little deterioration. In Painter I will also create the RGB mask.

Thank you for sticking up with me until the end. Thank you for viewing!