Travelling Potion Shop - "Motion Potion"

Introduction

I have gone into this project with a few goals set for myself: to experiment with and develop my style in the transition from 2D art to 3D, while aiming to improve my set design skills, assembling a game scene in a visual-storytelling rich manner.

My aim was to create a shop area in a hidden part of a magical forest, an area in a game which would be considered a "secret area". The player would be able to wander around the shop, enjoying a tranquil atmosphere and inspecting the rare wares and other curious items that could be spotted in the mysterious travelling boat shop.

Concept Art

Creating the concept art for this project, I kept to a quick and loose painterly style that I wanted to incorporate in the finished work, which also helped me work quickly and loosely on my iterations.

The first two concepts are the ones I shortlisted, exploring colours, shapes and detail lighting options. 

Further concepts showcase lighting exploration and placing my subject into an environment, exploring environmental lighting colour and times of the day, and how they impact the environment.

The one I chose to develop ended up being the green theme, as it had the whimsical, magic forest aesthetic I was aiming for.

Foliage

As the foliage was a big part of the project, its mood and believability, I was quite nervous to tackle the foliage pipeline for the very first time within this project.  I choose to go with the hand-painted approach as I believed it would fit the visual style of the piece the best, however, I stuck too close to the reference while painting causing the foliage to look more realistic than I was aiming for. 

Props

Some of the props from the scene and the process behind them!
I have used various texturing techniques, eg, Substance Painter, Hand-painting (Procreate) and Unreal Engine material creation while experimenting with what software suits my style best. 

The potions, their geometry and textures, and the " Motion Potion" sign with hand-painted texture showcase.

Engine and Showcase

Materials and lighting set up and directed in Unreal Engine 5.1

Thank you for reading! This was my first full-scale environment project, and I have learned a lot and enjoyed the process thoroughly! If you want to follow my journey, here's my ArtStation link : https://www.artstation.com/ivadevcic