Collection of Environment, 3D Assets, and Lighting

Real-Time Environment Art

Japanese Classroom During Bunkasai

Software Used: Autodesk Maya, Unreal Engine 4, Photoshop, and Substance Suite (Painter, Designer and Sampler)

This project is created from a concept that was developed in my first environment in Unreal Engine back in 2020. For this project, my aim is to push the realism of the environment as much as I can within the span of 10 weeks. My original concept is a Music Club room in a Japanese high school. However, when it comes to this project, I wanted to push it more to fit with my desired aesthetic. I was looking into Cultural Festival, which is also known as Bunkasai (文化祭). It is an annual open day held around October and November in schools and universities in Japan.

Modular Assets

Reference

Lighting

For this project, I wanted to nail the lighting as much as I possibly could. I was looking at different lighting references to get a better understanding of how light works at that time of the day and how other artist does it. Then I tried to create the light that would fit my desired aesthetic the most based on the knowledge that I gained.

I used a combination of HDRI and point lights to light this scene, as well as LUT to make the scene brighter and manually create global illumination. LUT gives me the ability to fix the light using Photoshop.

Texturing

Substance Painter is used to texturing most of my assets. Throughout this project, I got a lot faster as I became more experienced with the program, especially with baking. It saves me a lot of time to texture each of my assets as I can use smart masks to help me quickly generate micro details on the asset itself. For some assets, such as a hero or larger assets, I will also do some manual hand painting on the details too.

For this project, I used Substance Designer for textures such as the acoustic roof, textured hard plastic, and more customized details in the existing texture. For example, I used it to create an older version of the floor texture that I created in Substance Sampler. I also used it to create some alpha maps that I further used in Painter.

I also used Substance Sampler to quickly generate the floor and concrete texture of the classroom. It is a quick and easy process that gives me high-quality tileable textures that I can further use in both Substance Painter and Designer.

Material Optimization

Atlas map was a big part of what I wanted to achieve in this project. As this is my first time putting my knowledge into use, I decided to stick to smaller assets, including the flags, small lanterns, books, papers, and signs.

I created a black-and-white texture to use as an alpha for each sign. By assigning specific UVs to the texture and creating some hand-made light map UV, I was able to create material instances that could change the color or texture combination in real time. I had to manually generate a lightmap for each of the signs in order for this to work since the decal UV is going to be on the second UV channel.

I can also use other textures as the background since I made it an instance. For example, I switch out the base color with cardboard material instead. This gives the assets more variety.

Cinematic and screenshots

One of my favorite parts of creating an environment is to create cinematic and screenshots. I had a background in both photography and cinematography before I decided to become a game artist. Creating a video for each project allows me to get in touch with my other passions. They are not perfect as I have not been practicing my skills for a while now, but I do enjoy it a lot! 

3D Models

Drum Set

Software Used: Autodesk Maya, Substance Painter, and Designer

One of the Hero Assets from Japanese Classroom During Bunkasai. It was definitely one of my favorites in the project!

Reference

Lighting

Re-Lighting - Diner

Software Used: Unreal Engine 4

Lighting studies in Unreal Engine 4. I want to explore types of lighting that I have never done before. So I decided to re-light a scene that I got from a marketplace.

https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/atompunk-post-apocalyptic-diner

Reference

Thank you for reading my entry this year! Please see more of my works on my Artstation.

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