Jordan Douglas - 3D Environment Art Showcase

RadioShack

This is my Advanced Term Project (3/4) at Think Tank Online. I wanted to create a smaller environment piece and focus on making something eye catching. My goal was to translate a stylized concept into a realistic environment. I also wanted to complete an exterior scene from scratch for my portfolio.

All assets are modeled by me in Maya and Houdini. All textures are made by me in Substance Designer and Painter. The Skybox is the only thing not made by me. This was one of my goals, to create all my textures in Designer and Painter and model everything from scratch.

When lighting, I use lighting sub levels to create different lighting scenarios. This makes it easy to switch between the day and night lighting.

Progression:

Breakdown:

The hero props are all textured in Substance 3D Painter. For the gas can, I baked a normal map from a high poly model. I created the grass card texture atlases in Substance Designer and modeled small clumps of cards. The tumbleweed was modeled procedurally in Houdini using the tree generator. I then baked the high poly tumbleweed down to a card using a normal and opacity bake.

Reference board:

Windmill, Tree & Wood Shaders:

For the shack walls I modeled a kit of wood planks that could be assembled in Maya into the shack. I then positioned the planks’ uvs along the wood trim sheet which has a small sliver of exposed wood that can be aligned with the plank edges. This workflow required that I had a good idea of how my textures would be laid out. In Unreal, I made a shader that adds color variation to individual planks using random vertex colors aligned to each plank. To do this, I used my custom Maya script that adds a random vertex color in the specified channel to each mesh.

Materials:

My texel density goal was 1024px/m. For most of the materials I used 2048x2048 maps to get more variation out of each material. This was fine considering these maps would be used liberally throughout the project.

For these materials I started with a height map to get the correct shape. Stacking multiple grunges and patterns allowed me to get more realistic detail and variation. The other maps were easily made using patterns from the height map and other patterns for more variation.

Tactical Snackpack

This is my Hero Prop project for the Intermediate Term at Think Tank Online. My goal was to create a photo-real hero prop with a high detail level. It was modeled in Maya and textured in Substance 3D Painter.

After quickly making a proxy model for scale reference, I modeled a high poly version with no restriction on poly count. I was then able to make a low poly version by removing edges and creating lower poly meshes. The high poly was then baked into other maps for the low poly texturing.

My approach to texturing begins like most, with a linear layer system. However, I like to take advantage of Painter's power to make layers more participatory with each other. Anchor points were pivotal in making exterior paint layers react with underlying imperfections. I used a trio of BaseColor variation noises to make surfaces' wear more realistic. Most surfaces use a paint mask to isolate detail to specific areas. 

Idroelettrica

This is my Intermediate Term Project (2/4) at Think Tank Online. I decided to take a reference image from urban exploration and make it into a game level. I mostly changed lighting from the reference to make a more dramatic mood. 

All assets are modeled by me in Maya. All textures are made by me in Substance Designer and Painter.

Progression:

Breakdown:

Reference board:

Materials:

Using Substance 3D Designer, I created a library of worn concretes, rusts and moss, that would texture the majority of assets. These materials are combined using vertex blending materials to create variation across large meshes.

My ArtStation

HDRIs from HDRI Haven