Rookie Awards 2023 | Sarah Kosco 3D Environment Artist

Dragon's Realm

This piece is my most recent project completed in Unreal Engine 5. My goal was to push myself and improve my stylized texturing and sculpting. I began the project as an entry for the Dragon's Rise ArtStation Challenge and was able to come back to it recently to finish it up. I focused on honing in my Designer material creation and prop sculpting skills, as well as learning more nodes in Unreal's material graphs. 

The piece is based on the beautiful concept by Marine Serre.

Breakdown:

Bait Shop

This project was my first stylized full environment piece. I wanted to create a landscape environment that placed a heavy focus on stylized materials and foliage for you first go at it. I utilized Unreal Engine 5 to help me learn the shaders and techniques needed to create stylized environments. 

One of my main goals was to get more practice in sculpting meshes and hand painting textures. I was able to hand paint the trim sheet utilized across many assets in Substance Painter and created many tileable materials in Designer. I also wanted to learn how to make foliage, so I explored different modeling and shader techniques to do so. I was able to make a landscape material which included grass and two dirt variations which then could be painted and blended with the grass meshes using a runtime virtual texture. The other foliage in the scene was able to use a lot more simple of a shader than the grass. they all are derived from one main hand painted base map with simple grass wind to create movement.

This piece based on the wonderful concept by Dane Yeno.

Breakdown:

Ornate Sword - Ephemeral Epilogue

This was my first project exploring a more stylized art style. My goal was to increase my skill and experience in prop modeling and to gain a better understanding of the hand painting process for materials. I also wanted to dive into Unreal 5 to get some lighting practice in as well. 

This project is based on the ornate sword illustration done for Swordtember by Mukhlis Nur (Sinlaire).

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