Shack of Ashinas - Game Environment

Hello, I am Mohit, a Game Art student currently studying in Mages Institute based in Singapore.

Shack of Ashinas is my first solo 3D game environment project and my initial experience with Unreal Engine 5. The start was overwhelming given the exterior environment choice, i had to plan unique assets within constrained timeframe. However, the experience was great.

Inspiration - My inspiration came from Elden Ring's "LIURNIA OF THE LAKES" location and my aspiration was to make and environment that has a sinister past tied with it. So I chose Muazzam Ali's work as my reference as it fits the theme I was looking for.

Demo Reel

Over the duration of the project, I started modelling that assets I need to fill up my environment, I used 3Ds max for Modelling and UV Unwrapping and after completing my UVs, I used procedural PBR texturing in substance painter to bring my assets to life. The level creation and the lightings took place in Unreal Engine. I created mountains around the swamp to make it look more interesting and to make it look like more "Eerie" i used Fog to sit on the ground instead of covering the whole environment as it will hide the secrets of the swamp and then I added Swamp debris to make it look like weathered.

I aimed to replicate my reference with similar assets and different lighting settings which makes it easy to give it similar vibes as Elden Ring but still have the reference as my base composition.

There are the Modular Assets I created and used to fill up my environment

To make certain assets look more weathered, I used Vertex Painting. This was very useful as i wanted to give my bridge and logs a mossy texture as they are submerged in the water. I also used vertex painting on the shack to make it look more weathered.

As its a swamp I needed to use a lot of foliage to fill up the environment such as dead grass, mossy rock and swamp debris which I imported from Quixel Bridge.

For the Lighting, I used "Ultra Dynamic Sky" as my base environment lighting and on top of that i used Direction Light and Sky Atmosphere to give it some brightness in the environment. the fog was a bit challenging but was surprisingly easy to do so I used shader graph to applied it on a Cube to make it into a cloud like texture.

To finish it I used Decals on the shack to give the worn off paint texture.

Thank you for Watching! :D