DEMO REEL 2022/2023 - Valentin Lefevre

Graduation Project : TOWER 42

Environment / Layout / Tech Shaders 

Tower 42 is a realistic Sci-Fi project done in only 5 Months with a team of seven 3D artists and 5 concept Artists at New3dge for our Graduation project , my task was to bring life to the Natrual environments , and interiors
of this universe.

The Exoplanet : Creating a 1/1 scale planet Shot in UE 5

The idea was to recreate a 1/1 shot in space , but unfortunately the scale doesn't allow Lumen to cast shadows at this distance , so , in order to have some shadows , I created a lower resolution of the clouds textures with UE5 Mipmap bluring filters to have a more blurred texture , than I duplicated the mesh and offseted it's texture in the UV space to create a parallax effect between the clouds and their shadows.

Cinematic Layout - Tower 42 interior & Hardsurface 

The Tower was one of the toughest of the project because of the scale of the asset (+500m heigth) so we made a lot of cameras and layout iterations with Hippolyte Gely to find one that would give a good sense of scale to this shot. We decided to go on two shots , a closeup with the rover getting out of the building and really wide vista to settle a foggy overcast ambiance.

I was also responsible for the shading method of the tower. The idea was to have tileable textures in a layered Material, with a layer blend composed of RGB masks that we called "DU DI CU" for Dust / Dirt / Curvature.

this method allowed us to have PBR tileable materials to have a reasonable Texel Density for the needs of our shots. The modeling and texturing of this gigantic building was Handled by Antoine Josephine.

I also worked on the Environment for the main menu of the game.
The UI is from Leo Zhang our Tech artist.

  Here is the HardSurface part I made for this project . The asset production was really standard , combining meshs atlases , trimsheets and classical Mid-poly assets production. our Texel density was of 1024px/m².
To avoid details loss , we used Detailed Normals and Decals when needed.

Agnium Forest  - Environment / Layout 

To create the various Rocks of this project , I experimented in a lot of differents softwares like Houdini (for the porous basalt) , Zbrush (For the cliffs and crystals) and Blender's Geometry nodes for the other ones. 
It was really fun to see how large is the spectre on How to create Rocks.

The shading varies depending on the scale of the objects , I've use mainly UV texturing and atlases for the
small / medium meshes and detail mapping in tri-planar for the larger ones.

Most of the textures were made using Substance 3D Painter and Sampler , with the time constraint we had, we needed to go straight to the results and the "photo to material" of Sbs 3d Sampler was really usefull at the begining of the production to produce fast placeholders and floor patches that we used during all the project.

The Trees were made in 3DS Max , SpeedTree and Houdini (for the crystals in their Core) , the idea was to have a trunk with enough subdivisions to be displaced in the inner part where the agnite crystals are. Allowing us for Fast iterations of trunks with cracks.
Leo Zhang then Linked the shader I made to a blueprint to randomize these values when we moved the trees.

Research and Developement

I also added a Sweat map Input to the characters Shaders in order to add detail and realism to the scene.
this technique was very inspired by "The Callisto protocol" game that has extremely realistic characters.

Character made by Mathis Boumedjmadjen.

The Team behind Tower 42 :

Game Art Team :                                                                                         Concept Art Team :

Group Project : Roebuck

Environment / Level Design / Vehicule / Tech Shader

Roebuck is a stylized project done in 3 months with a team of  seven 3D artists and Three Concept Artists
at New3dge for our first Graduation project.

Environments - Level Design

The Idea was to have two really dinstincts moods , the first one being a dark alley, cold and mysterious .
The second one is way warmer and greets the player to discover an alternative vision of the same universe.
Combining the pirate world and the steampunk was way harder than I thought , even with the main reference we used : Arcane.

During this project I've worked on the level design , and I tried my best to bring life to every corner of the Shallows and the Docks.

Assets Production - Props and Vehicle

Here is my library where I had to paint every single assets / props by hand (+70 assets) in Substance Painter.
It was a really fun task since it was my first stylized project ! 

Texturing Pipeline , Tech Shaders & Library

The Team behind Roebuck :

Game Art Team :                                                                                                       Concept Team :

- Hippolyte Gely : Environment / Cinematic / Lighting                                - Anne Fichet 
- Benjamin Kretschmann : Environment / SFX                                               - Regin Wellander 
- Valentin Lefevre : Environment / Tech Shaders / Level design               - Marius Villard
- Mathis Boumedjmadjen : Character / Creature
- Raphaël Banget Mossaz : Character / Creature
- Yohan Houel : Character
-Moheb Naguib : Character

Personnal Project :

           Capsule from the Past (wip)

                         Environment / Shading / Lighting / Post-Production

This is a personal project on Unreal Engine 5 , the main goal was to achieve a realistic rendering on UE5  with the new BSDF rendering Method , Substrate. 
It was a good training on modeling , texturing / Shading  and rendering. I had a lot of fun doing it , i hope you will like it ! 

I really hope you enjoyed those project as much as I enjoyed working on them. 
Thanks again to my Family , friends and our teachers who shared all their knowledge during five years.

Thanks to New3dge Administration and our Supervisor Mickaël Floury.

 Looking forward to share more in the future ! 

Find here some older projects ! 

Hitokiri (UE4)                                      Alien Planet (UE4)                       USCSS Nostromo (Vray)