Diagon Alley Tearoom

Hello! I will be presenting a 3D environment project done for my first year of studies at Falmouth University.  The project served as a way to learn about modularity for environments,  trim sheets, tileable textures and introduce material creation applications such as Substance 3D Designer and Sampler. 

We were tasked to model, texture light and present in Unreal Engine 5 a shop that would fit into Diagon Alley from the Harry Potter Universe. 

DIAGON ALLEY TEAHOUSE

Concept and Blockout

After cycling through different shop themes, I settled on creating a tearoom shop. Before starting any modelling, I gathered reference images into a PureRef document. I tend to collect more than I usually end up using, but I find this to initially be helpful when trying to concept the shop! Once that is done, I created rough 2D concepts in Photoshop , then further refined the shop design by making blockouts in Maya, with the final blockout exported into Unreal Engine 5. 

Shop Props

The shop props were all modelled in Maya, and imported into Zbrush if there was any need to add additional sculpting detail. Texturing was done in Substance 3D Painter. I dedicated more time to the shop sign, as I considered it to be the 'hero asset' of the shop. Flower patterns used to texture teacups, plates and teapots were sourced from pngegg.com. 

Texturing and Materials

With the exception of bespoke assets such as the shop sign, tea shop assets (eg. teacup, scones), ground floor door and teapot wooden panel, the shop was textured using a trim sheet and tileable textures. 

The trim sheet was modelled in Maya, then baked and textured in Substance 3D Painter. The roof tile material was created in Substance Designer. Using Substance Designer was fairly time consuming as I was completely new to it, and so to ensure that the project would be completed within the allocated timeframe, I instead used Substance Sampler to create the rest of the tileable textures. The bricks and curtain materials were made using the image to material function in Sampler (links to sourced images included). 

While applying materials to my shop in engine, I also took the opportunity to experiment with master materials and material instances in UE5. I used this feature to adjust the hue and brightness on the roof tiles and bricks, and to create differently colored versions of the ceramic material in order to add variation to the teacups, teapots and plates props. 

Lighting

Before adding any lights, I wanted to decide what time of the day the scene was in, as this would affect the types of light chosen for the shop. I experimented with different day settings by transforming the default directional light. In the end, I kept a daytime scene as it better showcased the balcony, and thematically made more sense (food would not be left outside overnight!). 

I only added lights on the ground and second floor since these were the areas that I wanted highlighted the most and gave them a warm pinkish/beige color to convey a cosy atmosphere. Similar to shops in real life, I made the point lights in the window display a brighter intensity than the rest to draw attention to the tea assets. I also added soft rectangle lights over the balcony, ground floor door and shop sign to offset some the of the strong shadows that fell over them.

UE5 Progress Shots

Finally, I would like to give a huge thank you to all the amazing teaching staff and to friends made in this first year for their help, feedback and patience. I would have not made it this far into my 3D journey without their support, and am very much looking forward to what future projects we will be working together on. 

And thank you for reading through my entry!