Environment Art Portfolio 2023

Three Environment  Art Projects form my 2023 Portfolio

(In order)

> The Underground Farm

> Stay in Line

>The Steam House

The Underground Farm

my final major project for the Escape Studios Game Art MA. Self-directed project created to open brief, produced over 18 weeks. 

This project is themed around a farm set up in a disused industrial facility. The Underground farm, is comprised of a collection of tunnels and open rooms. Inspired by my recent playthrough of ‘Stray’ (BlueTwelve Studio, Annapurna Interactive, 2022), and additional influences from ‘The Last Of Us 2’ (Naughty Dog, Sony Interactive Entertainment, 2020).

Rendered Stills

Architectural Modular Kit

Once an initail blockout was completed I focused on the creation of an architectural modular kit. Breaking down the space into its constituent parts, creating the minimum number of pieces to create the maximum amount of visual interest. The Material for the modular kit is set up to enable vertex painting, alternating between a concrete and a mossy layer.

Asset Set

For the creation of the props in the space I began with the most important, the hero props, and expanded from there to complete the stroytelling in the environment. I used Maya and Zbrush to create the models, taking advantage of the surface texture creation abilities of Zbrush for high polygon meshes and maintaining uniformity setting up the low polygon meshes in Maya. I baked the high polygon meshes into the textures using Substance painter.

Foliage is a key component in this project. I sourced textures for the leaf based from Quixel Megascans, while creating the textures for the mushrooms from scratch.

Further breakdown for this project can be found on my Artstation

Stay in Line

This project is the third module I completed on the Escape Studios course, it was completed to a six week deadline. The focus of this project was the aplication of real-time VFX and animation. In this project I wanted to use VFX to exhibit my storytelling ability.

Character Design and Storyboarding

I wanted the main focus of the sequence to display the most VFX, so I designed a drone character to follow. The key element being the drone's light trails travelling through a dark forrest. 

Project Breakdown

(pictured above) The material that is the main component in the niagara system creating the Light Trail VFX

(pictured above) The water material, a major component in the environment in the scene. Also pictured, the ripple material and niagara system set up for the water disterbance, that begins halfway through the sequence.

Further breakdown can be found on my Artstation

The Steam House

This project was created for the second module on the Escape Studios course. The focus for this project was on using subdivision moddeling techniques to create a low polygon diorama.

Design Development and Blockout

The design was inspired by industrial pump houses and traditional steam baths.

Asset set and environment foliage

I created the foliage in Speedtree. The main tree in the scene fits very closely to the building I imported the blockout for the building into Speedtree to use as a form to grow the tree around, to emulate real growth and significantly reduce clipping.

Further breakdown can be found here