Daniel Babich - Game Environment Showcase

Pirate Warehouse

I started this project in late 2022 with the idea of developing as many skills as possible in a relatively simple environment, where I could try out lots of new techniques and softwares.
I wanted to get more comfortable with Unreal and the creation of modular pieces for game environments, and play a bit with the material and Blueprint editor to make cool things.
This environment was greatly inspired by Nils Drechsels concept, as well as the game Hunt : Showdown, as I'd been wanting to work on a Hunt-inspired scene for a while ; this concept proved to be the perfect opportunity to do so. :)
In general, I tried to keep everything game-ready, with mid to low-poly models and reasonable texture sizes.  To this end, I used a trimsheet for most of the wooden assets.

It was a very fun project to work on, and I hope you like it ! :D

Dynamic Rain 

To bring more life to my scene, I wanted to add some asset animations, moving water and rain ! I started following Ben Clowards videos on the subject (that I highly recommend) and, with the addition of some simple blueprint work, I made a dynamic rain system, affecting only relevant parts of the environment and starting and ending in a believable way. It was very challenging to make everything work, but I'm quite happy with the result ! :)

Finally, you can check out some of my modular pieces as well as the scene wireframe.

AerRacer - Game Environment

This environment was created as part of an indie game project carried out at my school in partnership with the programming section. I was lucky enough to have the role of lead environment artist for this small team. I was responsible for the creation of all foliage assets, landscapes, the implementation of all other environment assets and the general set dressing. As there were only a few of us, I was also in direct contact with the developers and in charge of most of the optimization work. I was even able to take care of the level design of the first circuit !

With this project, I was given the opportunity to try my hand at a Ghibli/Zelda BOTW like style, in the context of an almost real game production. I had a lot of fun working on this environment, and, once again, I hope you'll enjoy it! :D

Credits :
- Concepts : Nicolas Valée 
- Rock assets : Ylenia Pappalardo
- Ruins assets : Leylou Michel
- Skybox : Nicolas Degaudenzi
- Portal FXs : Antoine Cattin

Desert variant

For the second circuit, I had to reproduce a desert environment. By redistributing the assets of the first level and adding texture to the ground (and a few cacti !), I achieved this result.

This work was an opportunity to test new techniques in Unreal, such as Landscape Grass Type. To enable developers to begin their level design work, as well as to facilitate the placement of foliage in general, I used this feature to set up a procedural "landscape populating system".
The texture and placement of vegetation assets (including small rocks) was then automated. For the desert version of the environment, I added the ability to edit (using Landscape materials) the various environment categories randomly distributed throughout the Landscape. In this way, everything is generated quickly and automatically, but if a patch of grass or a grouping of stone proved to be annoying or necessary to add, it could be modified at any time.

I had a bit of trouble getting everything to work, but I think the result was worth it!

Thanks for taking a look at my work ! :D 

They are both project i'm quite proud of, and I'd have loved to show you the one I'm currently working on, but I sadly haven't managed to finish it just in time.

In the meantime, you can find here my Artstation and Linkedin pages ! ;)