The Coastal Inn

The Coastal Inn was a personal project I was working on for quite some time, The main story I aimed to tell was that of a Coastal Inn that fell into a state of disuse.  My major technical goals were to learn to texture large assets with trims and learn how to do foliage. On the artistic side of things my objective was to create an environment from an existing concept art. In that regard, the original concept art was from Oleg Pasynkov with whose permission I was able to use his concept art to get some artistic influence for the building. 

Above are some of the renders from Unreal Engine 5. In this scene the set dressing (Axe, Table, Fruits, Debris and Fence) was done with the help of assets from the Quixel library.

I first started with planning out what elements are in the building and made a quick color coded map, with which I can use to plan out the trimsheets for the building. This also helped out in the technical side of things where i could visualise the parts of the structure in a trimsheet and check if the elements have proper texel density.

I initially split them up into Wooden and Non-wood elements. which would make 2 texture sets for the entire building. 

Below are Trim sheet plan for the wood part. I also used a simple grid overlay to ensure all my trim partitions follow the proper multiples of texture sizes.

Now that I had the trims planned out, I set out on the long journey of modeling the building, setting the blockouts in-engine and sculpting the trims . 

Once I had the building assembled in UE 5, I set about doing the pier part of the scene. while blocking out the shapes I realised there would be significant amount of work in terms  arranging the stones on the pier. I turned to Houdini for the arranging part where I premade the pieces for the stones and the side and arranged them in Houdini, using the UV packer to pack the geometry of rocks on top of the pier's side walls.

For the foliage I scaled back to making only the larger trees and used the Quixel library for the shrubs. I made the trees in Speedtree and used a custom version of Quixel's Foliage shader for the trees to give it a large amount variation in terms of texture.

In order to add variations to the building I built a shader that uses a RGB mask to add 3 extra layers of dirt, grime and moss to the surface. 

I also built a shader that uses triplanar projection technique to project decals so that I could add subtle wear and tear to the building and around structural corners so that it speeds up the workflow.

Finally, A Big thank you to the 3D Fast Track discord for their amazing feedback and guidance throughout the entirety  of this project. 

Overall, This project was a really enlightening experience for me as I was able to learn a lot in terms of Artistic concepts and Technical skills which will help me a lot down the line. I hope you enjoy my work!!!