3D Environment | The Rookies 2023

Welcome to my The Rookies entry. 

At this moment I'm in my 4th and final year of uni, only 8 months left before I graduate. 1,5 years ago I made the choice to switch to 3D environment and prop art after wanting to pursue a career in 2D concept art. My 3D skills are still in progress and I am still learning a lot. I really want to show you my current project which is not finished yet, I hope you can still enjoy the environment despite the missing parts. Thanks for taking the time to read this.

The home-base (work in progress)

I'll start with a small video of my project, rendered with Unreal Engine.

This is my 2nd big environment project I made since switching to 3D art. I wanted to create a environment inspired by the concept art below I found on Artstation. I made some moodboards for the 3D style I was aiming for and I started the project. This project is being made with Blender, Photoshop, Substance and Unreal Engine 5.0.2.

Concept art by Geoffrey Ernault 

I started with making grass, setting up realtime virtual textures (so the grass can take the ground color) and making a basic landscape. This was very interesting to learn! I made some materials for the landscape with layers, a material for the water (I added foam later on) and one for the grass.

The blockout fase.

Worked on making trimsheets for the first time, started in Blender first to set everything up. Exported to Zbrush and added symmetry so the sculpt is tiling. Sculpted the beams and baked them on a plane and added colors. The normals add a lot to trimsheets and it's very easy to do!

Created some materials and added vertex paint, a super nice tool in Unreal Engine to paint materials in layers. This makes it easy to blend materials and you can change it easily.

Making the materials with Substance Designer was also a lot of fun. I just tried to mesh up a lot of the nodes and tweak stuff. I have some experience with nodes from an earlier Substance Designer class (4 lessons).

Now lets look at the roof! Sculpted different tiles and scaled them to create variations. Then used the array modifier in Blender to create a roof and used lattice to make it fit. This took a few tries, I struggled with some technical difficulties but in the end it all worked out.

For the flowers I used a simple small trick, I made a texture with 4 colors and an alpha mask with 3 flower shapes on it. When I do the UV's right on the flowers I can create 3 types of flowers with 1 mesh and 1 texture! This was super interesting to learn and do and it's very quick.

With the bushes I did some testing first to see what people like and after the testing I had to face some normal issues with the bottom of the bushes being much darker. This was fixed easily by covering the bush mesh in a sphere and transferring the normals of the sphere to the bush.

The well was my first big sculpt, I learned to make a lowpoly blockout and import it to Zbrush and sculpt stones and everything in it. Baking was also very easy and texturing in Substance Painter was a lot of fun. At first I was afraid to sculpt bigger props but I'm getting more comfortable with it now.

All the assets you've seen are all made by me. On my projects I always want to use my own assets and create all of them myself during the project, for me this feels like a fun challenge and this way I keep myself motivated and busy.

Here are some 'final' shots of my project right now.

I still have 4 weeks to finish this project, this means that its not done yet. Even after the deadline I want to continue working on this to make it a portfolio piece. I made so many changes and I want to show you everything but then this post would be way too long. Last week I got a lot of feedback on my project, I'm going to try to apply most of it and to push this environment as far as possible. 

But since this is my second environment and I switched to 3D not so long ago I'm pretty proud of this already and everything I've learned throughout this project.

Small pink room

This is my first Blender 3D project to learn the software (I used Maya before switching to gain more knowledge about 3D softwares.) I followed a tutorial and changed some things and played with some modifiers and tried to learn a lot of hotkeys in Blender. 

Since this was a small project there is no breakdown but I wanted to share the renders.

Global Game Jam 2023

All the 3D art I did for our game. I made the hedgehog character and the environment. Play our game here!

Guiding Journey 2022

This was my first environment after I switched to 3D environment and prop art! I will also share the concept art I did for this project.

I will show some of the foliage I made for this game, it was a browser game so it could not have too many tris. I did a lot of research about plants for this project. 

And the in-game version. I knit some tutorials and my own knowledge together to make the shader, this was done in Unity.

I also made some rocks for this game, I will show how I made them and the in-game look.

To make the environment complete I also had to add other props, to make it feel like the environment is alive!

And I will also share some of the final renders, if you want to know more about this project, check my entry from last year on The Rookies!

Thank you for taking the time to read this.