Charming Gateway to the Potion Bazaar

Introduction

I'm happy to introduce my piece as this was a culmination of work that I did during a 5-6 month period. The learning curve was difficult but I have pushed myself past the wall to create a piece I genuinely enjoyed. We were given the task to create a piece from what inspired us so I chose to create a piece that was loosely based on the art of kemineko on Twitter and my favorite games series such as WoW, Final Fantasy XIV, and League of Legends.

Video flythrough of my environment. Music from Xenoblade Chronicles 1. 

Composition Shot

For these camera shots, I wanted the composition to show off how you'd be looking through the eyes of an adventurer for the first time while highlighting all the models set to show how the hallway would be set up on a normal day of work for the shopkeep. Objects were placed in a way where it shows the shopkeep is disorganized but also not too intruding where it would be in the way of normal townsfolk. 

Prop Breakdown

All the models were done with a high and low poly version. This boat was my hero prop for this piece as I wanted to show off how long the boat has been sitting in the water, with moss growing underneath. I started the modeling process within Maya, sculpted the edges in Zbrush, back to Maya to retopolgize the model, UV, clean up, and then Substance Painter to texture. The final stage was placing the Roughness, Normal, and Base Color maps in the folder in the mesh in Unreal and placing it within the scene. 

Modular Kit Breakdown

The modular kits were done within ZBrush with a plane, to give it a more organic look and edited in Photoshop to tile the Trim sheets to not show any seams. After using Offset the images were saved in 2D and I set up both the walls and floors to repeat the texture properly, exporting them to Unreal 5. 

Foliage Breakdown

The foliage was done using the MASH network in Maya. I created four different leaves in Photoshop, making textures for the base color, roughness, alphas, and specular. I initially created the base of the vines in Maya using the curve tool, afterward I created a plane, importing the leaves to the plane and curving them slightly. Using MASH, I connected the individual leaves to the mesh of the vine and adjusted the leaves that are clipping through one another. The flowers, lilypad, and grass were created in Maya and textured to Substance Painter.

Progress shots from block out to the final project. The initial blockout was done in Maya and exported to Unreal and put the initial colors to get an idea of how the colors will look with the lighting. As models got completed, I imported them to replace the objects in the Unreal engine to complete the composition while adjusting the lighting in each iteration. 

Thank you for reading and if you'd like to see more, please check out my Artstation at https://www.artstation.com/jenniferc!